- Convenors:
-
Letizia Bonanno
(University of Vienna)
Charlie Rumsby (Sussex University)
José Sherwood Gonzalez (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Send message to Convenors
- 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:
I reflect on experiences with two works, an intimate ethnography and a graphic novel, and describe a new online project to consider the promises of and obstacles facing multimodal anthropology. I assess institutional matters, the multi-media landscape and opportunity spaces for public engagement.
Paper long abstract:
I count myself among the ever-growing ranks of anthropologists who have long experimented with various writing genres and multimodal practices. My primary motivation is to make knowledge accessible beyond the academy; my intention is to facilitate engagement with larger publics. The overall purpose of my scholarship is to inform a vision for a more just present and future. With these motivations and goals in mind, I offer reflections on the joys and successes as well as the frustrations and disappointments with two multimodal experiments, one an intimate ethnography that combines a written narrative with an online, multimedia story companion and the second a graphic novel of art and anthropology. These experiences have helped inspire a new project, a joint online venture with Maria Vesperi that springs from our Anthropology off the Shelf volume (2011) to feature both experimental multimodal works and critical essays. Referencing my experiences and the new project, in this presentation I consider a series of interrelated questions: How to effect change in the discipline and its institutions to support experimental formats and better ensure the future of multimodal anthropology? In an already overcrowded media landscape, how can projects of multimodal anthropology be brought to public notice? Are there specific venues of public engagement more or less likely to embrace multimodal anthropology, and why might that be so?
Paper short abstract:
Through interactions in a 3D virtual boarding school, audiences engage with the topic of boarding school syndrome. Themes of power, play, representation and the body will be discussed with a narrative piece in Unreal. Animation and interaction are used to guide the player to encounter transitional objects to release personal testimony from recorded group psychotherapy sessions.
Paper long abstract:
My approach to creating a walking sim is informed by Thomas Malaby’s suggestion of a, “framework for understanding games that sees games as grounded in human practice and as fundamentally processual.” (p96, 2007). My research is a contribution to this intellectual enquiry, as well as offering contributions to theory through practice. Malaby’s question, “What would a processual approach to games look like?” (p105, 2007) serves as the provocation for this paper. Malaby contends that games are, "socially created artifacts with certain common features and allow for the way they inhabit, reflect, and constitute the processes of everyday experience." I examine this in the context of psychotherapy, attachment patterns, hypervigilance and mental health.
Paper short abstract:
How to capture the complex entwinement of inner and outer worlds in the creative process? This paper explores this question in relation to a collaborative virtual exhibition, curated with contemporary Japanese artists.
Paper long abstract:
Creativity appears to require both creative engagement with the outside world and a withdrawal into interiority, or a relatively solitary space of focused engagement and immersion. Both featured prominently in the descriptions of their creative process offered by the Japanese artists with whom I have been working since 2013. How then might we capture and represent this productive intersection between inner and outer worlds? This paper reflects on an attempt to address this question through a collaborative 360° virtual exhibition. In moving beyond the conventional white-walled gallery space, 360° photography allowed artists to arrange their works in the inner and outer spaces they themselves selected and captured, in collaboration with me. Their works, and glimpses into their creative process, are offered as links in these captured virtual spaces, utilizing video, sound and images.
Paper short abstract:
Posting graphic field notes can be brewed into a method to broker attention from busy professionals. This paper is focusing on a collaborative ethnographic process conducted within a neurosurgery department as a “radical open-access” pre-publication.
Paper long abstract:
Publishing graphic field notes may be brewed into a method to broker some attention from busy professionals. Teaming up with a resident neurosurgeon, I am currently conducting an ethnographic “participant exhibition” based on the physical hanging and online posting of drawings on the walls of her department. The new modes of publishing suggested by multimodal ethnography displaces further the focus from an impossible neutral observation toward circumstantiated interventions, and toward an increasingly public practice “beyond text” in the contemporary media environment. Graphic ethnography and exhibition formats can provide the “stage” for collaborative exploration of adjacent concerns of humanities and their epistemic partners —in the case at hand, with clinical neuroscientists. Publishing strategies can be constitutive of this theatrical performance. Throughout the “Sketching Brains” project, the exhibition and its online documentation on the platform Pubpub are working as publications as well as ethnographic devices. Which are the publication venues that are able to play that game, and what are our demands to them? How can these formats interact and get the academic recognition (and production quality) provided by traditional publishing houses, and what do they have to offer to them? After a short presentation of the project itself, this paper will focus on the decision process and the operation flow pertaining to this radical open-access pre-publication. I will share the conundrum, the thrills, and the pains of drafting a graphic ethnographic book into the open.
See the online publication:
https://speculativerealitieslab.pubpub.org/sketching-brains-exhibition