Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Pia Olsson
(University of Helsinki)
Tiina Suopajärvi (University of Oulu)
Maryam Adjam (Uppsala University)
Jenni Rinne (University of Oulu)
Send message to Convenors
- 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:
The paper considers creative writing workshops as affective methodologies and analyses such workshops as affective assemblages. We draw attention to the collective and transformative potentials of creative writing workshops as affective research processes.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, the authors will describe and reflect on their experiences with planning, facilitating, and analyzing creative writing workshops.
Drawing on various traditions of creative writing from the New Critical Scandinavian tradition (Llambías, Ringgaard) to therapeutic writing (Bolton, McNichol) and writing the personal (Probyn), we argue for the creative writing workshop as an affective method. Using this method, we have worked with intangible and tabooed subjects in relation to e.g., students under COVID19 lockdown, young women victimized by digital assault, and high school students vulnerable to stress.
We view the creative writing workshop as an affective assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari) that includes bodies, texts, technologies, identities, and more. Approaching the writing workshop as an affective assemblage allows us to engage in modes of analysis that can grasp the collective dynamics, tensions, and potentials of the group workshops. We consider the therapeutic and political potentials of writing groups for vulnerable or marginalized people, arguing for their ability to perform affective modulations in individuals and in broader situated or abstract assemblages.
This leads us to discuss an ethics of transformation, pointing to how creative writing workshops as affective assemblages emerge and develop between people, interfaces, etc., and how different identities and positions come into play, calling for analysis and ethical thinking that is emerging from and emerged in the research process itself.
Paper short abstract:
In this talk, I will present creative methods I developed for an ethnographic investigation on the phenomenon of intimacy in contemporary dance: somatic workshops and research-creation allowed me to grasp/share affects with dancers; autoethnography and video-essay to transmit/disseminate them.
Paper long abstract:
Running an investigation on the phenomenon of intimacy in contemporary dance (in Montreal, Paris and Dakar), I’ve been looking for the right methodology to investigate sensoriality in dance. Convinced by the potential of art-based practices to access the affective dimension, I carved a method based on workshops to explore intimate experience through somatic exercises. A research-creation emerged from one of my fieldwork’s encounters with a Senegalese contemporary dancer. In our duet Dereskina, we address the question of appropriation of another sensorial culture through movement. Made of “der” (skin in wolof) and “skin”, Dereskina expresses an intimate encounter through dance. We experimented the way dance enables to taste another way of moving, sensing and inhabiting the world. Drawing on this duet, I will show how co-creation allows to enter in another gestural, emotional and artistic language. The research-creation generated an intimacy that also brought us to face our different conceptions about contemporary dance, dramaturgy and performance. Dancing myself allows me to share the sensitive life of dancers and consequently, ask accurate questions. But how can I give account of this affective dimension through words, avoiding epistemic violence of otherness' representation within ethnographic accounts? In this talk, I will also address the issue of representation. What are the potentials of new formats such as video-essay to give account of the sensorial intimate experience? (Vionnet and Becholey Besson 2020) I will stress on autoethnography to transmit fieldwork’s affectiveness, responding to the question of how to write about/with affects (Vionnet and Ingold 2018).
Paper short abstract:
My presentation discusses a method for embodied research in participant observation. Through the lens of assemblage, which maps different nods in an affective sensescape and the flows in and in between these nods, the researcher becomes plugged into the very assemblage she wishes to study.
Paper long abstract:
My PhD project, Calling out, sensing in, is an ethnomusicological study on women's emotional sensations when singing kulning - an all-female tradition of herding calling. I am interested in what happens when something is felt and what constitutes emotional events. The aim is to elucidate what, and how emotional sensations are felt when singing kulning. The study uses ethnographic methods such as participant observation and different techniques of interviewing. A key approach here is that the participation also means participate body-emotionally. In traditional (male) stances on epistemology and scientifically correct ways to conduct research, the researcher should be emotionally neutral and disembodied. Firstly, I think that the idea of a disembodied researcher is a delusion; bodies hold agency in knowing.
Secondly, I will argue that when affective and emotional sensations are studied, the researcher should allow her/himself to know and understand through bodily, sensory states. How else could we understand the emotional encounters which we study if the process of knowing is not also embodied?
I will use the concept of assemblage to map a sensescape in which I, the researcher, am plugged-into. I will do this mapping using fieldnotes as assemblage, describing what happens both during the act of singing kulning, both what happens in, or to, the singer and in/to me as a researcher with many "I's", what produces an affective event. My presentation will discuss assemblage as a method of embodied research, and a possible way to take assemblage into analyses and transcriptions.
Paper short abstract:
Blood donation raises strong affects both for researcher and donnors. Sharing corporeal and affective experience of blood donation with actors allows a depper understanding of the topic and fielwork. Go along interviews and videos are an attempt to report the affective part of blood donation.
Paper long abstract:
The anthropologist who works on blood and the reasons for (not) donating it has an interest in combining her status of researcher with that of blood donor in order to gain legitimacy with actors in the field. In Belgium, where donation is voluntary and unpaid, donors and professionals « collaborate » in order to collect blood for therapeutic purposes. The technical collection process should be accompanied by a pleasant donation experience, in a context that exacerbates or provokes certain affects: fear, pain, shame, joy, boredom, disgust, ...
As a donor, sharing a similar bodily experience with actors I work with becomes a means of relating to, interpreting , comparing, ... My own emotions become a working tool and emotions in context of blood donation, an object of study. Indeed, the terror that giving blood inspired me at the first allows me to adapt to strong emotions that the donors sometimes have, to understand it and to accompany these affects.
The sensitive and affective experience of blood donation is difficult to share or reproduce. That is why I seek new ways to "report" for these sensitive materials, as the written text (usually preferred by anthropologist) unsatisfactorily renders it. The association of video with subjects’ comments on their experience (by go-along interview) or a posteriori by watching the video is an attempt to overcome this difficulty.
For this communication, I propose one commented video of a plasma donation after a short introduction to my thesis work about blood donation in Liège (Belgium).