- Convenor:
-
Maruska Svasek
(Queen's University Belfast)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 26 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Researchers and research participants shape their interactions in dynamic ways, dealing with expected and unexpected challenges, opportunities and affective interaction. Contributors in this panel reflect on their use of visual methods in the light of this 'condition of un/expectedness'.
Long Abstract:
Ethnographic fieldwork always calls for improvisation. Researchers and research participants shape their interactions in dynamic ways, dealing with expected and unexpected challenges, opportunities and affective interaction. This panel explores the implications of this 'condition of un/expectedness' for the ways in which visual methods are shaped, ethnographic knowledge is produced, and research outcomes are used in specific research projects. Rethinking fieldwork as improvisation, the contributors reflect on their use of film, photography, and social media in the light of this condition.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Ciriaca Coretti (Università degli Studi della Basilicata)
Paper short abstract:
Physical distance imposed by measure following COVID-19 pandemic, together isolation and impossibility to move from one's own home have redrawn boundaries of ethnographic research based on daily contact, experience and participation of anthropologists as active subject in the field.
Paper long abstract:
Current situation has reminded us that concepts of adaptability and elasticity are not new to ethnographic research, especially with regard to the modes of investigation. To agree and renegotiate design and research modalities are now essential aspects.
Physical distance imposed by the measure, together with isolation and impossibility to move from one's own home have redrawn boundaries of ethnographic research based on daily contact, experience and participation of anthropologists as active subject in the field. Proximity, physical contact and encounter are still indispensable aspects of anthropological research, in some cases indispensable.
Undoubtedly the new technologies, represented by PCs and mobile phones, mediate the distance but force us to review the usual parameters of ethnographic communication and invent new ones.
In this circumstance I report the case that saw me engaged, in the year 2020, in the production of ethnographic materials, interviews and photographic documents, as part of my PhD research on the themes of craftsmanship, considering that part of it consists of the direct collection of stories and testimonies of life.
Limitation of physical and social proximity and closure of economic and commercial activities, have affected the usually long timescales and the research methods too.
The choice to use an audio recorder for interviews, instead of a camera, and also to resize photographic apparatus, have considerably reduced time for my presence on site, perhaps conditioning dialogical and collaborative dimension that characterizes ethnographic research. The same phase of negotiation with the interlocutors took place thanks to the virtual communication tools.
Alejandra Navarro-Smith (ITESO)
Paper short abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic, alongside with online teaching practices, made me adapt research desing to bring students to online conversations with my long-time collaborators. This emerging methodology has opened a space for remembering past events, and to build a common ground for their interpretation.
Paper long abstract:
The covid-19 pandemic forced me to cancel fieldwok. At the same time, I was forced to learn the use of digital platfoms for on-line teaching. This new set of habilities helped me to imagine how to combine teaching with digital fieldwork. As a result, I figured out how to combine my on-line teaching to continue conversations with Cocopah people with whom I have been doing fieldwork since 2006. In this paper I reflect on the methodological challenges to digitally connect communication undergraduated students, from central Mexico, with Cocopah people, living in the Northeastern state of Baja California. In this process I have not only had the opportunity to connect in collective conversations students and Cocopahs through facebook chats. But I have also found a compelling narrative to edit the film archive that I have built in ten years of fieldwork following Cocopah female leaders in their struggle to defend their fishing rights.This emerging methodology has opened a space for the remembrace of past events, and therefore, to build a common ground for their interpretation.
Michael Allen (University of Adelaide)
Paper short abstract:
An auto-ethnographic research project of performances (live and online) has revealed a new contribution to performance theory, unique to the online space. The fourth wall is remade and with it the relationships and meaning of performance
Paper long abstract:
Stanislavsky identified public solitude. This concept quietly ensconced the abstract concept of the fourth wall and Bateson expanded the inference of the backstage space as a metaphor for personality consciousness.
Web integrated technology and platforms have blossomed based on the individual capacity to perform and present themselves. Tik Tok, FaceBook live, youtube, vimeo and more everyday are used to present and perform education, religion, medicine, gaming and nearly every minority hobby or sub-culture imaginable.
A significant feature of the online personality is the ‘authentic’ confessional relationship of their performances and the relationship with their audiences. The temporal and spatial elasticity of this type of performance also significantly impacts the traditional (albeit redundant) definition of ‘live’ performance.
This paper will recount an auto-ethnographic research project which engaged in creative analysis of the online performance environment from 2018-2019. Specifically, this research reflected the experiences of living online characters, interacting in social media sub-culture groups using creative analysis and interpreting that into a series of live theatre performances.
The plays were performed and broadcast as a live stream on multi-modal social media platforms simultaneously with live in-the-room conventional audiences. The resultant experience is an infused audience participation work of collective imagination which has spawned a new way of thinking about the theatrical conventions of the fourth wall and the suspension of disbelief.
Ultimately I conclude that the metaphor of the 4th wall and 'backstage' experience of personhood requires new thinking in a web 2.0 consciousness.
Maruska Svasek (Queen's University Belfast)
Paper short abstract:
Reflecting on the impact of lockdown conditions on communication in education and ethnographic research settings, the paper discusses opportunities and limitations of different media and communication technologies to create communities of practice, imagination and affective sociality.
Paper long abstract:
Reflecting on the impact of fluctuating lockdown conditions on communication in education and ethnographic research settings, the paper discusses the opportunities and limitations presented by different media and communication technologies to interact across distance. Drawing on a notion of creativity that highlights the dialectics of un/expectedness (Svašek and Meyer 2016), it explores different ways in which researchers and educators have improvised and used painting, illustration, storytelling and film to tackle the crisis. The paper is partly autobiographic, analysing my own struggles to find ways to overcome distance and silence and create communities of practice, imagination and affective sociality.
2016 Creativity in Transition. Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production across
the Globe. Oxford: Berghahn (eds. M. Svašek and B. Meyer)