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- Convenors:
-
Kim Silow Kallenberg
(Södertörn University)
Jenny Ingridsdotter (Umeå University)
Jenni Rinne (University of Oulu)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Disciplinary and methodological discussions:
- Location:
- Aula 15
- Sessions:
- Monday 15 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
We invite papers that use imaginative and creative methods to ethnographic inquiries as well as to ethnographic writing. This includes using fiction as a reflective tool in transmitting field experiences, as well as collaborative, experimental and embodied ways of doing fieldwork.
Long Abstract:
Creativity is an integral part of the ethnographic practice. Conceptions such as 'thick descriptions' and 'faction' suggests that creative approaches are part of a longer tradition that problematize the division between facts and fiction, reason and affect, as well as objectivity and subjectivity in ethnographic practice. Alternative methodologies as well as mixed genres and other creative approaches, helps us to multiply our views on the world, ourselves as researchers, as well as on our research subjects.
For this panel we invite papers that use imaginative and creative methods to ethnographic inquiries as well as to ethnographic writing. This includes using fiction as a reflective tool as well as a way of transmitting field experiences. Further, it also includes collaborative, experimental and embodied ways of doing fieldwork.
Creative methods and genres can be means to highlight social complexities that are excluded or simplified in more traditional scholarly texts and research processes. We would like to discuss methods and concepts such as ethnographic fiction, dirty ethnography, ethnographic film making, the using of drawings and art in ethnographic work, as well as the inspiration one can get from reading fiction, listening to music or in other ways being creative in the ethnographic research processes.
We suggest that creativity is essential both for gaining knowledge about a field of research and for communicating research results, both in- and outside of academia, and we encourage contributions from ethnographers who uses experimental methods and research dissemination strategies in their works.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 15 April, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Based on a project in Austria, where a valley was contaminated by an environmental scandal, this contribution discusses how the cooperation of art and ethnography in the form of a co-production can expand both the increase in knowledge compared to classical fieldwork and formats of representation.
Paper long abstract:
In the course of the emergence of the research format of "artistic research", the merging of art and ethnography in concrete research projects has further advanced the debate on the possibility of transdisciplinarity.
In the project SELFIES IM GÖRTSCHITZTAL (EU-Creative Europe) sound artists, ethnographers, and a photographer explored the Görtschitztal valley in the south of Austria, which had become famous due to an environmental scandal. One of the research concerns was to eliminate the invisibility of the poison HCB and to make audible the voices of the valley's inhabitants regarding the ecological disaster. Firstly, classical ethnographic methods such as field surveys, participant observations, and a form of photo interview via selfies developed specifically for the project context were used, which significantly contributed to the self-empowerment of the interviewees. Secondly, the participating artists worked with photography or created sound collages based on ethnographically collected audio materials.
The surveys were linked in a dialogical process and the results of the co-production were presented in a joint exhibition. The arrangement of the objects and photographs reproduced the valley in miniature. In this way, the so-called 'Poison Valley' could be "imagined" and experienced in a new way. This contribution reflects the cognitive potential of this form of convergence of art and ethnography and shows how an expanded knowledge of social (everyday) worlds can be generated, represented, and imparted by means of experimental procedures - which transcend disciplinary boundaries and are interconnected at different levels (data collection, evaluation, and representation).
Paper short abstract:
This paper is part of my ongoing PhD research on the Finnish kink community. I will discuss how affect and personal experience can be conveyed in academic research through creative writing.
Paper long abstract:
In my research on kinky sexuality, I am interested especially in the affect of shame: the ways shame is both a source of fear and loneliness but also a needed ingredient of kink that creates excitement. In this presentation I shall explore the possibilities of using fictional narrative in conveying this affect in an academic context.
In my PhD dissertation I am researching the Finnish kink community and what it means to be kinky in the non-kinky, i.e. vanilla, world. My main research material is query answers. These writings by kinky identified individuals convey some important points and perspectives to the kink phenomenon. In addition to this, I have myself been a kink community member and therefore have experience on the same issues that appear on these writings.
To reach the interface between my research material and my own knowledge, I have decided to create fact based fictional narratives. This way I can also be respectful to the individuals who answered my query, as well as utilize my own experience without turning to autoethnography. Through fiction it is possible to depict scenarios from a kinky everyday life, to engage the reader by making the research topic more tangible, and to convey affect that is attached to the individuals' experiences. In this presentation I will discuss the factors why I turned to creative writing in addition to the query answers and why it is a useful method in my ethnography.
Paper short abstract:
Art probing is a way to use art as a creative speculative method and as an instrument of evocation. I have used it combined with ethnographic research and together with various stakeholders. I will present my art probing with Volvo Cars and in a recent research project.
Paper long abstract:
Art probing is a way to use art as a creative speculative method and as an instrument of evocation. I have used it combined with ethnographic research and together with various stakeholders. I will present my art probing with Volvo Cars and in a recent research project.
In a collaboration with Volvo Cars I developed Sparks (2017-2018), which is a series of short audio-visual evocations. The aim was to use art probing as part of workshops, discussions, and design projects. It was used to spark imaginations about automotive futures, and social as well as environmental dimensions of mobility. Sparks was produced as part of the research project Human Expectations and Experiences of Autonomous Driving (HEAD), led by the DUX (Digital User Experience) Development Center at Volvo Cars in collaboration with Halmstad University. Sparks was also used to promote lateral thinking and to provoke affective dimensions related to mobility and the automotive.
As part of the presentation I will also present and discuss an ongoing art probing project called The Mundania Files. It is used as part of the research project Connected Homes and Distant Infrastructures. By using video, sound and electronic music I further develop creative methods to extend my methodological toolbox when researching complex and ungraspable infrastructures and people's experiences of domestic technologies and elemental media.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will focus on two experimental methods, 'mapping' and the use of fiction, applied in my dissertation project about power structures in contemporary psychiatric care.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I will discuss two experimental methods applied in my dissertation project concerning psychiatric care units. One of these methods is 'mapping', in which research participants (staff and patients) have drawn maps of the care unit where the field study was undertaken, followed by them describing their thoughts behind the drawings. Psychiatric care is an arena of both direct and subtle power relations, and in my presentation I will emphasise how the ethnographer can gain knowledge of power with mapping as method. Also, I will discuss fiction as an analytical tool for understanding psychiatry. Using the movie One Flew Ower the Cuckoo´s Nest as an example, I will highlight how fiction has a central role in our cultural understanding of psychiatry, and how fiction is therefore something that the ethnographer needs to relate to in the process of writing.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses ethnographic fiction as a creative scientific genre based in ethnographic knowledge. Most emphasis will be placed upon our own examples and will be drawn from our own experience of writing ethnographic fiction based on our work in migration studies and institutional ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the reciprocal relationship between ethnography and the arts. We will discuss ethnographic fiction as a creative scientific genre based in ethnographic knowledge. This genre can be a means to highlight social complexities that are excluded or simplified in more traditional scholarly texts.
Our discussion highlights some important theoretical contributions to this field such as Clifford Geertz 'thick descriptions' and 'faction', suggesting that ethnographic fiction is part of a longer tradition that problematize the division between facts and fiction, reason and affect, as well as objectivity and subjectivity. Qualitative research in general, and ethnographic research in particular, would be impossible without an active research subject that thinks, feels and engages with its field.
Most emphasis will be placed upon our own examples and will be drawn from our own experience of writing ethnographic fiction based on our work in migration studies and institutional ethnography. We intend to discuss the potentiality of this form of writing as well as how knowledge production can draw upon music and literature. We suggest that ethnographic fiction and a creative approach to writing and reading can serve as an alternative way to produce and communicate knowledge, as well as to reach new audiences and to help establish the importance of ethnographic work also outside of academia.
Paper short abstract:
What are the ties that bind educational background and occupation together when ethnologists work outside of academia? This paper tracks the affinities that can be established between ethnological methods or epistemologies, and the everyday work in museums, consultancies and public administration
Paper long abstract:
What is the use of ethnological skills and knowledge when moving outside of academia? Akin to many disciplines within cultural studies and the humanities, an education in ethnology has many potential areas of application, but few obvious ones. Since the access to clear-cut career paths associated with a degree in ethnology is limited, students who do not pursue an academic career following graduation often have to find their own way upon entering the labor market. What constitutes "ethnological" work is therefore a question of personal orientation, which in turn can lead to many different destinations. Translating the educational background to fit into organizations and workplaces operating in accordance with epistemological foundations contrary to those found within the discipline, calls for creativity and flexibility. Sometimes this transformation can make it hard to discern which ties bind education and occupation together.
The paper is based on interviews with twenty-four ethnology graduates working in museums and archives, as public officials and as consultants in the private sector, looking to how their educational background shapes skill, knowledge and self-image in relationship to professional life. I argue that tracking ethnological associations at work is not primarily a question of identity, but one of affinity. Affinity denotes kinship, though not of the genetic kind. Thus, it can take on multiple forms and be traced in several ways - such as through places, problems and practices. This approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of how ethnological methods and associations change when moving through unfamiliar terrain.
Paper short abstract:
We discuss creative writing to collectively approach a subjects that provoke simultaneous feelings of pain, attachment and detachment: the #metoo campaign as it took form in the Swedish context late 2017. We use personal writing to start investigating feminist responses to the #metoo campaign.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation discusses creative writing and feminist storytelling (Richardson 1994; Lykke 2014) as a way of collectively approaching subjects that provoke simultaneous feelings of pain, attachment and detachment. Focus is on the #metoo campaign as it took form in the Swedish context during the autumn of 2017. We: the authors of this presentation, shared a wish to engage in the responses to the #metoo campaign in Sweden, and the initial discussions concerned the possibility to write about feminist responses to this campaign. Saying this, suggestions on potential theoretical frameworks and collection of material did not evoke an obvious continuation; rather, we started to talk about our own feelings for the #metoo campaign. In order to explore what these feelings stand for, and whether they could make way into discussing the #metoo campaign more thoroughly, we decided to pursue creative writing exercises during the autumn of 2018. In this paper, we reflect on and discuss this process and the possible contributions that it can make to our academic writing.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation takes the form of a short poetry reading and an short audiovisual film connected to my (auto)ethnographic work on intersectional spatiality. The presentation explore questions connected to memory, place, class, gender, and age.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation takes the form of a short poetry reading and an short audiovisual film connected to my (auto)ethnographic work on intersectional spatiality. Using creative writing in the poetry form as well as editing a film, where I use family photographs, new filmed material, my own memories, voice and childhood health card, as well as my brother´s memories and voice, the presentation explore questions connected to memory, place, class, gender, and age.
I argue, that the same neighborhood can cause experiences of feeling stuck or wanting to stay put, and the neighborhood where you grow up can stay within you even if you move away. In the research project I return to my childhood's working-class neighborhood as a researcher and discuss belonging (Yuval-Davis 2006) and (im)mobility (Cresswell 2010), while utilizing creative research methodologies.
In the film as well as poetry reading, theory, (moving) images, sound and story work together as a collaborative engagement and the aim is to create bridges between analytical, practical and aesthetic modes of inquiry and representation. Following Holman Jones (2016), both theory, images, memories and stories are languages for thinking with and through, asking questions about, and acting on.