Contribution short abstract:

My presentation will describe my efforts to produce an intimate ethnography (Waterston and Rylko-Bauer 2008) of the Spanish Civil War through an assemblage of materials from archival photos, postcards, forensic and state documents.

Contribution long abstract:

A decade ago, I began a project to research and write about the historical memory movement in Spain – a grass roots movements initiated by victims of the Franco regime. It was a movement in which I had very personal stakes as the daughter of refugees from the Franco dictatorship. I conceptualized my approach as an “intimate ethnography” after Waterston and Rylko-Bauer (2008), neither memoir nor history, but rather the pursuit of an historical reality as seen through a personal lens. My presentation will describe my efforts to write from the shards, silences, clues, and erasures that were the results of my own attempts to unravel the disappearance and traffic in my grandfather’s body. I will present my efforts to both inhabit and craft a narrative form that remains true to my frustrations, uncertainty, and fluctuation in subjectivity as granddaughter and ethnographer. I offer an unwriting of a dark family history via an assemblage of visual materials, archival and family photographs, postcards, stories, forensic, and state documents. And I reflect on what this unvarnished and decidedly fragmentary material archive allows me to express about the multifaceted and emotional dimension of a personal journey that I share with so many others descendants of this terrifying past.

Contribution short abstract:

Employing creative, semi-fictionalised, fragmented storytelling, this paper explores the moral ambiguities of representing lives shaped by violence. Drawing on fieldwork in Rio’s Vidigal favela, it examines how 'unwriting' ethnography can ethically narrate lives without reducing them to spectacle.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper explores the moral ambiguities and narrative challenges of ethnographically representing lives shaped by systemic inequalities and violent governance. Anchored in my fieldwork in Vidigal, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, the paper examines the life and choices of B, a former housemate who tragically took his own life after committing an act that irrevocably altered his existence and those around him. B’s story reveals the intersection of structural violence, precarious aspirations, and deeply personal struggles to achieve a better life (melhorar de vida) within constrained fields of possibility.

Through fragmented narratives and reflective storytelling, I interrogate how B’s life and death challenge conventional anthropological approaches to representation. Drawing on Veena Das’s notion of the ordinary, I explore how B’s decisions, including his final one, made sense within his moral framework and ordinary aspirations for stability and dignity. At the same time, the story unsettles dominant moral codes by foregrounding how systemic neglect and inequality render choices that are unthinkable to many as entirely conceivable to others.

By “unwriting” conventional ethnographic representations, this paper embraces the fragmented and nonlinear nature of human experience. It reflects on the ethics of representing lives where agency, precarity, and morality intertwine in complex ways. It asks how we, as ethnographers, can ethically narrate lives marked by suffering, resilience, and irrevocable loss without reducing them to spectacle or stereotype. Perhaps, this could be done through creative, generous, and semi-fictionalised storytelling.

Contribution short abstract:

“I sank my teeth into its fragrance. Not words, but dreams spilled forth,” I wrote in a poem about the heavenly scent of spring lilacs. Reflecting on that verse, I realized that smells, intertwined with the act of remembering, can evoke a daydream state through their ephemerality and non-verbality.

Contribution long abstract:

This presentation invites ethnographers to explore poetic methods for keeping field diaries, particularly regarding research topics that don’t narrate themselves easily. While not dismissing the ancient craft of writing or harboring a priori hostility toward language, the presentation reflects on and values the attempts to undermine the official structures of academic writing to create space for affective ways of knowing, sensing, and attuning to the world. Drawing from ethnographic research on olfactory affect and memory among elderly Turkish and Kurdish migrant women in Berlin, as well as my own olfactory plant diary, this presentation demonstrates how novel perspectives on the social lives of smells can emerge. These perspectives move beyond well-trodden discussions of smell’s role in othering, urban planning, and power structures.

First, I will introduce the olfactory plant diary and outline my intentions in keeping it. Diaries—whether written by a literary figure (Woolf, 2003) or an ethnographer in a drawing format (Taussig, 2011)—are experiential forms where one can loosen intellectual boundaries, allowing unexpected ideas to take root. Along this vein, I will further highlight how the use of smells creates a descriptive atmosphere that represents the almost existential exhaustion felt by participants—a culmination of racism, backbreaking working conditions, and embodied longing. Finally, I will address methodological pursuits that bridge the gap between the diary and the field. Thus, I seek to present the ways to find connective tissues between poetry and sensory methodologies through fragmented narratives of smell stories of migrants.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper combines fragmentary qualitative field observations buried in quantitative biological recording datasets into found poetic artefacts to explore how they might challenge ideas of scientific objectivity and resurface the lived textures of interspecies encounters that give rise to "data".

Contribution long abstract:

This paper draws interspecies stories from qualitative fragments in large quantitative datasets, specifically those of the UK’s National Biodiversity Network, where sightings of nonhumans are meticulously recorded. It might be tempting to say that such datasets “thin out” the rich, embodied, sensory encounter between people and animals. The writing style of this data table does everything it can to fix certain kinds of facts and not others – to quantify the encounter and remove all sense of its quality. The literary conventions of the genre of biodiversity spreadsheets remove the modality of the encounter between human and nonhuman: the voice of the author is removed, and the text attempts to disappear as such, striving to achieve a state of pure information without writerly artifice. However, between the cracks of the numerical inputs are spaces for qualitative comments – a column titled “Occurrence Remarks” which are included in the database but generally ignored in analysis. This paper takes these fragments of subjectivity to “unwrite” their context that strives above all for objectivity: it approaches them as found poetic objects as the voices of different biological recorders come together by accident to produce polyvocal texts. Using different combinations of filters to read athwart the spreadsheet, I examine these fragmentary poetic accidents as means to write lively texture back into big datasets, to complicate the forms of knowledge they carry and represent: what stories do spreadsheets tell, despite themselves, and what can they teach us about living alongside other beings?

Contribution short abstract:

An anthropologist walks into a hairdressing salon. A hairdresser rages about cultural rights. A mirror witnesses an unravelling scene, exposing heightened emotions, hinting at hidden ones. Academic attempts at meaning-making and dissemination go through many stages. Because. Words. Falter…. Fail….

Contribution long abstract:

Life, and thus anthropological fieldwork, is a multi-sensory experience. Different sensations occur simultaneously with emotions, memories and imaginings in a series of fragmentary episodes that may or may not be connected. When interacting with others, inner lifeworlds may contradict external presentation, and we sometimes grasp for meanings that seem to float just out of reach. Yet this rarely causes an existential crisis because we make meaning primarily through experience—embodiment and intersubjectivity. However, re-enactment of fieldwork experience is almost exclusively through the act of writing—linear sentences, complete paragraphs and logical argument—and when trying to capture embodied experience through lexical communication, ontology and epistemology sometimes collide. This paper explores one ethnographic encounter: a half-hour appointment between a hairdresser, who is angry and upset by a story she heard, six weeks previously, about alleged ‘cultural rights’, and an anthropologist on a routine visit to a hairdresser (a chore to be ticked off on a ‘non-research day’), who is bamboozled by her own simultaneous sensations, emotions and cognitions, and a very large mirror that reflects the scene as actors and audience become one and the same. On leaving the field I return again and again to my memory of that ethnographic moment, memories that subtly change with each act of storytelling, as I attempt different ways to explain, analyse and disseminate anthropological knowledge. The failure of writing, experiments with unwriting through performance and storytelling, and the slog of multiple re-writes, become a Beckettian exposé of try again, fail again, fail better.

Contribution short abstract:

The patchwork quilt is illustrative of the stream of women’s time, fractured, snatched and held in scraps. How can we employ this way of writing research, assembling partial narratives to challenge the masculine paradigm of academic writing and better represent the tangible nature of craft knowledge

Contribution long abstract:

The patchwork quilt is a material object constructed from the fragments, remnants and scraps of everyday life. As a craft practice, it is organised around many centres, put down, picked back up, returned to at a later date or forgotten about. It is partial and interrupted, temporally marked by the meander of life, faded from use, creased from being folded away.

Writing about this tactile practice after long-term ethnographic research within the quilting community demands an approach that reflects the process of making, collecting and construction. Hence, I ask how can the patchwork quilt be used as a metaphor and mode of writing? Inquiring as to how academic writing can incorporate this notion of the verbal-quilt, a stylistic use of scraps arranged in cunning irregularity to create patterns. I propose that an anthropological enquiry into women’s everyday experience can be better understood if we embrace the assemblage of partiality, offcuts from a larger expanse of life/fabric. This temporal flow of women’s writing, short sections seamed together are fragments illuminating the nature of women’s time. In my fieldwork with quiltmakers in northwest England, I investigated how the bricolage of women’s collecting, saving and stitching constituted their everyday experience of being and living in the world. The quilt itself quickly became apparent as a tangible object of women’s self-narration. In response to this creative practice of world-making, I argue that there is a more creative/poetic way to write research, one constructed of patches, conflicted and contrasting narratives redolent of the patchwork quilt.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper discusses several creative projects and workshops that pushed the participants beyond the limits of textual representation. The metaphors of playing, stretching, and fermenting unpack the multifaceted relational dynamics that shaped specific practices of doing and undoing.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper reflects on several creative workshops organised in 2023, 2024 and 2024 that pushed the participants beyond the limits of textual representation. The metaphors of playing, stretching, and fermenting unpack the affective relational dynamics that shaped specific practices of doing and undoing. While ethnographic inquiry always requires flexibility and the ability to think on one’s’ feet, the multisensorial activities confronted the player-participants with out-of-the-ordinary procedures and methods, which forced them to experiment beyond familiar disciplinary practices and work with and along each other in new ways. Counterintuitively, the restrictive, structuring rules of the workshops produced a playful mindset that, as extensive feedback highlighted, was in most cases experienced as a welcome opportunity and challenge. The participants, transformed into ‘co-players’, were bound by sensorial directives and immersed in the exercises, which shaped their subjectivity and influenced the ways in which they came to know and interact with their surroundings. While the workshops were mostly welcomed as liberating experimentations, some critical comments alluded to important ethical considerations to be taken into account when designing unconventional ethnographic learning projects.

Contribution short abstract:

This presentation will work through an autoethnography of detainment and deportation at the end of my fieldwork in India. By moving through segments of spoken word and ethnopoetry, my presentation seeks to rely less on holistic sense-making and more on fragments that evoke liberation.

Contribution long abstract:

Dressed in only the rags that were given to me by jail guards, I sat alone on a wooden cot, locked in a detention centre in Delhi. I was in India conducting research on young Indian tourists and their mobility patterns. I was attempting to return home to Canada after the airways had re-opened, post-covid. Instead, I found myself in solitary confinement for nine days, and then in a cell with other detainees for an additional week.

Eventually I was put on a plane and deported.

Focusing on segments of spoken word and ethnopoetry this presentation elaborates on my experience of being detained and deported from my fieldsite (without any motivation or accusation). I recount the tale of what happened to me when writing was no longer a sufficient means to locate freedom. I will also discuss what I am doing today with the incongruences left behind. While detained, I used ethnography to keep my spirit alive. Now, after I have had time to process this experience, I turn once again to ethnography to liberate myself from the story, and the story from myself. Being an ethnographer in these circumstances felt like a cruel and ironic joke; today it may turn into a gift. After years of not speaking about this publicly, I am giving words to an ordeal that felt untellable, in the disconnected environment that very few people, and certainly even fewer ethnographers have the chance to be released from.

Contribution short abstract:

In this paper, I discuss my use of soliloquies for expressing experiences of aporia and haunting during cultural activism in post-East Prussian Poland. Soliloquies are part of an auto-ethnographic montage that captures different voices and roles as entangled anthropologist-cum-producer and citizen.

Contribution long abstract:

Soliloquies became a way for me to express my experiences of aporia and haunting being the founding director of a performing arts event in my fieldsite in post-East Prussian Poland. Aporia here describes a dilemma that evolved within enduring power relationships and unequal interdependencies, politics of value and claims to meaning-making. It emerged between my desire for a cultural activism that makes space for marginalized communities and that creates encounters between disjointed social groups, and the process of a gradual appropriation of the performing arts event by transnational stakeholders. I realized that my work as entangled anthropologist simultaneously countered this process of appropriation and facilitated it. Confronting this dilemma, I was haunted by the violent pasts of the area and standing on constantly shaking moral grounds.

My writing consists of an ethnographic analysis that is repeatedly disrupted and complemented by soliloquies, snippets of my returning interior dialogues since founding the cultural event. Soliloquies are thus part of an auto-ethnographic montage [Nielsen 2013] that captures my different roles as anthropologist-cum-producer, practitioner, observer, activist, academic, citizen. They add to the phenomenology of my embodied ambivalence, telling a story of disjuncture between internal, private expressions and outward manifestations [Irving 2011: 24] and of a vivid two-way knowledge exchange and translation. The auto-ethnographic montage captures the situated odds of producing a cultural event as German national in post-East Prussian Poland. It moves through external pressures, internalised loyalties, and power inequalities, in a situation marked by the seductiveness and responsibility that come with exceptional privilege.

Contribution short abstract:

We reflect on our process of creating a semi-fictional graphic narrative based on ethnographic research with hijras, an Indian community of transgendered ritual specialists. “Unwriting” academic arguments through illustration, we produced a form relatively easy to circulate outside academia.

Contribution long abstract:

Our paper reflects on our process of creating a semi-fictional graphic narrative based on ethnographic research with hijras, an Indian community of transgendered ritual specialists, and on “unwriting” academic theory and archival documents through illustration. Narrativizing queer identities in India is a fraught exercise, often reproducing a landscape of Orientalist tropes. In the colonial period, British anthropologists and police wrote prolifically on hijras, courtesans, thugs, and other supposedly “Criminal Tribes,” in genres ranging from forensic science to sensationalist fiction. Contemporary definitions of sexuality and gender emerge from this colonial legacy, so turning to the colonial archive to “recover lost voices” or publishing “hijra life histories” can inadvertently reproduce the terms of coloniality. Indeed, in recent years, hijra activists and their allies have turned to poetry, fiction, autoethnography and performance, precisely to contest the authority of the foreign “anthropological gaze.”

Inspired by the creative productions of transgender activists in India, as well as the impulse to examine the dialogic relationship been fiction and fact in the colonial archive, we created a graphic narrative about the history of Criminal Tribes legislation in India. Bringing together historical fragments and using the affordances of the comic genre, we staged hypothetical encounters between East India Company officials, hijras, Mughal emperors and upper-caste elites. Rather than draw directly on archival documents, we imagined the scenes of their production, creating composite characters and humorous dialogue. We are currently translating our 12-page comic into Tamil, exploring how alternative genres can facilitate more co-creation between anthropologists and their interlocutors.

Contribution short abstract:

The paper examines methodological challenges and opportunities in studying industrial ruins as ruinous postscapes in the city of Zagreb, Croatia. By integrating a multimethodological perspective, the presentation addresses how materiality informs our understanding of ruinous postscapes.

Contribution long abstract:

The paper examines methodological challenges and opportunities in studying industrial ruins as ruinous postscapes in the city of Zagreb, Croatia - spaces where material decay, preservation narratives, everyday experiences, and lifeworlds, along with urban planning and land development, intertwine. By integrating a multimethodological perspective from counter-mapping, walking through, and site-specific ethnography, the presentation addresses how materiality informs our understanding of ruinous postscapes.

The paper focuses on discussing methodologies that engage with sensory and affective dimensions of ruins, such as site-specific ethnography, drawings, photography, and counter-mapping that speak of and for a reimagination of the encountered ruinous postscapes.

Through examples of chosen decommissioned factories and redeveloping industrial sites, this paper highlights how these sites embody contested city-making practices, resilience, and transformation. It points to the importance of developing new conceptual tools to work with the complexity and elusiveness of the postscapes.

Our ethnographic and methodological insights are based on the first year of a research project titled PostCity. They stem from the ethnographic attempt to grasp the meaning of ruinous postscapes, their physical remnants as well as social contexts in which they are intensively reimagined and renegotiated.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores knitting and writing as ‘structuring resources’ (Lave 1988) for each other, taking the moment Shetland knitters call ‘sprettin’ (‘to burst or rip open; tear asunder’) as an opening up to fragmented and spiral forms that finished work (textile or ethnographic text) often obscures.

Contribution long abstract:

Unwriting’s ‘deliberate act of unravelling’ is familiar to any knitter, along with the pain and promise it can hold. As well as a textile-making process of interlocking loops, the English verb ‘to knit’ means ‘to link firmly or closely’ or ‘to cause to grow together’ (Merriam-Webster 2024). In Shetland, a knitter unravelling her ‘makkin’ (knitting) is ‘sprettin’, meaning ‘to burst or rip open; tear asunder’ (Christie-Johnson 2014: 85; Velupillai, forthcoming). In English we ‘tink’, or knit backwards. Whether it is a violent ripping into fragments or a methodical undoing into one spiralling thread (Alison 2019: 161), un-knitting, like unwriting, opens up both the form and surface design of the work at once. Writing about the multifaceted experience of cognition, Jean Lave (1988: 98-99) observes ‘it is probably never the case that only one thing is going on at a time…I can read and knit at the same time…Knitting is a structuring resource for the process of reading and reading provides structuring resources that give shape and punctuation to the process of knitting. They shape each other’. This paper explores the use of knitting and writing as ‘structuring resources’ for each other, taking the moment of ‘sprettin’ as one of potential rather than correction, part of an improvisational process of making (Carden 2022) that finished work (whether textile or ethnographic text) often sets out to obscure.

Contribution short abstract:

How do we leave experiences, standings, encounters, and representations in their own right as fragmented, unruly, fleeting? What is left out or gained by emphasizing the narrative of an encounter over the location? Speculative thoughts on letting go of excessive naming.

Contribution long abstract:

How do we leave experiences, standings, encounters, and representations in their own right as fragmented, unruly, fleeting? This paper is both a reflection and a question, a work-in-progress, and an imagination of what will take place in the field. It starts with space, an encounter, and a recording. By reflecting on experiences already taken place, and those that will come in the months before the conference, I question the necessity of identifying or placing recollection, encounter, and recording in a particular place. Instead, we could explore the possibility of not naming, not identifying, not expanding.

What is left out or gained by emphasizing the narrative of an encounter over the location? What does it mean to anonymize, hide, or murk the location of an image and how can we make use of the practices involved in noticing, without essentializing the encounter in location, address, or country.

From a methodological perspective, this paper makes an argument for thinking through fragments with sound, both heard and recorded, emitted and omitted, not as oppositions, but as fragments of an event. Through this, I expand on the nature of fragmentation and the lack of identification through a collaborative angle on the use of sound (recording). Where sound inevitably helps to identify, there is also space for play and experimentation, and maybe even confusing the sounds of places and narratives. What emerges, then - and remains, is not less than, but an encounter.

Contribution short abstract:

Can we even speak of a decolonized Kashmir when the very arrangements of our narrations remain . . . so colonial? Experimenting with a fragmentary approach to writing gleaned from diaries maintained during fieldwork, I try to imagine a world where empire is bracketed.

Contribution long abstract:

I attempt to articulate Kashmir outside of its placement at the geopolitical edges of empire. To do so, I revisit fragments from diaries I maintained during research in the mountainous Neelum Valley, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, between 2014 and 2022. I approach these fragments as overlaps between aesthetics and analysis, politics and ethics, theory and methodology, as opposed to simply “data,” “field notes,” or “ethnography.”

Fragments—in notes, conversations, pictures—destabilize the expectation of providing coherent narratives often expected of scholarly writing. Fragments may be chaotic and inconclusive, but in their haptic indeterminacy, they raise the possibility of new forms of knowledge where the temporal and incomplete are viewed as totalities in themselves with their own symbolic value.

The fragments convey how Kashmir is constituted and reconstituted within the relationships and ethical decisions enacted in the “field” and how the social is imagined and related in these encounters. I gesture towards Kashmir as an interstitial and relational terrain where the failures, small victories, and confusions of encounter take primacy, directing attention to the flows and ebbs of life that unfold as expressed in dedications to each other, such as the care taken to prepare a meal or time made for a guest. To dislodge Kashmir from its colonial fixity, risks must be taken in the way we listen, think, speak, and write about Kashmir and its people. Otherwise, our efforts at decolonial world-building will remain incomplete and impoverished.

Contribution short abstract:

The paper is grounded in a creative walking project with young male asylum seekers. Participants used digital media tools to explore their local environment. The aim is to explore how an ethnographic ‘field’ emerges as multimodally constituted, where knowledge is generated through co-creation.

Contribution long abstract:

As the programme of this panel suggests multimodal interventions may be key to moving beyond the textual as the single most powerful medium of representation. This paper will engage with this idea and seek to draw out potentials of multimodality which include, yet also move beyond issues of representation. These revolve around generating experimental modes of fieldwork and unexpected conversations, encounters, and stories.

The paper is grounded in the author’s involvement with a ‘walking project’ in which visual and digital media were used as practical, sensory and collaborative tools of sense making. It involved collaborating with artists, community partners and a group of young forced migrants who used digital tools to explore a national park in southern England. Filming and audio recording equipment was instrumental to collaboration and to forms of multisensorial perception and creativity.

The paper will draw on some of the visual creations (e.g. video, collage) that were produced in this project, to reflect on multimodality as a form of ‘reading’ an environment and its tangible materiality, as well as a form of edited representation that tells a story. The overall aim is to explore how an ethnographic ‘field’ emerges as a multimodally constituted field which generates pluralist voices and perspectives and in which a mode of ‘participant observation’ makes way for a mode of co-creation and the endeavour to create knowledge ‘with’ rather than ‘about’ others.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores how Malinowski's early life shaped his method of participant observation. Using found poetry, I juxtapose his descriptions of his parents, fieldwork, and the Trobriand Islands to reveal unacknowledged connections, illuminating the role of personal history in ethnography.

Contribution long abstract:

The question of how to read Bronislaw Malinowski’s public scholarship after the publication of his private fieldwork diaries has been widely debated in anthropology, with scholars such as Geertz (1988) and Young (2015) arguing that the diaries represent an unacknowledged, albeit problematic in this case, part of ethnographic fieldwork. However, these arguments have not adequately addressed the issue of the role of Malinowski’s early life experiences in the development of his method of participant observation. My paper addresses the issue of a lack of attention to the connections between Malinowski’s early life experiences of his parents and his development of participant observation with specific attention to the aesthetics of Malikowski’s writing. Specifically, my project will be looking at Malinowski’s descriptions of his parents in his diaries and letters and his descriptions of participant observation, in order to show that the two sets of descriptions mutually inform one another. Using a technique of creative research practice known as ‘found poetry’, I will read aloud fragments of his descriptions of his parents alongside fragments of his descriptions of participant observation, and juxtapose them against his descriptions of the people and landscapes in the Trobriand Islands. I argue that reading these fragments alongside each other illuminates previously unacknowledged connections between his early life experiences and the development of participant observation. In conclusion, this project, by closely examining these connections, sheds new light on the neglected issue of the role that an anthropologist’s early life experiences play in the making of their ethnographies.