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Digital media dissolves boundaries, blending virtual and physical, where memory flows in fluid, nonlinear currents. Through a three-year ethnography with Turkish students, this research maps the interplay of proximity, transitions, and shifting narratives reframing collective memory.

Paper long abstract

The shift from traditional media into digital media brings into question how collective memory will be shaped in the digital environment. Social media platforms, as spaces where people meet and interact, become not only vehicles of communication but also vehicles for recognition, with the transformative power to easily change traditional ways of communication and help shape collective remembering.These exchanges flow fluidly, traversing the digital and seamlessly spilling into the physical, continuously relating and reshaping both individual and collective memory. This is a nonlinear, ongoing process that blurs the boundaries between the virtual and corporeal to facilitate an unceasing re-territorialization of memory, estranging all static contiguity points. Memory, in this sense, emerges as multiplicity perpetually in motion and flux. Personal narratives with transitional layers are deeply connected to other narratives such as family histories, news, politics, and sports. These interactions form dynamic compositions, with nuanced rhythms and patterns on multiple levels. Continuously interacting, these parts create fluid mixes that reflect the interconnectedness of lived experiences shaped by a future-oriented present and past events through ongoing processes of forgetting and remembering.

This research positions social media as spaces of interaction—new agoras and public spheres where memory is shaped, contested, and negotiated. Using a map enriched with visuals from a three-year collaborative ethnography with Turkish university students aged 18 to 23, this study explores collective memory through the lenses of proximity, relationships, and transitions. By examining digital platforms as counter-mapping domains, it raises new questions about their role in shaping collective narratives. https://themapofmemories.com/

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Based on a visual multispecies ethnography conducted on Mexico’s Pacific coast, I explore qualities of analogue film suited for representing the sensory aspects of multispecies encounters in a lagoon, as well as the effect of using 16mm film on the collaborative filmmaking process I employed.

Paper long abstract

Based on a visual multispecies ethnography conducted on Mexico’s Pacific coast, this paper explores how I use 16mm film to investigate human and more-than-human entanglements. I propose that analogue film possesses qualities particularly suited for representing the sensory aspects of multispecies encounters. The Chacahua-Pastoría lagoons, one of Mexico’s oldest national parks, are home to Afro-Mexican and Indigenous communities who increasingly face ecological threats to their environment. Over the course of eight months, I used collaborative filmmaking and multispecies ethnography to represent human and more-than-human relationships in the lagoon. In this paper I discuss (and show) how I am employing both 16 mm film and digital footage to illustrate worlds that come together among contradictions and difficult negotiations, the pluriverse proposed by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser. The Chacahua pluriverse encompasses conservation and monitoring activities informed by living on national park territory and grounded in biological knowledge, and being tonal, sharing life with an animal - fate, abilities and death common to the human and more-than-human partners of a life-long bond. I discuss how attributes of 16mm film such as texture and colour highlight sensoriality and become useful for imagining the tonal connection. Furthermore, I reflect on how the pace of working with a 16mm camera, which demands time for planning, adjusting, and focusing, along with the deferred visibility of its outcomes, shaped the collaborative filmmaking process. This slower approach encouraged pre-shoot discussion and preparation while fostering openness to accidents and a lack of complete control over the images.

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Drawing from the author's experiences of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in two highly diverse and historical Asian cities, this paper argues for a multimodal approach to urban ethnography that responds to the altered context of the 'field', to ensure a more reflexive and dialogical enquiry.

Paper long abstract

In the context of contemporary societies, the conventional tropes of traditional ethnographic engagement have lost much of their former relevance. Increased global flows, high diversity indices, rapid population movements, and severe constraints on time and resources have significantly shrunk the scope for prolonged ethnographic fieldwork in 'unfamiliar' settings. With that, the image of a lone ethnographer meticulously taking field-notes and maintaining detailed diaries of their time in the field has largely dissipated. In the diverse and dynamic urban landscapes of Asia, ethnographers often find themselves navigating crowds, ‘chaos’, and sensory overwhelm, which can pose challenges for traditional modes of observation and documentation. The altered context of ethnography further implies a transformed relationship between ethnographer and field, especially, when researchers study their own societies. Here, beyond a changed power dynamic, the ‘other’ becomes a site for studying the ‘self’ and vice versa. Given these changes, this paper explores the various ways in which urban spaces in Asia can be engaged with, ‘read’, and documented by a South Asian ethnographer. Drawing from experiences of conducting fieldwork in vernacular urban neighborhoods, paras of Kolkata, India, and kampungs of Surabaya, Indonesia, it examines adaptive ethnographic practices that respond to the evolving contexts. The paper highlights how multimodal approaches like cognitive map-making, ethnographic sketches, and sharper attunement to sensory registers, can foster a more self-reflexive and dialogical engagement with communities. Further, the paper underscores the practical significance of on-site improvisation while offering insights into the constraints researchers face while conducting ethnography in Asian cities.

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This presentation draws from years of ethnographic research into human-microbial interactions to attempt a sensory ethnography of the “avisual” (Lippit 2005): a form of visuality that is invisible to the human eye yet nonetheless real, visible somewhere else, beyond human scale, in the mind’s eye.

Paper long abstract

This presentation draws from years of ethnographic research into human-microbial interactions to attempt a sensory ethnography of the “avisual” as described by Lippit (2005): a form of visuality that is invisible to the human eye yet nonetheless real, visible somewhere else, beyond human scale or in the mind’s eye. This is a visuality that cannot be brought to surface, like the dreams or thoughts explored by psychoanalysis, only visible in the mind of the one who thinks of them and yet intrinsically connected to his or her experience of the world.

Using ethnographic descriptions and media, the paper will explore how bodily symptoms participate of this form of avisuality: born at the end-point of immunological relationships, symptoms are more like a felt trace, the shadow left by the “unassimilable” (Massumi 2002) in its passing or halting. They belong to the order of “pre-personal” and “autonomous” forces that affect bodies and are affected by them (Stewart 2006).

Involved in emergent human-microbial ecologies, bodies become “attuned” (Peterson 2016, 2021) to the forces that incommensurable worlds bring upon them, bringing into view how human-microbial relationships depend on our ability to cultivate a renewed understanding of sense. This is also a renewed understanding of vision, based on the recognition that “abstractions are not unreal, nor separated from material surfaces” (Parikka 2023). A rash on the skin is not that different from the strips on a COVID test: they both invoke images of ecological relationships that depend upon our ability to take abstractions seriously.