Short Abstract:

Ethnography strains under rigid words, losing life's flow. This panel explores “unwriting,” fragments, and creative methods to free narratives from form. Followed by the workshop "Meander, Spiral, Explode," where we will dance with fragments, embracing their beauty and transformative potential.

Long Abstract:

Ethnographic research is often constrained by the rigidity of the written word, struggling to capture the fluid, shifting landscapes of the lives it seeks to document. This panel invites participants to explore the concept of liberating ethnography through the lens of fragments, creative improvisation, and the freedom to unwrite. We challenge the established boundaries of how we produce and represent knowledge by drawing on the notion of "unwriting"—a deliberate act of unravelling, reimagining, and reshaping traditional academic narratives.

We are interested in:

How dismantling traditional forms of knowledge production can open space for new insights and methods?

How to bring the silenced, the untold, and untellable into being?

How fragmented stories reflect the nonlinear, multifaceted nature of human experience?

How the multimodal can be integrated into ethnographic work to create more dynamic forms of representation?

The panel is followed by the workshop “Meander, Spiral, Explode: Working with Narrative Fragments” where we invite participants into a space where the beauty of the broken, the power of the scattered, and the freedom of the fragmented are celebrated. Here, we embrace fragments—not as remnants of something lost, but as pieces waiting to become something new, something profound. Inspired by Anais Nin’s reflections that “to write from (...) fragments is to embrace multiplicity,” we will wander through the spaces between words, ideas, and experiences, letting them meander, spiral, and explode into new dimensions of storytelling. We draw inspiration from writers who have imagined with fragments -Carmen Maria Machado, Maggie Nelson and Jane Alison.

This Panel+Workshop has so far received 7 contribution proposal(s).
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