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- Convenors:
-
Pia Olsson
(University of Helsinki)
Tiina Suopajärvi (University of Oulu)
Maryam Adjam (Uppsala University)
Jenni Rinne (University of Oulu)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Bodies, Affects, Senses, Emotions
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
To do research is an affective process. The affects and emotions are acting both in the experiences of the researcher and those sharing their lives with the research. In this panel, we invite you to discuss how to capture the ways affects are materialized throughout the research process.
Long Abstract:
To do research is an affective process. Affects and emotions are acting both in the experiences of the researcher and the research participants. Affects are influential in the planning, fieldworking, writing or otherwise documenting our findings but also in the way researchers experience academic life. Affect emplaces and displaces research. It embodies and yet lacks a body. How then to capture how it is materialized throughout the research process?
This panel and workshop focuses on how imaginative and creative ethnographic approaches can be used in making visible the role of affect in the research process: What methodological tools do we have to approach affect in research? How might they break the research practices we are used to? How is the affective turn changing the ways of doing research; of seeing, sensing, analysing and expressing research? How is it possible to capture affect in different kind of research material? How and which affects are allowed to become actors in our research processes and in communicating our research results?
We welcome papers and documentations that use imaginative and creative approaches to study and capture affect as experience in the research process. This includes different ethnographic practices such as visual, performative, poetic, artistic expression or creative ways of reading already existing sources. You are also free to choose the format of your presentation yourself.
During the workshop we want to involve the participants to reflect upon the affects arousing from each others' presentations. The guidelines for this will be circulated later.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how visual and poetic aspects of bricolage as method can be used in mapping absence. Focusing on the memoryscapes emerging in-between the tangible and the sensed, I analyze how absence is evoked in the temporary constellations memories of the missing assemble.
Paper long abstract:
Reflecting on the ways that absence is evoked in the place through the act of remembrance, this paper outlines the convergence between memory regimes and embodied memory practices in the context of state sanctioned violence. Focusing on hidden and deserted graveyards for the missing, political dissidents victims of state sanctioned violence in the Middle East during the 1980’s, the analysis investigates the notion of absence in relation to the memories of the missing. Being a battlefield of traces left and erased, traces speaking and mute, these sites both encapsulate different and overlapping historical representations of the past, the memory politics articulated through these representations, as well as evoking a space of embodied memories bringing the missing to the fore as presence-absence. Hence the act of remembrance at these sites isn’t only an act of memorialization, but also enacting the memory of the missing as an experience of being missed, an experience of an entirety lacking, embodying a history of absences. In order to map the memoryscapes emerging in-between the tangible and the sensed, and by focusing on the visual and poetic aspects of bricolage as method, this paper investigates how absence is sensed and evoked through the temporary constellations memories assemble in the place.
Paper short abstract:
In my presentation I will explain the methodological usage of the documentary films "Not to judge" (2017) and "The Fear" (2020), both co-created by me, for affectively-oriented ethnographic research conducted in the region of Subcarpathia and focused on the problem of long lasting collective guilt
Paper long abstract:
In my presentation I will explain the methodological and imaginative use of the documentary film "Not to Judge" (2017), co-created by me, for affectively-oriented ethnographic research. I will discuss how this film broke the long lasting conspiracy of silence on the killings in Dębrzyna forest that happened in the years after WW II and I will explain how the public screening and discussions on this film initiated the dialogue and encouraged at least some members of the local community to testify on what actually had happened in the forest. Discussing the cognitive impact of the first film on ethnographic research I will present short videos taken from the second film "The Fear" (2020), also co-created by me, and revealing strong affects and emotions of interviewed social actors. Although those emotions cannot be textually captured they are materialized in gestures recorded in the film thus enabling better understanding of their role in the process of remembering about killings and of their importance throughout the whole research process.
Paper short abstract:
Based on Ling Hon Lam’s conceptualization of emotion as spatial (2018) and previous psychogeographical work that has served as ethnography, I would like to propose a fictionalized reading of Tirana’s development from settlement to city.
Paper long abstract:
Based on Ling Hon Lam’s conceptualization of emotion as spatial (2018) and previous psychogeographical work that has served as ethnography, I would like to propose a fictionalized reading of Tirana’s development from settlement to city. Starting off from walks that send one through the oldest streets of the Albanian capital, I make the effort to attune to the thought processes of its oldest inhabitants. Making reference to a series of authors that have explored the material via their affectivities, such as Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things, I want to fictionalize knowledge that derives from such analysis. Family relations, good neighboring practices, views of the urban future and moments of rest and joy are all present in the surviving affective environment of the urban.
I will make use of photography and other visual material, to take the listener back in time.
Paper short abstract:
How does an ethnographic process change when face-to-face discussions happen online? With the sensitive topic on academic affects, a mutual trust is needed. We will focus on the ways trust becomes generated in technically defined space and how affect theory participates in analysing this becoming.
Paper long abstract:
In the ongoing project on ‘Ethnography of Academic affects’ our aim is to understand how research strategies affect the ways academic professionals experience their work in Finnish universities. When designing the project, our aim was to conduct ethnography by interviewing and observing both in the corridors of universities and in social media. One of our designed methods were “learning cafés” that are based on peer discussions about everyday life and emotions in the academic world. During autumn 2020, the covid-19 changed our plan to arrange these cafés as physical meeting places for researchers, drastically. So we organized these get-togethers online in Zoom.
In our presentation, we will analyse how the methodological change from offline to online encounters influences both the movements of affects and our ethnographic process of participant observation and our analyses. We do this through opening the process of our shared data sessions on the recorded Zoom-cafés where we analyse how mutual trust becomes generated in the discussions. Trust is crucial since the topic of emotions and affects in academia is quite sensitive, and we will especially consider the affordances of this particular technology in the generation of trust. By following Sara Ahmed’s (2004) idea on affect as movements and as agents, we further discuss the “doings” of affects in a shared virtual space that is entangled with our separate material embodied places. Finally, we reflect on whether the process of analysing affects will orient our research to a new direction.
Paper short abstract:
My research on knowledge production around the notion of migration in Greece will be presented through sounds and voices.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I would like to express sonically through voice recordings or possibly other media my anger and frustration towards the European Union politics in relation to migration as I am doing my research on the knowledge production around the notion of migration in Greece. I will be questioning these emotions through various contexts in which they appear and thus use them as a perspective that helps to understand the situatedness of my research.