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- Convenor:
-
Natalia Picaroni Sobrado
(Universidad Católica de Temuco)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 4 July, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract
In this panel, we explore the possibilities and limits of visual and multimodal collaboration by asking: what have we learned about care ethics, reflexivity, and engagement through co-creative ethnographic projects in contexts shaped by global inequalities, patriarchal and racist ideologies?
Long Abstract
The refreshing potential of co-creative, artistic, and multimodal approaches to research must be considered alongside their parallel capacity to reproduce power structures and hierarchies—particularly within contexts shaped by enduring racist, patriarchal ideologies and global inequalities.
Creativity, reflexivity, ethical accountability, and political engagement have long been part of anthropological practice. We can trace various genealogies of these approaches, some going back at least to the first generation of native and Black women anthropologists. We can also observe different trajectories of appropriation and institutionalization that have shaped (and sometimes diluted) their subversive and critical potential.
By critically examining care ethics, reflexivity, and political engagement in current multimodal ethnographic projects carried out in neocolonial contexts, this panel explores the possibilities and limitations of collaborative visual and multimodal experiments. We aim to share our thoughts, feelings, and intuitions about the extent to which we are dismantling—or perhaps also rebuilding—the master’s house.
Accepted papers
Session 2 Friday 4 July, 2025, -Paper short abstract
How can physical collages and their constituent images be transformed into digital formats that keep their intended fluidity and motion? Can anthropologists not trained as graphic designers or artists manage to produce shareable graphic novels? Visual diaries, collages and more will be discussed.
Paper long abstract
Anthropologists are not always trained as visual artists, but our lack of training need not keep us from experimenting with non-logocentric strategies for rendering our ideas. This paper begins by discussing an effort to use a graphic novel format to share the experience of traveling around Lugu Lake in southwest China with women from a nearby village. In collaboration with a talented Winter Term student, I worked to transform three physical panels into a digital, visual-first format. How to render vertical scale, how to preserve circularity and flow, and what visual style to use were all difficult elements to work through. Eventually, we resolved these problems, but the project period ended before all images could be completed. This unresolved, partially completed project taught me important lessons about conceptualization and role-clarification, including how to conclude projects when they aren't quite done.
The collage/graphic novel project is a decidedly post-fieldwork endeavor, undertaken long after returning home. The second form of visual rendering to be discussed is produced during the fieldwork itself. Many anthropologists include sketches as part of their fieldnotes. With twin inspirations from a Lijiang-based artist (2024) and an Oregon-based preschool teacher, I created "visual bedtime diaries" with both of my children as they accompanied me during my China fieldwork. These extended visual diaries functioned as daily opportunities to record a visual representation of the day's events, as part of the end-of-day bonding ritual of bedtime. They were far from perfect artistic creations, but captured important details and moods, nonetheless.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores women’s narratives in Mahila Mandals of Shiv Nath village, Himachal Pradesh, through ethnographic filmmaking, highlighting visual ethnography’s role in examining their socioeconomic mobility, resilience, and collective resistance, as documented in Pots, Pans, and Politics.
Paper long abstract
Ethnographic filmmaking and other visual ethnographic methods have proved significant in anthropological research. Everyday life and the lived experience of women have often been undervalued, as their contributions to the local and household economy are frequently overlooked. In a multi-caste village with women from different class groups, the critical reflexive methodologies offered by visual ethnography become significant, particularly as women come together as a single group in women’s collectives. This paper explores the nuanced narratives of women in Mahila Mandals, which were established in the 1980s through an independent women’s movement for the empowerment of rural women in Himachal Pradesh, India. It emphasizes the importance of ethnographic filmmaking methods in bringing out the narratives of women across different intersections of the village and their varied experiences and purposes within the same women’s collective. The film-Pots, Pans, and Politics focuses on the narratives of members of Mahila Mandal and traces the role played by the collective for the social-economic mobility of the women of Shiv Nath. It also documents the everyday lives of rural women in Shiv Nath, who, despite being affected by issues of caste, class, and capital, continue to grow resilient through various forms of resistance.
Paper short abstract
Hamano Sachi’s Lily Festival (2001) challenges the male gaze through ageing, queer sexuality, and female agency, redefining sexual representation in Japanese soft porn. The film empowers marginalized voices and fosters political engagement, offering a feminist intervention in visual ethnography.
Paper long abstract
This research critically examines Hamano Sachi’s Lily Festival (2001) as a feminist intervention in Japanese pink cinema, challenging the male gaze through the lens of aging, queer sexuality, and female agency. By employing textual and contextual analysis, the study explores how Hamano reclaims female desire and representation, emphasizing individual and collective opportunities for women in a male-dominated industry. Situating her work within the framework of collaborative visual ethnography, this paper highlights how Hamano’s films serve as a platform for political engagement, challenging societal taboos around ageing and female sexuality while fostering inclusive conversations. Her films not only subvert patriarchal norms but also empower marginalized voices, particularly elderly women, by redefining their sexual agency and visibility.
The study’s innovative approach lies in its unique perspective on the intersection of gender, age, and Asian cultural contexts, analyzing how these factors influence female representation and desire. By centring the experiences of elderly women and exploring their sexual agency, Lily Festival exemplifies how ethnographic film can disrupt traditional gender norms and empower marginalized voices. This research contributes to the discourse on feminist visual anthropology, revealing how cultural narratives shape perceptions of female identity and expression. Furthermore, it advocates for an ethically accountable form of filmmaking that aligns with generational aspirations for equality and collaboration, emphasizing the importance of care ethics and co-authorship with marginalized communities in visual anthropology. Through this lens, the study underscores the democratizing potential of ethnographic film as a tool for social change and political action.
Paper short abstract
This paper foregrounds the keyword "fandom" and explores the methodological implications of multimodal anthropology in working with women-oriented fan culture communities concerned with popular online feminism in China by highlighting their complicity and disruption of the dominant structures.
Paper long abstract
How can multimodal anthropology engage with media fandom in ways that creatively address bad habitus in both the fields and their tools? In contemporary China, popular media and media fan cultures are key sites of cultural production. Emergent “fandom publics” (Zhang, 2016) are one of the few sites for public expression under severe censorship. They are also sites of expansive and intensive consumption, blurring distinctions between what Jenkins (1992) calls “interpretive audiences” and what Sugihartati (2020) calls cultural “prosumers (producer-consumers)”.
This paper proposes “fandom” as a keyword for critical anthropology of multimodal worlds in which tools and platforms enable subversive gender relations as well as complicity in dominant valuations of ethnicity, sexuality, class, and rurality. It looks at the case of women-oriented mobile game fandoms in China, centering around gender politics and negotiations of queerness in these fan communities. It asks how these fans connect to popular feminist movements in China that are censored online and prohibited in physical spaces. What kind of “feminist” politics are produced when fans seek empowerment through consumerism and gender equality through prosumption? And finally, what forms of ethnographic participation, observation or collaborations can emerge in working with fandoms?
Paper short abstract
This paper shares the experience of a creative research residency in collaborative audiovisual anthropology designed to renew our ethnographic engagement. It focuses on creating collaborative audiovisual works and cultivating protective and caring spaces within neoliberal academic settings.
Paper long abstract
This paper shares the experience of a creative research residency in collaborative audiovisual anthropology. Its first edition, titled “Woman, Land, and Memory” and coordinated by Andrea Chamorro Pérez (University Tarapacá), Doris Aguilera Santos (Aymara Association Chacha Warmi), and myself (University of Los Lagos), took place in 2024 in Arica, Northern Chile.
The residency is designed to creatively address the challenges of limited time and resources in pursuing meaningful collaborative audiovisual practice within neoliberal academia. Andrea and her team (from the northernmost university in Chile) and I with mine (from the southernmost anthropology department) worked intensively for about 15 days with communities we have longstanding connections to, producing an audiovisual piece intended for both academic and non-academic audiences. The resulting work belongs collectively to the organization and to us.
Each year, one team will have a longstanding connection with the protagonists, while for the other, the film project will mark the first collaboration with them. We aim to foster diverse, situated perspectives, “speaking nearby” (Trinh T. Minh-Ha, 1989) the protagonists. The residency, as a field device, challenges our ethnographic skills while highlighting the sympoietic (Donna Haraway, 2016) nature of life, fieldwork, and audiovisual creation. Our goal is to renew and expand our ethnographic engagement, creating a caring space within academia for ourselves and the people we work with—casting circles of care that protect us from our insalubrious milieu without isolating us from the work to be done (Isabelle Stengers, 2018).