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