- Convenors:
-
Letizia Bonanno
Charlie Rumsby (Sussex University)
José Sherwood Gonzalez (Manchester Metropolitan University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 6 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel wants to explore novel ways to unsettle traditional anthropological modes of inquiries and invites contributions that engage with multimodal practices and have engaged with outlets for multimodal publication.
Long Abstract:
Multimodal anthropology has the potential to unsettle disciplinary boundaries and provide an entry point into debates from different angles, whether that be digital, text, film, drawing, theatre, photography. The unsettling of disciplinary boundaries also offers an opportunity for anthropologists to engage publicly in new meaningful and impactful ways.
In the American context the tide is turning with an emphasis on the multimodal. In Europe, the newly established Multimodal Ethnography Network is another example of a collective response to multimodal anthropology and ethnographic practice.
The momentum surrounding multimodal anthropology is birthing alternative ways of knowing, collaboration, and dissemination. However, it seems that publishing venues are not just yet attuned to such growing interest and often are unable to accommodate multimodal publications.
Following on from such considerations, this panel asks: what space does multimodal publishing have in British Anthropology? In an increasingly digitalised world, is multimodal publishing the future of an engaged anthropology? What is the future of multimodal anthropologies? Is multimodality just another ‘theoretical turn’ which is only temporarily capturing the academic imagination or is it actually paving the way towards alternative futures for publishing and public engagement?
In trying to answer these questions, this panel seeks to foster creative, critical, and pluri-disciplinary dialogues and productions between researchers in anthropology, on its fringes, and beyond.
As such this panel wants to critically explore novel ways and modes to unsettle traditional anthropological modes of inquiries and invites contributions that engage with multimodal practices and publications beyond the traditional conference paper presentation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 6 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
Digitised ethnographies open space for collaborative learning and provide an alternative to established modes of ethnographic storytelling. The Peng game is an interactive ethnography that uses original ethnographic material to chronicle one day in the life of Peng, a young Chinese migrant.
Paper long abstract:
Digitised ethnographies open new spaces of collaborative learning and provide an alternative to established modes of ethnographic storytelling and publication. The Long Day of Young Peng is an interactive storyline based on the open-source tool Twine that uses original ethnographic material (fieldnotes, interviews, pictures and videos elicited through a participatory approach) to chronicle one day in the life of Peng, a young Chinese migrant. In this interactive ethnography, the player is put in Peng’s shoes on his journey from his native village to Beijing in search of employment. Through interacting with other characters, the player relives Peng’s first day in Beijing and familiarises herself with topics in the scholarship of contemporary Chinese society.
How is anthropological storytelling challenged by this multimodal media form? What does interactivity do to ethnography? Digitised ethnographies cast a critical eye on how anthropologists traditionally address their audience and complicate the various hierarchies of ethnographic storytelling. The Peng game works similarly to photography in explaining content through context, yet interactivity forces players to inhabit an unstable environment which interrogates not just their comprehension but their ethical agency. Should I send remittances home or keep the money to myself? Is it reasonable to break the law to fulfil my aspirations? In this light, digitised ethnographies place players in a so-called “ethical gym” where seemingly ethical or unethical choices are experienced as separated from their consequences.
Paper short abstract:
Written during a global pandemic while searching for ways to radically question white heterosexist norms, this essay is an invitation to consider a multi-sited, multi-sensorial and multi-ethnographical research.
Paper long abstract:
Written during a global pandemic while searching for ways to radically question white heterosexist norms, this essay is an invitation to consider a multi-sited, multi-sensorial and multi-ethnographical research. Also I will deconstruct and interrupt the white heteronormative framework that is dominant in the Western world. The bigotry and oppression sexual and racial minorities currently face are due to professional installations of sexologists and physicians’ scientific research on the nature of humankind. They found ways to meticulously place skin colors, sexualities and gender performances in a violent binary hierarchical structure. In my film Dancing in Captivity the viewers are moved to viscerally engage with me in the interrogation of the concepts of race, queerness and gender norms. It’s a film that queers, or rather dances, creatively juxtaposes and merges various media, allowing viewers to refuse entrapment. With their entire being viewers, which become co-makers, are invited to reason with poetry, dance, music, the visual and text. The bringing together of these various media in film, interrupting the realist fallacy of film, promotes multisensorial becoming, queer becoming and the queering of anthropology. I did not stop grooving as I danced making this film, which is truly made when viewed. I keep dancing in this essay and invite the reader to reason from the dancing humans perspective. When you dance along, you participate. When you participate you relate. Let’s question and engage in movement. Get ready to dance!
Paper short abstract:
Can a classic text be conceived as an image? If yes, how would it look like? To what will resemble? What does it mean collaborating in such process? In other words, how can we co-create a 'participatory image in text’? This presentation will focus on a twofold way of doing multimodal anthropology
Paper long abstract:
This presentation will focus on a twofold way of doing multimodal anthropology: a contribution to a multimodal book-edition and its research team (set up by the C.rital I.cono E.thnography L.ab in Brussel cf. https://cielab.ch/), and a collaboration with an anthropologist/curator (Arnaud Dubois) and an artist (Letizia Giannella) who together co-created an exhibition called “Cosmographies : expérience du territoire” in September 2021 in Paris.
I got involved almost simultaneously in these two separates but connected collaborative practices which I placed immediately together. They both had the common wish to work around the concept of creating a participatory image. Along with Arnaud Dubois and Letizia Giannella we then experimented the potential to create a participatory image in text which in turn I presented to the CIEL team.
Can a classic text be conceived as an image? If yes, how would it look like? To what will resemble? What does it mean collaborating in such process? In other words, how can we co-create a 'participatory image in text’? These questions led Arnaud Dubois, Letizia Giannella and myself to write an experimental chapter where words and images, personal narratives and academic discourse had been treated at the same level and with the same value. The text had been discussed in its in-progress stage with the collaborative CIEL team contributing to an ulterior level of collaboration and multimodality. Although this process has not created an answer or a mathematic formula to answer our questions about the participatory image in text, this experience opens up possibilities to think and re-think multimodality and anthropology of today and tomorrow. In this paper, I will discuss the complexities and possibilities of this double multimodal collaboration.
Paper short abstract:
Redesigning and reimagining scholarly forms of dissemination requires scaffolding infrastructural pedagogical supports, collective knowledge sharing, and contextual understanding of current publishing ecologies and economies.
Paper long abstract:
With their commitment to form-sensitive arguments and the practical know-how of how to not only produce but also theorize the relationships between image, text, sound, and performance, multimodal anthropologists are well positioned to reimagine and redesign traditional scholarly forms of dissemination. We must, however, scaffold these ambitions with infrastructural pedagogical supports, collective knowledge sharing, and contextual understanding of current publishing ecologies and economies. In this presentation I draw on my experience creating and publishing multimodal scholarship in society-sponsored journals and art presses, co-editing and co-leading the redesign of Visual Anthropology Review, and developing curricular pathways for students to explore and engage multimodal projects at the graduate and undergraduate level. This work has not only revealed various pinch points—how to control layout on dynamic platforms and evolving technology, maintenance required to ensure accessibility, building audience and reach and enhancing discoverability, guiding authors to engage with layout and design choices, and so on—but also the necessity of working collaboratively, fostering information sharing and defining on our terms the value of labor and work.