- Convenors:
-
Timothy Cooper
(University of Cambridge)
Till Trojer (London Business School)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 20 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how creative responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have called for a reconsideration of existing ethical orientations to media, technology, and practice.
Long Abstract:
This panel invites papers that explore how creative responses to the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic have called for a reconsideration of existing ethical orientations to media, technology, and practice. Focusing on the relationship between creativity, crisis, and their technological mediation requires considering ethics as a reflexive process forged in correspondence with those usually viewed as "other", rather than as the domain of individuality or self-cultivation.
Take, for example, ethnographic filmmakers whose practices are enmeshed in a triangular relationship with their viewers and interlocutors. During the pandemic, streaming services like Vimeo and YouTube have allowed multiple interlocutors to participate in post-production processes despite physical distances in ways which collapse the distinction between participant and audience. Similarly, during lockdowns many social, religious, and life events have had to rely upon other technologies that simulate co-presence, causing many to reconsider the place of social media in ritual practice and to question what constitutes the "being there" of participation and presence.
These are just two examples of the myriad ways in which the ethics of ethnographic representation, collaboration, and participation have been propelled to the forefront of creative and mediated practices by the uncertainties introduced by COVID-19. This panel welcomes papers that foreground reflexive engagements on the relationship between face-to-face practice and its digital mediation and how the pandemic has transformed notions of presence and co-presence. Together we hope to find ways of thinking differently about the place of agency, ethics, and crisis and discuss innovative and creative ways of doing anthropology.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Reflecting upon engagement with the Pandemic Religion Archive and ongoing ethnographic research into digital prayer collectives in Pakistan, this paper explores experimental and improvised approaches to theological doctrines of spiritual presence, temporal proximity, and moral reception.
Paper long abstract:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the continuation of forms of communal worship relied on experimental and improvised approaches to theological doctrines of spiritual presence, temporal proximity, and moral reception. While creativity and play served to bring out fresh ways of being together in prayer, these attempts at eliciting co-presence built upon pre-existing religious mediations rather than simply being fashioned anew from media assemblages.
This paper reflects upon engagement with the George Mason University's Pandemic Religion project and its attempts to document the various ways that religious communities in North America have been challenged and transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Built from user-contributions, the resultant Pandemic Religion Archive is a repository of reflections over how worshippers from varied faiths and denominations sought other ways of remaining connected when traditional forms of communal prayer were interrupted. These activities will be framed in relation to ongoing ethnographic research into digital prayer collectives in Pakistan who seize upon already existing platforms and repositories to host participative content on Facebook Live, communicate through messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, and broadcast live and archived prayer gatherings on YouTube.
Through this comparative frame, this paper asks, how is divine presence made tangible and immediate by digital technologies? How is the experience of co-presence - as communal worship or of fellow congregants - mediated in the experience of online prayer and devotion? How have the atmospheric or ambient dimensions of prayer been transformed by the use of digital technologies during the pandemic?
Paper short abstract:
How can ethnographers keep filming in the midst of a pandemic upon stringent conditions? What kind of haggling takes place between researchers and participants if the locations and live actions once agreed for shooting have suddenly turned into an arena of mistrust and precautions?
Paper long abstract:
How can ethnographers keep filming in the midst of a pandemic upon stringent conditions? Of Domes and Robes is a documentary short which portrays how minority houses of worship in an European city might serve as community homes, setting thresholds where socio-spatial boundaries are made (un)visible. This presentation introduces the disruption of the filming schedule that us co-directors had set right before Covid-19 struck, severely affecting our location: Brescia (northern Italy). Throughout spring 2020, with targeted temples locked down, we could only touch base with cult leaders via phone-calls and follow them on social media, watching celebrations webcast from deserted worship rooms. While partaking in this mediated normalcy, we welcomed the national decree that reopened all religious places and consented their activities to resume in presence.
Acknowledging current admission rules for Covid-prevention, which altered social and ritual habits, our visual research ethics demanded creative re-orientations. To overcome missed events and believers’ anxiety for a ‘threatening’ co-presence, we’ve developed a closer collaboration with cult leaders and film actors, recording the minima interactions allowed, and borrowing repertoire audio-visuals that participants themselves produced.
If our movie’s subtitle recited: ‘an ethnographic film on freedom of worship and the right to the city’, will such tenets of living with diversity endure this new era when “we are all holding our breath, but some tighter than others” like the local Imam forewarned live on FB? Screening selected footage from our collaborative film-in-progress, we’d like to engage the spectatorship-audience in debating our choices towards co-representational editing.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will discuss the predicaments and opportunities posed by the online shooting of a collaborative film co-written with Chinese sex workers in Paris and originally scheduled to be filmed as a fiction, which has both enhanced and made more visible its collaborative approach as a result.
Paper long abstract:
The paper will discuss the ways in which the original methodological approach of the ERC-funded SEXHUM project (Sexual Humanitarianism: migration, sex work and trafficking; www.sexhum.org) was adapted to respond to the ethical and logistical challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. SEXHUM adopts a creative methodological approach integrating ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviewing with collaborative ethnographic filmmaking (ethnofiction) through which groups of migrant sex workers express their lives and realities.
Plan B was produced in the context of SEXHUM through the collaboration between Nicola Mai and the Roses d’Acier sex worker rights association of Chinese cis women in Paris, France. The film was originally supposed to be shot as a fiction presenting the intersecting stories of two Chinese women, Jing and Duoduo, who decided to emigrate to France in order to help their children and families and also to realize their social mobility projects. Eventually, the film was shot mostly online during the COVID-19 pandemic in France and tells the stories of Lili and Duoduo through online discussions of the script by the members of Roses d’Acier who wrote it, as well as through original illustrations of its main scenes. The paper will discuss the predicaments and opportunities posed by this process of adaptation, which has both enhanced and made more visible its collaborative approach as a result.
Paper short abstract:
This paper hauntologically re-evaluates ethics involving ethnographic practices from the perspective of a mixed race queer female filmmaker with physical and mental health challenges. It examines the benefits of how marginalized Othered voices can help towards safeguarding a world in crisis.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will follow my phenomenological experience as a queer mixed race disabled woman creating an auto-ethnographic part-fantasy film during a world health crisis, lockdown and the BLM movement. The paper will focus on three areas. 1: An ethical and radically queered re-evaluation of ethnographic practice from mentally and physically health challenged perspective. 2: How the artist as Other is so used to managing crisis, that their experienced voices are invaluable to a world in crisis, and 3: How hauntological research, social distancing and BLM triggered me to film the actors who played my younger selves on zoom, and also make them co-producers. Hence, they will have an equal and empowered voice in future discussions oh how the film is represented and shared. I examine how adversity urgently queers resistance to enable new discourses. I posit that these new discourses, specifically around race and world consciousness call for a re-evaluation of academia and ethnographic ethical practices that are still entrenched in colonial and patriarchally dominant hierarchal structures. Formerly marginalised voices can be harvested to produce fairly executed ethical guidelines in the future. The artist subject as Other is ironically privileged in working with limited resources to make art accessible, due to their own experiences of inaccessibility. I argue that the ethnographer's only way to be truly ethical is to predict and take full responsibility on behalf of participants for any potential risks of exploitation, particularly when it comes to future third party involvement.
Maria Rosamojo
www.harledencuckoo.com