- Convenors:
-
Federica Manfredi
(University of Torino (Italy))
Lucia Portis (University of Turin)
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- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 21 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Sometimes words can't express what we would like to say. Communication seems to be in crisis when logocentric logic shows its limits. How can anthropologists go beyond words to communicate with research participants? And after fieldwork, can words be enriched by other communicative strategies?
Long Abstract:
Crisis challenges daily routines and comfort zones, influencing how we perceive experiences, communicate emotions and elaborate thoughts. Sometimes it's hard to put experiences into words and to have access to people's lives. Anthropologists can experiment with new communication strategies using creative tools, adapting fieldwork methodologies in order to go beyond a logocentric logic. Creative self-narratives can turn what is incommunicable into drawings, poems, sounds and other sensory inputs that fight against the crisis of the communication. Words can be substituted, enriched or completed to create connections.
At the same time, creative strategies of communication can be used after fieldwork to disseminate research findings not necessarily anchored to logocentric and oral communications. Multiplying research efforts, theatre, art exhibition, songs and creative laboratories can reach audiences beyond the scientific community of anthropologists.
This panel seeks contributions on creative ways to communicate during and after fieldwork, challenging ordinary communication and requiring creative strategies of expression.
How can anthropologists support creative communication with research or project participants? How do relationships develop when logocentric expressions are not the main strategy of communication? How are intimacy and trust affected by alternative communication strategies? What is the role of objects and handicrafts during and after fieldwork? How can creative communication help rethink the interaction between the anthropologist and the general public?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on the use of visual and creative forms of communication when conducting and disseminating ethnographic research with forcibly displaced youth; and the challenges and possibilities of drawing in particular. It is based on fieldwork carried out in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Paper long abstract:
This paper argues for greater engagement with ‘visuality’ and creative communication in research with/for linguistically and culturally diverse groups of young people, such as those who have been forcibly displaced across borders. It is based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with displaced youth in Thessaloniki, Greece, involving participant observation as a volunteer teacher in various educational spaces (including language classes and arts workshops). During this period, focus group discussions were held with youth aged 15-25 which involved creative methods - namely, drawing pathways to one's future and the barriers and supports along it - as well as interviews with educational ‘stakeholders’ such as teachers, parents and coordinators.
The paper addresses two ways in which visual communication became a part of this project, and reflects on the associated challenges and possibilities of drawing as both a method and form of dissemination. Firstly, it describes how the ‘visual’ was incorporated into the process of data collection and analysis - from pictorial consent forms and creative methods to the researcher’s reflective sketches and photographs - and the ethical and practical implications of this. Secondly, it makes the case for creating a visual product of research with/for refugees, to enable youth to share their lives in colour, rather than as another bureaucratic or academic text. It concludes with a call for researchers to visually engage an audience beyond academia in young people's stories, while paying attention to their role in constructing generalised visual narratives.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation addresses the use of photography as an alternative methodology to better envision the phenomenological realities of opioid users. Participant photos allow us to create an imaginary of how experiences of addiction and recovery are shaped by everyday social and spatial environments.
Paper long abstract:
For communities often excluded from mainstream discourse, reimagining modes of communication in research can fill in gaps left by logocentric expression and allow for deeper understanding across social divides. Participatory photography, a technique in which participants respond to prompts by taking photos, is an exciting medium through which to conceptualize the subjective experience of people who use drugs (PWUD), who navigate a unique social and built environment of trauma, invisibility, and oppression.
This presentation focuses on insights from a participatory photography project conducted with illicit opioids users in the Dayton, Ohio metropolitan area, considered to be an epicenter of the current opioid crisis. Participants took photos of perceived barriers and motivators to their opioid recovery and reflected on them in semi-structured interviews.
Through taking photos, participants were able to dig beneath the surface of recallable memory to create a self-narrated phenomenological imaginary of how they navigate their spatial worlds. The photos revealed that the participants’ everyday social and built environments are pregnant with connotations of trauma, struggle, adoration, and hope. In this manner, participatory photography becomes a technique with which we can address crises in communication regarding the subjective experiences of drug use and recovery, which often focus on risk and the body, and ignore how broader experiences of place shape addiction trajectories.
As initiatives to address the opioid epidemic expand, qualitative researchers must consider new ways to address persisting misunderstandings of how PWUD view their own experiences of addiction and recovery.
Paper short abstract:
The Gallery of Obstetric Experiences is an ethnographic project whereby women use artistic experimentation to interrogate, process and represent their experiences of obstetric violence. What potentials and limitations does artistic expression bring to ethnographic fieldwork on perceptions of OV?
Paper long abstract:
The Gallery of Obstetric Experiences is a project whereby women use artistic experimentation to interrogate, process and represent their experiences of obstetric violence (OV). Its aim is to constitute a body of creative depictions of birth experiences that can be used to interrogate and explore personal experiences of childbirth with the people who create them, and to foster public discussion on the issue of OV, through communication and engagement with wider and non-academic audiences.
This presentation analyzes some of the first outcomes of the Gallery to explore what artistic expression can tell us about experiences of OV, while looking at the initial process of constitution of the Gallery to critically consider the use of collaborative artistic methodologies in activist ethnographic inquiry. I assess the use of artistic expression as a research method, exploring its potentials and shortcomings, without overlooking the issue of power relations between researcher and interlocutors in activist research. What are the challenges in this kind of endeavor? What contradictions must we face when engaging with art as a research method in ethnographic inquiry? What does art have that other tools don't? Is it an effective device to materialize perceptions of subjective and intimate experiences as are those of childbirth?
Paper short abstract:
In our research, at the intersection between anthropology and the contemporary visual arts and images, fieldwork is related with creative communication and autoethnography. These unorthodox new mixed methods offer great opportunities and important vulnerabilities and ethic dilemmas to consider.
Paper long abstract:
During the last 8 years, I have applied anthropology methodologies (unorthodox new mixed methods) to my research on the visual narratives of illness and functional diversity. As a person with various food intolerances, dyslexia and chronic illnesses, I have used creative communication and my social networks to share images related to my own experience that have also be exposed in artistic exhibitions.
The shared images, the comments and the interactions obtained in various ways have brought new perspectives and points of view to my research. However, I have come across numerous prejudices to consider the community of artists and filmmakers that work with self-referential illness as informants because they are not considered as common people or users. It’s also difficult to justifying to academic publishers’ certain images because they were not "anonymised" as I should give credit/copyright to public artworks or public artists. Even my own shared images have been a problem as autoethnography still arouses some susceptibilities.
I have made ethical decisions that I would not have confronted otherwise. The public exposure also supposes that I have met complete strangers at conferences who knew all my health problems and made me feel very uncomfortable (without intention) as they treated me as a close “friend”. I consider it necessary to have this experience in first person in order to be able to analyse this phenomenon usually disqualified with easy labels as “narcissistic” or “morbid”.