Contribution short abstract:

The meaning of dance cannot always be understood through words. This calls for visual and aural modes of conveyance, also as complement to text and talks. Here bodily fellow-feelings between ethnographer and dancers are helpful even though certain spectacular sensations might defy translation.

Contribution long abstract:

“If I could tell you what it means, I wouldn’t have to dance it” Isadora Duncan is reputed to have said. Most dance is non-verbal and has the potential to convey moods and form that cannot be expressed in the same way, or at all, through words, orally or textually. This impacts both how dance is transferred from coach to dancers, and how dance scholars convey dance through various media: images, film with audio are necessary complements to text and talks, as are apps and links to video clips. Unwriting dance pays particular attention to the senses and to movement. Dance coaching includes metaphors such as: “Dance as if the floor was on fire!” and “Go up like an elevator!” Coaches also demonstrate steps and movements but since they are senior and stiffer than dancers, they can ask to move a dancer’s legs and arms for illustration.

Drawing on my research on career and culture in the transnational world of dancers, the aim of this paper is to explore how my own background as a dance student was key in establishing a sense of bodily resonance between me as ethnographer and the dancers. As one of the dancers told me: “We noticed that you used to dance from the way you watched us dance.” This indicates not only a bodily fellow-feeling, but also a unique trust from the dancers. The paper concludes with a discussion of certain spectacular sensations of dance that might defy translation after all.

Contribution short abstract:

We introduce ‘poetic resonance’ as a methodological contribution to better sound out sensorial and embodied insights in ethnographic data. We offer concrete processes of decoding affective meat relations and group creativity to make dialogues around the politics of analysis more accessible.

Contribution long abstract:

Working with transmodal material in ethnographic research complicates the alchemist process that is analysis to find what is not automatically apparent due to its embodied, sensory nature. In this submission, we introduce the analytical tool and concept of ‘poetic resonance’ as a possible new way to understand and produce knowledge by intertwining ethnography with the practice-as-research approach of poetry and poetic thinking. We define poetic resonance as a practice of ‘sounding out’ for the slippery and nebulous aspects of embodied and sensorial data. When applied, poetic resonance allows us to gain a deeper understanding and sense of connection to these slippery and nebulous phenomena that goes beyond textual translation. We discuss our experiments with poetic resonance - and how it allowed us to keep with the multimodal and sensory complexities of our field studies - through two case studies: affective relations around meat and meat reduction in the Nordic context and collaborative practices of creativity in Danish makerspaces. Using these case studies, we highlight the praxis and concrete process of ethnographic analysis. In doing so, we offer poetic resonance as an innovative methodological contribution which allows for an alternative approach to decoding, interpreting, and translating the embodied and sensorial in empirical material. Additionally, we offer the discussion of our own analytical process to make the politics of our decisions transparent, concrete, and accessible for dialogue.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores reciprocity as an epistemological/methodological approach in ethnographic research on disability performing arts. It highlights the potential of bridging gaps between academia and the field, words and bodies, and practice and theory, particularly for non-performer ethnographers.

Contribution long abstract:

As a non-dancer, non-disabled anthropologist who has worked for over a decade in the field of disability dance and theater, colleagues often ask me whether my relationships with interlocutors involve dynamics of power or exploitation. In my experience, the reality of these interactions with artists and creators is far more nuanced and grounded in mutual respect.

In this presentation, I reflect on why this is the case and explore the textual and non-textual methodological practices rooted in reciprocity, respect, and relationality. By examining these conditions, I aim to illuminate the frameworks that foster ethical and meaningful collaboration in ethnographic research within the performing arts.

Bringing together methodological reflections from the fields of (1) disability culture, (2) sensory ethnography, and (3) Indigenous performing arts, I propose two key ways in which reciprocity was developed in my fieldwork. First, through sensuous and kinesthetic relationality, I reflect on "movement" as a category that profoundly impacts our lived experiences and scholarly insights. Second, through intellectual reciprocity, I explore collaborations with interlocutors who occupy "knowledge creation" roles, such as choreographers and creators—individuals who, in many ways, function as researchers within their own practice.

Textual practices, such as shared WhatsApp groups, combined with non-textual practices like audio messages and collaborative aural public presentations, as well as shared bodily involvement in research creation, will be discussed. These approaches offer new pathways for rethinking the role of the body and the senses within the anthropology of performance in general and disability culture specifically.

Contribution short abstract:

The process of 'unmasking' is an art-based ethnographic method in the becoming, which seeks to enhance the dialogue between social and natural sciences and more than human actors under threat of extinction. It works along contested relationalities and methodological tools in becoming.

Contribution long abstract:

The wolf mask provides an illustrative example of how the crafting and wear of a mask can be employed as a means of articulating hitherto unheard, unexpressed, or unseen narratives concerning the relationship between hunters or ecological engineers and wolves. We are engaged in an experimental process of crafting and wearing masks within a context in which different actors are seeking to identify solutions for the return of large predators in the Italian Alps. The masks are becoming a tool for communication with professionals and their contested relationalities whose roles involve the protection of animals, including ecological engineers, shepherds, wildlife monitors, hunters, and others. These masks "create agency" (Gell 1998) as the act of crafting and subsequently wearing these masks imbues their creators and wearers with the capacity to challenge existing public polarisation and to bring alternative, hitherto unheard perceptions to the fore. However, it remains still unclear to us which actors are emerging. Our contribution aims to present a methodological tool and describe the process as well as shift in perception and narrative of the actors involved. It ascertains how the relation with the wolf is experienced by examining what has not been mentioned, touched upon, seen or heard in ethnographic interviews conducted prior to this process with the same actors.

The process of 'unmasking' is an art-based ethnographic method in the becoming of our collaborative research project DSooE, which seeks to enhance the dialogue between different disciplinary perspectives and more than human actors under threat of extinction.

Contribution short abstract:

Dance Theatre made by learning disabled people opens possibilities for the untellable to take form. I will argue that learning disabled colleagues take advantage of choreography and relationship to temporarily unwrite historical and contemporary, social and medical inscriptions of lack.

Contribution long abstract:

Drawing on my work with learning disabled and non-disabled dance theatre makers I will argue that Tobin Siebers’ concept of disability aesthetics (2010) is at work in the practice and that this opens possibilities for the untellable to take form within movement, gesture and relationship with others. I will argue that learning disabled colleagues take advantage of the form of dance theatre to temporarily unwrite the historical and contemporary, social and medical inscriptions of lack. Such inscriptions in the bodyminds of individuals are not always negative and may achieve necessary recognition to enable support. However, in my examples I will show how agency is enacted in the process of making and performing and holds potential for unwriting and interrogating ideas of capacity, intention and knowledge. In the endeavour I suggest that we reframe notions of inclusion via practice that foregrounds the concerns, interests and choreographies of learning disabled theatre makers who unwrite histories of Othering, charity, pity and their accompanying problems, still in evidence in our time. It is in taking the risk of following disabled colleagues who lead that an unwriting and perhaps a re-writing of dance form takes place. Dance theatre might unwrite normative aesthetics towards a disability aesthetics that can be shared and re-work the codes of dance theatre and inclusive practices.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper asks if there is a way to unwrite the non-verbal and the sensorial. Drawing on making theatre for toddlers, this paper asks if anthropology can entail a process of unwriting to communicate that which is already experiential, sensorial and the non-verbal.

Contribution long abstract:

While being an anthropologist, I am also a theatre practitioner making non-verbal/sensorial theatre for toddlers, i.e. creating plays for toddlers and adults to watch. In creating anything for a toddler we have to use a tangible material as toddlers do not have the faculty of language as yet and they respond to the world sensorially and through the tangible real. Toddlers experience and communicate joy, suspense, pathos or anticipation but only if they can touch, feel, see or smell something rather than talk, write or read about it. Language of the material tangible creating an aural, visual and a tactile principle is at heart of toddler theatre. As adult creators of this form, I consider making such plays an anthropological endeavour as ethnography too is in a sense an assemblage of the visual and the aural in a discrete relationship. I want to now write ethnographically the process of creating and working on this artistic practice to think through the making of anthropology but I feel writing may not do justice to the process of this creation. Toddlers in receiving this work share the joy of the discrete, the repetitive and the mundane and but how can I reflect on this process sans writing. Can I engage in an unwriting of the non-verbal and the sensorial? What will that entail if I do not wish to create a parallel register of the sensorial to talk about the sensorial?

Contribution short abstract:

The paper focuses on embodied practices such as Foley art in experimental film and sound workshops with neurodivergent participants. It explores how neurodivergent expressions, considered as modes of enquiry, trouble the symbolic order and reimagine relations within more-than-human ecosystems.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper deals with non-symbolic meaning-making and neurodivergent expressions as modes of enquiry for more-than-human ecosystems. It is based on experimental film and sound workshops that I have been facilitating in Maarja küla in Estonia, a supported living facility for adults labelled with learning disabilities. Our shared artistic practices include Foley, i.e. recording sound effects for existing video using everyday objects and our bodies, as well as other techniques of embodiment drawing from fiction and estrangement, allowing us to re-materialise found footage and perform impossible encounters. The participants’ taste in repetition, burlesque and noise; the variations of attention and temporality that score our explorations; and the importance of traces, indexicality, touch and friction make up the position from which we learn together about nonhuman living beings.

The paper delves into different perspectives on non-symbolic meaning-making, including the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge (1969), Fernand Deligny’s Arachnean and permanent cinema (2008), as well as my own take on the notions of contagion, resonance and trace. Moreover, it questions whether non-symbolic and symbolic orders are commensurable and mutally translatable. How can we interprete Deligny’s statement that symbolic orders are not merely dominant, but exclude other forms of relation (2013)?

I propose to explore how neurodivergent expressions and their ecological embedding trouble the expectations of symbolic orders.

Finally, the paper reflects on the role of expressions miscast as stereotypy and automatism by behavioural studies, such as nonverbal sonic feedback, repetition and echolalia in the creative process with nonspeaking participants.

Contribution short abstract:

Reflection on the research positionality in the process of production of two diametrically opposed video representations of the everyday events interpreted as different faces of the same regime of irregular migration on the periphery of the EU marked by the normalization of violence and racism.

Contribution long abstract:

The presentation is based on field research in Una-Sana canton of Bosnia and Herzegovina, conducted by active participation in the work of the international, pro-migrant volunteer collective. During 2020 cantonal anti-migrant policies became radicalized and police violence was increasing at the Croatian side of the border.

The ethnography of the everyday life of the migration regime I approach through the analysis of the audiovisual works I have produced in different contexts during the research process. The first example is a video report created through a video call with hunger strikers stuck at the site of burned Lipa camp in the first days of 2021. My second example is a video diary form created by spontaneous video recordings of a dinner with friends in a squat on the outskirts of Bihać in the winter of the same year. Those two diametrically opposed events (the drama of the hunger strike in the camp versus the lightness of the party in the squat) are two faces of the same everyday level of the regime of irregular migration on the periphery of the EU marked by the normalization of violence and racism, the criminalization of people on the move and pro-migrant solidarity, and produced by cooperation and negotiation between heterogeneous actors. I have approached videos as the basis of a tick description and subsequent theoretical interpretation of the events in which I spontaneously participated as one of the actors.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper discusses the potential of performance ethnography to challenge conventional understandings of ethnographic disability activism. It focuses on my project Unspoken Futures, developed in collaboration with d/Disabled artists in Toronto, as an embodied and multisensory form of future-making.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper discusses the potential of performance ethnography – an approach to research that uses theatre performance as a form of ethnographic process and representation – to challenge conventional conceptions of ethnographic disability activism. It focuses on my performance ethnography project, Unspoken Futures, created in collaboration with d/Deaf and d/Disabled artists in Toronto, Canada. The project encompassed workshops, a public performance open to an invited audience and the general public, and a post-performance Q&A session. This paper examines how participants employed strategies such as devised theatre, physical theatre, improvisation, clowning, collective creation, and creative writing to draw on ineffable aspects of their lived experiences in order to engage in interventionist future-making. I argue that performance ethnography, as an embodied, affective, metaphoric, physical, and visual methodology, can constitute a form of imaginative activism, potentially politicizing participants, the ethnographer, and audience through empathic, multisensory, critical, and collaborative engagement. This paper problematizes how we practice disability activism by arguing that imagination can unlock new possibilities for experiences and actions, laying the groundwork for an ethnography that challenges the dominance of textual representation.

Contribution short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in Turkey, this paper examines the role of docu-poetry in translating the olfactory affect. Focusing on aesthetic debates around rose fragrances, it tackles the challenges of representing non-verbal, embodied experiences and explores how docu-poetry can overcome these obstacles.

Contribution long abstract:

Poetry, though articulated mostly through words, is fragmented, opening up an intersubjective field that transcends the limits of the discursive. Creating a shared sensory experience, a new one each time, in a Rancièrian sense, it intervenes in the distribution of the sensible as well as what is given as equality and politics. Docu-poetry, as a hybrid genre, incorporates poetic elements like imagery, rhythm, and metaphor with historical and personal accounts.

In this paper, drawing on my fieldwork in Turkey, I aim to weave together the possibilities of sensory ethnography and docu-poetry, hoping to uncover novel ways of articulating and representing the depth of our embodied encounters. In Turkey, ‘rosely’ scents —rose, rose oil, and rose water— evoke passionate sensual-aesthetic debates between opposing socio-political actors with their multilayered and conflicting connotations, bringing forth powerful memories, affects, and emotions. Symbolizing the Prophet Muhammad and Heaven, rose fragrances are frequently used to perfume public spaces by the Justice and Development Party, which has governed Turkey in an increasingly authoritarian manner since 2002. My anthropological endeavor seeks to comprehend and articulate the affective arrangements that these fragrances generate.

However, olfactory affect, as being pre-personal, non-verbal, yet cultural, poses methodological challenges concerning articulation and representation. In this talk, first, I intend to get beyond these obstacles with my docu-poems, which use collage and montage techniques to translate verbal and non-verbal accounts of my interlocutors. Then, I will discuss the political and artistic contributions of docu-poetry in subverting hegemonic and linear modes of knowing and representing.

Contribution short abstract:

Visual unwriting is an investigation of the experienced knowledge beyond words, an embodied mapping as a way of understanding how people discern and construct meaning within their environment. We will exhibit variations of (and insights from) our visual wayfaring and sensorial walking workshops.

Contribution long abstract:

Unwriting may denote surrendering to another form of speaking than one’s habitual expression. It is a process of learning to see the world with a creative awareness and sensitivity, softening the limits between the self and the environment, and a continuous restructuring of this encounter.

Visual unwriting could be defined as a method that leaves a safe (yet adventurous) “blank space” to recall and restructure embodied memory, to cast a new light on spatial experience, surrender to imagining a reality that is not imposed and reduced to a mere survival. Visual unwriting is a form of investigating experienced knowledge, a modality beyond words that delivers personal maps of inner wayfaring as platforms of understanding how people discern and construct meaning, within their living relationship with the environment.

The presentation will exhibit variations and insight from visual mapping workshops, made after sensorial walking. We will discuss maps of intentional wayfaring in both nature and urban context, while trying to avoid radical separation of the importance of both contexts. The aim is to illustrate how people with different backgrounds experience and relate to places, and how they desire to communicate atmospheric impressions to others.

The method we are developing is a mode of enquiry in trying to capture elements of people's experiences, emotions, memories, and relationships with environments and other-than-humans for research purposes. In other words, the method is not being used (at least by us) for purely artistic expressions.

Contribution short abstract:

Our study takes place in Edinburgh, a city shaped by migration and translation. We focus on non-textual translation spaces, co-created through art workshops led by refugee artists, whose artwork was then displayed at a local library. The exhibition emphasised the ongoing processes of affective placemaking beyond the use of language in textual form.

Contribution long abstract:

Starting from Cronin’s premise that the migrant condition is “the condition of the translated being” (Cronin, 2006), our presentation draws on a research project on Edinburgh as a “translational city” (Simon, 2021), shaped by migration and translation. We focus on co-created translation spaces through a series of art workshops led by refugee artists. The activities, jointly organised with the Edinburgh & Lothian Regional Equality Council (ELREC), included drawing, clay work, and collage. Rather than simply translating the city from English into their own languages, participants were invited to use non-textual creative methods to break language barriers—through drawing, feeling, and imagining. The artwork was displayed in a local library. In this way, sites of “translation spaces” (Simon, 2021) were co-produced, where the dominant direction of translation was challenged and critiqued, or even temporarily reversed to reclaim urban space (Marasligil). The workshops demonstrated a range of themes in art creation, reflecting participants’ positive and nostalgic feelings towards their mother tongues, as well as their frustration and struggle with English as the new language. Imageries of home, mostly expressed through landscapes, intersected with imageries of language and cultural symbols, such as national flags or traditional patterns. Struggle and linguistic isolation were depicted via abstract imageries of imprisonment or solid and abstract clay objects. These collaborative art and craft workshops supported participants in incorporating their experiences into their ongoing processes of affective placemaking beyond the use of language in textual form.