Paper short abstract:

This paper explores options for an anthropology of engagement. I am asking, how digital tools can support ethnographic inventions of culture, help to translate our knowledge for a broader audience, and bring order into the vast archives of artifacts, as well as recorded and written sources.

Paper long abstract:

From Fridays for Futures to Citizen Science Games: All over the world we see how social media can be used as tools of empowerment, engagement and resistance, as modes of knowledge production and distribution. We also see that rules of knowledge-making are changing, that new phenomena are appearing on the scene, all within new intra-actions (Karen Barad) of hitherto invisible actors. What role, options and possibilities have anthropologists to explore and nurture contemporary debates on what knowledge production means? How can these new modes and tools support our ethnographic “inventions of culture” (Roy Wagner), even help us to bring order into the vast archives of artifacts, as well as recorded and written sources?

To explore the options of our discipline, we need to understand how digital gadgets work, and what informatic code and media actually do, when in action. Taking these aspects as a starting point, I want to discuss future options and bring the contemporary in resonance with the origins of European folklore studies in the 19th and 20th century, where citizen scientists were seen and widely used as lay experts and supportive researchers for broader empirical research projects. These historic enterprises come close to today’s visions and realizations of citizen science. In discussing the scope of the observed correlations I want to end my preliminary sketch for a new research project by reflecting how the three-cornered constellation (Laura Nader) of citizens, science and knowledge is re-negotiated in the digital era.