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Paper short abstract

Much ethnographic work relies on narrative as ways to represent research. Text and film, are time-bound: unfolding with each sentence, or sequence. This paper uses specific collage examples to explore and discuss how collage challenges regimes of representation to create other spaces of enunciation.

Paper long abstract

Much ethnographic work relies on storytelling and narrative as ways to represent experiences, histories and understandings. In text as well as film, these forms are bound to time, as they unfold with each sentence, or sequence. By contrast, images present other onto-epistemological commitments that are necessarily non-linear. Beyond the surface imagination of collage, the use of juxtaposition and fragmentation as discursive techniques are at once destructive and productive: this is the paradox of collage (and the trickster nature). This paper uses specific collage examples in the data generation, analysis and representation phases of research to explore and discuss how collage not only challenges regimes of representation, but also provides pathways to create work that pierces the constructedness and univocity of traditional narratives. Not only can the pieces be understood in any order, but they also overlap. Rather than striving for finite understandings, or to achieve “mastery,” collage creates spaces for play, a structural possibility for understanding something about the “spaces of enunciation” that might be possible.

We will explore some of the discursive strategies of collage, which are rooted in ambiguity about any sense of completeness. Instead, it is a form of representation whose hallmarks are it’s calling of attention to its own construction, and its refusal to bridge the gaps between its pieces. Collage is a form never certain of being whole, always broken but held together. What are some of the ways to tease out some of the underexplored potential of this broken frame for research?