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Paper short abstract

"Auto-ethnographic co-creative collage" is introduced to research, analyse and represent people's interepretative framework on their experience of personal, moral and social disruption, in the context of Traumatic Brain Injury, in Rome.

Paper long abstract

This paper is based on research conducted in Rome on the lived experience of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), a non-degenerative injury to the brain caused by an external force. The research is grounded on my experience of TBI, caused by a road accident, in 2005, in Rome. Yet, in the Italian capital city, I worked with twelve people who had experienced a TBI, and who were willing to embark in a collaborative journey of self-discovery on their life-changing experience. To explore how people negotiate their corporeality, socio-moral relationships, sense of self and identity, and imagination, following disruption, research interlocutors and I developed a set of innovative auto-ethnographic co-creative methods, “Auto-ethnographic Dialogue”.

This paper focuses on one such method, “Auto-ethnographic Co-creative Collage”. Through a detailed analysis of the process and resulting artistic outputs, the paper argues that this method created an intersubjective ethnographic field for the emergence of the interlocutors' ways of making sense of their experiences of disruption. Intersubjective, here, refers to interactions between people (including modalities of the self), places and objects. The seemingly serendipitous selection and juxtaposition of images and entanglement of agency fostered the development of novel understandings, perceptions, and interpretive frameworks, challenging existing biomedical models of TBI.

Yet collage poses the problem of how to work with images in Anthropology . Experimenting with this technique directly I propose its use as a form of analysis, interpretation, representation...