- Convenors:
-
Sanderien Verstappen
(University of Vienna)
Mark Westmoreland (Leiden University)
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- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 25 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel, in the form of a non-linear exhibition and discussion, focusses on smartphones as a mode of creative yet serious engagement with crisis. It opens a discussion about the creative and intellectual potential for implementing the smartphone in anthropological research and teaching.
Long Abstract:
In this panel, we invite anthropologists experimenting with smartphone-based media practices of filmmaking, film sharing, and audience interaction, particularly in contexts of imminent crisis, in order to open a discussion about the creative and intellectual potential for implementing the smartphone in anthropological research and teaching. While not limited to the public health crisis ushered in by the spread of coronavirus, we note that the pandemic has pushed experiments in response to conditions of online teaching, social distancing, and mobility restrictions. We are particularly interested in forms of audiovisual production that employ the specific characteristics of the smartphone (both embodied and innocuous), while also exploring its ubiquitous and networked affordances for reaching different audiences. What happens to an anthropological film, for example, if we literally hold it in our hands while viewing it? How might Bluetooth and wi-fi technologies enable proximate users to form live ‘mesh networks’? How might the apparent limitations of bandwidth and screen size actually rejuvenate our engagement with film, while also creating new opportunities to respond to crises in our field sites? Can anthropologists start developing modes of research and knowledge exchange that push further the boundaries of creative production in Visual and Multimodal Anthropology? The form of the panel will reflect the topic with a non-linear exhibition and discussion format, in which smartphones will be implemented as a tool of viewing and discussing the pre-recorded video presentations of the panellists.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Based on the process of the documentary film project "Transition", we will explore how we can research and express lived-experiences of people who go through life transitions using smartphones.
Paper long abstract:
Many Japanese individuals fall victim to the disease of cancer, making it the most common cause of death in Japan. Mizuno's wife Mie was diagnosed with stomach cancer in May 2017, just before the delivery of their first child. Mie began to live with medical treatment immediately after childbirth. However, she passed away three months after her son's first birthday. Mizuno recorded himself and his family's life using his smartphone camera almost every day ever since he was informed of his partner's disease in May 2017. From June 2018, Mizuno started a collaborative research with Ohashi to understand the rapid changes of his family's life-world and together they made a documentary film using images generated with Mizuno's smartphone. In the beginning, Ohashi, as a visual ethnographer, had planned to do fieldwork by visiting the family's living environment. However, she decided to avoid exhausting Mie's limited time and strength by being present in their living environment for research purposes. Alternatively, Mizuno and Ohashi began to share diaries and visual data generated with smartphones on Google Drive and arranged to have weekly online interview sessions to collaboratively reflect on the data and to create a structure for their documentary film. The film was titled "Transition", and it was selected for the 32nd edition of International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Based on the process of the documentary film project "Transition", we will explore how we can research and express lived-experiences of people who go through life transitions using smartphones.
Paper short abstract:
Audio tours are a way of communicating-in-space that integrates mobile technology within experiences of urban mobility. In this presentation, I share how smartphone-based audio tours can be used to communicate about research in a public space.
Paper long abstract:
Audio tours are a way of communicating-in-space that integrates mobile technology within experiences of mobility. They have been used for tourist and activist purposes but can also be mobilised to communicate in and about anthropological research. In this presentation I share fragments of an audio tour I currently co-create with anthropology students at the University of Vienna.
Social researchers with spatial questions have shown keen interest in mobile devises that generate locational information. While the tracking of movements as behavioural data has been critiqued for its top-down approach, PGIS and counter-mapping approaches offer alternative ways of researching and representing space. Audio tours combine locational technology with audio narratives. They can be created and accessed on a smartphone to conduct research and communicate about findings in a public space.
In Vienna, I collaborate with students in appropriating the smartphone to this end. During a project on the topic of urban mobility in Vienna, students and interlocutors co-create audio narratives that reflect diverse ways of moving in the city. The audio narratives are combined into an audio tour that we walk together with the students, interlocutors, and neighbourhood activists.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will present the Illustrating Anthropology exhibition launched in September 2020, supported by the RAI. This experiment in pedagogy and public anthropology provokes questions about how digital visual communication can be especially effective for communicating affective understanding.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will present the Illustrating Anthropology exhibition which launched in September 2020, supported by the RAI. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the exhibition took place physically in a socially-distanced manner in two galleries, and online via a dedicated website (https://illustratinganthropology.com/) and an Instagram account (@illustrating_anthropology). While the pandemic on the one hand constrained opportunities for public anthropology, it also prompted a deep engagement with online forms of communication, for which illustration proved to be apt. This experiment in pedagogy and public anthropology provokes questions about how illustration combined with the affordances of the smartphone work to capture attention and deliver anthropological insights to broad audiences. Examining Instagram and associated media as platforms for knowledge exchange, this paper seeks to build on a growing awareness of the potential of the smartphone for anthropological public interventions ('The Global Smartphone', Miller et. al., forthcoming 2021). By focusing in particular on the affordances of visual digital communication to convey anthropological knowledge, we see how the truth/fiction spectrum of ‘vérités graphiques’ (‘Drawing-Writing Culture’, Visual Anthropology Review, Dix, 2019) can be especially effective for communicating affective understanding when moved online, embedded in wider communication practices.