Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to offer some reflections on the use of a participatory video methodology with now-adult children of the disappeared in the Gambia to examine how, in the "post-truth commission era,” they deal with the ramifications of their violent past.

Paper long abstract:

In 1994, Lieutenant Yahya Jammeh staged a coup d'état in the Gambia, a small West African country of two million inhabitants, where his regime, for over 20 years, maintained power through murder, rape, torture, and enforced disappearances of dissidents and opponents. After Jammeh was forced from power in 2017, the subsequent president established a truth commission (TRRC) to investigate Jammeh's human rights abuses. Since the TRRC released its Final Report (2021) however, few of the commission’s recommendations have been implemented. Through collaborative ethnographic research involving in-person semi-structured interviews, participant observation, participatory video, and online ethnography, I explore the lifeworlds of now-adult children of the disappeared to understand the social processes and practices through which their loss and mourning are made real and meaningful in subjective and collective terms, and how building their lives in the longer-term, they engage with the broader international movement to recover the disappeared. In this paper, I describe in detail the making of two films, focusing on ethical dilemmas. Researching childhood memories, perceptions, and experiences is significant, but so is the context in which these experiences occurred and their meaning for the different parties involved. What happens when making sense suddenly becomes making sense? Merging ideas taken from Participatory Action Research, visual anthropology, and hermeneutic phenomenological research, my approach explores how participatory filmmaking as a way of knowing can be especially well suited to access grief that is socially silenced and as such, to study mourning (in absence).

Paper short abstract:

This paper takes short films as a vantage point to explore drifting in an app co-design project with youth in Vienna. While drifting, defiant data leak and linger beyond methodological boundaries in an encounter that enables inclusive, multimodal modes of knowledge production and mutual learning.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most impactful moments during our interdisciplinary participatory design project ensued when we screened “Anormal”, a short film created by a 17-year-old research participant. However, this was a significant moment with a twist – the film seemingly had little in common with our project theme. We:Design, the project in question, aimed to a) explore digital inequalities young Viennese people face in accessing the job market and b) to develop a low-threshold open-source job application app with and for young people. The task that prompted “Anormal” was to create short films on young people’s experiences of applying. Instead, “Anormal” evolved into a poetic mediation on coming-of-age, where job applications were just a side note. However, there was undoubtedly something powerful about the filmmaker’s drift, perhaps precisely because it emerged from these personal images that demanded attention and were not rendered invisible by the researcher arriving at a polished conclusion in the academic text, while discarding the data that refuses to fit in. By drifting in a creative sense, the filmmaker playfully reclaimed the narrative and temporality of the process. In this paper, I argue how the film “leaked” (Ingold 2011) and continues to linger in an encounter of mutual learning. The inclusion of embodied, fractal and multimodal forms of knowledge production, such as the short film format, can help engage diverse participants in accessible, open-ended, multimodal modes of co-creation that are sensitive to their pace and meaningful to them (Pink et al. 2022, Raman and French 2022).

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a collaborative ethnography project where some students, local artisans, and three Iranian anthropologists worked together to illustrate a children's book narrative depicting the effects of climate change on the lives of coastal communities in Qeshm Island, Iran.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an in-depth case study of a collaborative project conducted in partnership with the University of Hormozgan, Iran, spanning a two-month summer school in 2023 and an extension throughout an academic year. The project brought together fifteen traditional handicrafts students, local artisans, and three Iranian anthropologists (co-authors of this text) to illustrate a children's book narrative. The book details the repercussions of climate change on the coastal communities of Qeshm Island.

The project seamlessly merged traditional textile techniques with contemporary artistic expression, fostering active community involvement. Grounded in the principles of collaborative ethnography, it served as a unique platform for students and artisans to integrate their talents into the creation of a captivating children's picture book.

This paper offers insights into the project's planning, execution, challenges, and lessons learned, with a focus on improving collaborative processes in ethnographic research, education, and community engagement.

Significantly, this project embraces multimodality by incorporating local art forms, particularly traditional embroidery practices alongside visual ethnography. This approach offers a sensory-rich understanding of the Qeshm island's culture and challenges, while actively engaging with co-curation. Participants play a pivotal role in narrative construction and visual representation, challenging traditional anthropological power dynamics and fostering a more inclusive and democratic knowledge production process.

By showcasing this project, we aim to emphasize how multimodal and collaborative ethnographic research can provide profound insights into complex social phenomena. It exemplifies how anthropological knowledge can transcend academic circles, engaging wider audiences through narrative and visual mediums, thereby enriching anthropological pedagogy.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores the common grounds between critical public anthropology and critical public pedagogy as critically conscious, engaged and animating practices envisioned in the framework of shared anthropology that asserts the co-authored nature of knowledge by "sharing-the-anthropology".

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, the authors explore the common grounds between critical public anthropology and critical public pedagogy as critically conscious, engaged, and animating practices. Through intervention in the public domain, they are involved in the contested role of culture in power production, distribution, and regulation. These affinities have been envisioned in the framework of shared anthropology that asserts the co-authored nature of knowledge by "sharing-the-anthropology". A path toward decolonizing and democratizing knowledge through the use of multimodal narrative and art as a medium; not as “a research object or research aim” (Borgdorf 2013) and as a form to explore “knowing-in-practice” (Beck 2011) and strategy for mediating knowledge.

Through this framework the conceptual framework of the project, 'We Are Not Carpets' a work-in-progress in which the authors are currently involved, will be introduced. Aligning with the critical principles of shared anthropology, the project integrates a critical approach to problematize the subordinate condition of handmade carpet weavers within its production and distribution regime. As such we explore the connection between the ethico-political and epistemological framework established for shared anthropology and the conceptual framework envisioned for the project.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution transposes the category of 'being affected' - which refers to the involuntary reactions of the ethnographer 'caught up' in a power relation - to the analysis of a photographic exhibition carried out with male and female logistics workers in France and Germany.

Paper long abstract:

"Being affected" is a category coined by Jeanne Favret-Saada, a French anthropologist who conducted an investigation into witchcraft in the Normandy bocage at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s (1977). According to her, 'Being affected' is to be the seat of emotions and reactions that are most often uncontrollable, but it is also the starting point of ethnographic knowledge.

In this contribution, I propose to transpose this category to the analysis of a series of photographic itineraries presented at the Maison Robert Doisneau in Gentilly (France) in 2020. The exhibition was conceived as part of a collective research project on the 'working-class worlds of logistics'. The research methodology was based on collaboration between social science researchers and photographers. With a dual background in photography and sociology, I successively occupied the positions of interviewer and photographer within these collaborations.

From these two positions, I will analyse the installations in the exhibition devoted to photographic itineraries carried out with workers in Paris, Orléans, Frankfurt/Main and Kassel. These itineraries consist in conducting an interview on foot or by car, with the interviewee acting as a guide for a sociologist and a photographer. This method, formalised by the sociologist Jean-Yves Petiteau (2001), has been used in three different ways by photographers, interviewers and workers in the field, which reflect their power relationships. The choices made for the exhibition correspond to three strategies adopted by the photographers to call into question the power relationships that run through this relationship.

Paper short abstract:

We reflect on a bricolage case study unraveling the recovery narrative of Marc, an artist with bipolar disorder. We search for ways to (co-)curate research spaces that fostering recovery stories that ‘do not fit’ with prevailing norms, in order to build more inclusive understandings of recovery.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, there has been a growing consensus recognizing the inherently idiosyncratic nature of mental health recovery. This has given rise to a growing patchwork of research, rooted in exploring the personal narratives of persons in recovery. However, unintendedly, this experience-based research base also gave rise to a ‘master recovery narrative’ favoring specific characteristics in terms of content, genre and structure that in turn affect the ways in which people articulate their recovery stories in research. Without questioning this dominant recovery narrative, stories that deviate from this discursive norm risk becoming suppressed and marginalized. This presentation delves into an on-going co-constructive case study centered around Marc, an artist with bipolar disorder who documented the last 20 years of his life through artwork and film, offering a unique autobiographical lens. During our bricolage research process, we unravel the narrative layers of Marc’s life and recovery story, while thinking-with Arthur Frank’s notions of narratability and unfinalizability. From a socio-narratological perspective, we aim to gain insight into how we can (co-)curate research spaces that enable recovery stories to be narratable and unfinalizable, fostering recovery articulations that ‘do not make sense’ or ‘do not fit’ with prevailing narrative norms, and thus contributing to a more inclusive understanding of mental health recovery. In this talk, I will reflect on how narratability and unfinalizability come to life in the research encounters between Marc and me, and I look forward to critically discuss the challenges we encounter with the audience.

Paper short abstract:

In this contribution I reflect on three different dimensions of collaborative curation and ‘the curatorial’ as part of my ongoing research project on Muslim everyday life and digital media practices in German-speaking post-migrant contexts.

Paper long abstract:

In this contribution I reflect on different concepts of collaborative curation and ‘the curatorial’ as part of my ongoing research project on Muslim everyday life and digital media practices in German-speaking post-migrant contexts. I employ the ideas of co-curating and 'the curatorial' across three overarching methodological dimensions. Firstly, I examine everyday curatorial practice manifested in social media profiles, exploring the multimodal representations individuals and groups choose to curate within their profiles, considering their connection to the inherent power structures of the platforms and algorithms. The second curatorial dimension involves my participation in the co-curation of the Instagram-profile _hashtagIslam as part of a team ethnographic approach (Ahmad et al. 2023). Within this framework, we collaboratively curate thematic posts and stories, that aligh with our respective research objectives. The third dimension of applying co-curating as a method pertains to reflections on the multimodal exhibition project "Muslim*Present", which took place in Cologne in June and July 2023. This project took the form of an intervention in public space and on social media as part of the larger exhibition entitled "The Entire Story Starts Where". All three dimensions of multimodal co-curatorial practice must be viewed as a relational and ethical practice of care, drawing inspiration from the traditions of black and indigenous curators and scholars.

Paper short abstract:

Participants reflect on the co-curation of a performative autoethnography event and discuss how research-based-learning as a dialogic and reciprocal didactic format facilitates critical pedagogy in the academic context.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution explores the potentials and challenges of a university seminar that invited students to engage with the method of performative autoethnography and questions concerning communicating social anthropological insights to an audience. Research-based learning, as a dialogic form of teaching-learning-research, with its context-specific orientation toward understanding, aims for students and educators to collectively reflect on their field experiences and brings into focus reciprocal learning. Students were actively involved in knowledge production and experimented with the roles of learners, researchers, educators, and knowledge disseminators.

From an ethnopsychological perspective, it is necessary for us to learn to distinguish between the self and the other in order to not merely project subjective perceptions and assumptions. Like every individual, we experience the world through our bodies (Leib) and are inevitably part of what we observe. The autoethnographic approach and the experience and application of the ethnographic method on one's own socio-cultural context and embodiment are particularly suitable for engaging with postcolonial critique and the issue of 'othering' in social anthropology. The approaches of performative (auto)ethnography challenge and expand conventional forms of (textual) ethnographic representations (of 'the other'). Theater isn't solely a tool for conveying anthropological insights to an interested public; theater-making itself can be understood as an ethnographic method for analyzing and exploring human existence and embodiments. Participants and the instructor of the course reflect together on the co-curation of the event they staged at the end of the semester and the transformative experiences of the researchers and the audience.

Paper short abstract:

Using two of my sound interventions in Sao Paulo as case studies, this paper analysis practices of place-making that involve inhabitants in the creation of collected oral narratives and their use in public space as a means for activating situated collective knowledge production and transfer.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analysis practices of place-making that involve inhabitants in the creation of collected oral narratives and their use in public space, as a means for activating situated collective knowledge production and transfer. Describing two of my sound interventions in Sao Paulo, it approaches listening as caring and the voice as a place of exploration of the urban environment while asking what influence citizens can have on it. Furthermore, it contributes to the innovation of sound based exploration of urban space and the use of phonographic medium as political text. In the first case, a bicycle with a loudspeaker traveled the roads of the multiethnic neighborhood of Bom Retiro amplifying a recorded montage of wishes to expand the conversation with passers-by. It is presented how the action even if co-designed and co-curated with a local collective, in the end was hijacked by the activists for their needs. Moreover, it is discussed how a dynamic process of co-authorship continued in the aftermath. In the second case, the use of fabulation provoked the listeners to imagine the city as a person, as someone who could act: a loudspeaker on the top of Edifício Copan broadcasted my voice reading the questions that various interviewed people would ask the city if she could answer them. Finally, this paper illustrates in both examples, the role that (urban) space and situation of listening play in the public production of critical knowledge as a dialogic reaction to what is listened.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution presents ongoing multimodal experiments with transnationally mobile migrant youth between West Africa and Europe, exploring multimodality’s potential for making research more collaborative and attuned to migrant youth’s own embodied, digital, and relational experiences of mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Transnational family research has documented the increasingly digital strategies for ‘doing family’ across borders, focusing on how adult migrants care for ‘left-behind’ children, who are – like migrant-background youth in the Global North – often depicted as sedentary. Inspired by mobilities studies, recent research on transnational youth mobility investigates the diverse and complex mobilities of youth with migration backgrounds, including how the digital shapes their transnational relationships and experiences of being on the move. Yet while mobile, multi-sited and youth-centric methods are central to such explorations, multimodal approaches are rare, and participatory approaches engaging with migrant youth's existing digital practices are even rarer. What could multimodal approaches offer to youth mobilities research and what methodological and ethical questions do they raise?

This contribution presents the design, results, and future ideas and iterations emerging from ongoing multimodal experiments with transnationally mobile migrant youth between West Africa and Europe, exploring multimodality’s potential for making research more collaborative and attuned to migrant youth’s own embodied, digital, and relational experiences of mobility. Experiments that started from my own background in visual ethnography quickly transformed when colliding and intersecting with my participants’ own digital practices using their smartphones while mobile. The presentation thus engages with emerging concerns in research on transnational youth, migration and mobility, and digital media. It also speaks to the conference strand on ‘translating cultures and diasporic communities’ by attending to diasporic youth’s own multimodal documentation and representation of their mobility experiences between countries of origin and residence.

Paper short abstract:

AnthroDorphins is a new website and YouTube channel (@anthrodorphins) which uses multimodal approaches to create short videos aiming to enliven cultural anthropology for students, facilitate communication between researchers, and invite general audiences into a community of shared knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the ethical call for accessibility from the AAA, a significant amount of anthropological research remains inaccessible–often written in exclusionary language and even then behind paywalls. The scholarly community and the public could benefit from an inclusive and comprehensive network of shared anthropological knowledge to promote the varied and complex work by anthropologists and those using anthropological methods and theories. Meanwhile, millions of people seek information of all kinds on Youtube every day; it’s one of the most democratic and accessible platforms for knowledge sharing around the world yet one that has been largely overlooked by even translational anthropologists. AnthroDorphins, a new cultural anthropology video channel has recently launched and is still developing. The site aims to bring the field to new and diverse audiences and serve as an engaging teaching resource for the anthropological community and the general public. Building off an established visual and multimodal ethnographic practice in visual psychological anthropology, the videos seek to balance emotional engagement, visual interest, and theoretical knowledge through original material and that carefully curated from pre-existing available media. This paper will address the origins of the channel, its current iteration, and its vision for using open source social media technology to connect a wide network of anthropologists with each other and the public.

Paper short abstract:

The world is changing fast. Can anthropology keep up? The paper presents the benefits and challenges of dynamic, collaborative, and practice-based methods that build anthropological knowledge by means of direct engagement with the world.

Paper long abstract:

The paper presents the methods, challenges, and outcomes of a multimodal and collaborative teaching module to reflect on the changing nature of understanding the world around us. ‘Researching the social world’ is a graduate module that has been taught at the Department of Anthropology at University College London for several years. The module combines teaching conventional anthropological methods with practice-based introduction to video, sound, and filmmaking. The module is collaborative, interactive, and interdisciplinary. Students are encouraged to work in small teams for several weeks to research a topic of their choice. Throughout this process, students present work-in-progress in weekly media labs. The constant in-class feedback, discussions that can be sensitive and heated, independent group time, and personalized guidance represent main learning methods. Overall, the module introduces students to elements from different disciplines, including anthropology, filmmaking, visual and sound studies, new media, and the arts.

The paper discusses the benefits and challenges such practice-based modules have in terms of engaging with, representing, and understanding the world and in the dissemination of student perspectives. For example, most students typically appreciate the experiential and more inclusive kind of ‘reading’ of the world and the promises of a multi-disciplinary approach prompted by anthropology. However, these come at different costs, such as the issues around a relatively steep learning curve, the continued competition between projects, and the unexpected visibility of student work. The paper reports all these issues to plea for a more dynamic, experiential, and practical engagement with the world around us.