Paper Short Abstract:

This multimodal project exploring indigenous (non-)representation and tourism in Yellowstone National Park, conducted by a Swiss-Cambodian team, challenges traditional text-centered anthropological approaches by incorporating diverse sensory data, creating an interactive website.

Paper Abstract:

Multimodality in anthropology challenges text-centered approaches, but also goes beyond visual methods to encompass different sensory modalities (Westmoreland, 2022). This paper presents a multimodal research project on Yellowstone National Park that attempts to 'unwrite' traditional anthropological conventions about 'unwritten' perspectives on the park. Our research focused on indigenous (non-)representation and tourism. We ask: How does the creation of a multimodal, ethnographic website offer thick description and collaborative knowledge of the ‘unwritten’? What are the challenges to this in academia?

Our collective of four anthropologists from Switzerland and an indigenous activist from Cambodia used a variety of data collection methods such as photography, video, audio recordings, sensory ethnography and written notes. One key aspect of the project is its reflexive and processual approach, incorporating meta-research on the team's own positionality and potential biases. This multimodal approach diversifies anthropological methods and creates richer, more nuanced research outcomes.

The collective's website uses graphic art, images, audio, photos, video and text to engage multiple senses and perspectives, reflecting their sensory and collaborative research methodology. This approach aims to present research as an explorative journey, allowing users to navigate content at their own pace. The website's layered approach, stimulating multiple senses, offers a holistic and playful engagement with the ethnographic experience. The website dismantles the traditional hierarchy of written text as the primary mode of anthropological knowledge.

Through this endeavor, the collective demonstrates how multimodal methods can be instrumental in ‘unwriting’ traditions and what needs to be addressed in academia to create an enabling environment.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores mothering, housework and homeschooling in Slovenia through multimodal ethnography. It examines how visual and other approaches complement each other and enable a better understanding of child-rearing practices, family life and the domestic division of labor.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores the everyday lives, motivations, and identifications of housewives and stay-at-home mothers, including those who homeschool their children, in contemporary Slovenia. Using a multimodal ethnographic approach, I employed participant observation, interviews, informal conversations and visual ethnography (filming and photography) to explore child-rearing practices, household routines and the division of housework and childcare in families. The research draws on diverse materials, including interview transcripts, field notes, audiovisual recordings and photographs, to provide a rich, multidimensional understanding of the lived experiences of these families.

The paper focuses on the interplay between visual and written forms of representation in my PhD project, which includes the ethnographic film School for Life, which focuses on homeschooling practices, and a written dissertation. I analyze how these distinct yet interrelated modes of inquiry and representation informed my fieldwork and final interpretations, asking: what insights were made possible through visual media that could not be achieved through written analysis alone, and vice versa? How do these modalities complement or challenge each other in their ability to convey anthropological understanding? In reflecting on these questions, this paper highlights the value and challenges of multimodal ethnography in contemporary anthropological practice, such as qualitative diversity, epistemological complementarity, and new ways of representing anthropological knowledge.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper draws on my PhD research to explore how a multimodal approach profoundly transformed my understanding and theorisation of the nation as an imagined community, as exemplified through an in-depth analysis of music production and performance within La Escena Independiente in Lima, Peru.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, I will discuss my experience applying a multimodal approach to analyse music performance and explore how this understanding was co-produced with the musicians of La Escena Independiente (Independent Music Scene). I argue that music performance is a means to imagine the nation, affording the participants – musicians and audiences alike – a space to re-produce and co-articulate how they envision community. This idea is inspired by Anderson’s (1983) argument that the act of reading provides the readers with a sense of parallelity and synchronicity.

The methods I implemented included cartography, semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations and filmmaking. Each method afforded me a different experience as a researcher and impacted my relationships with the participants. The ethnographic observations and filmmaking, in combination with cartography, for instance, allowed me to experience the music performances as socially and geographically situated and understand the importance of positioning the body and movement within the space of the performance. Similarly, the importance of the bodily experience, the throbbing of the music, the smells, the shoving and pushing in the mosh-pit during some concerts or the stillness during others. This experience led me to discuss and analyse how the audience members move through the venue’s physical space to express and negotiate how they envision Peruvianness by echoing the musician’s notions through the embodied experience of proximity, interaction, and socialisation. Consequently, the multimodal approach reshaped my understanding of nation as being imagined through discourse towards being imagined through practice, presence, experience, positioning, movement and stillness.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores a series of participatory textiles workshops that used arts and history to understand the city of Hull’s long heritage of living with water and flooding. The creative outputs from these workshops show the crucial opportunity offered by participatory textiles for elevating everyday, marginalised and ‘unofficial’ stories, but also pose challenges for the integration of this material within some academic literatures.

Paper Abstract:

Between 2020 and 2024 the Risky Cities project (part of the UK Climate Resilience Programme) used arts and history to understand the city of Hull’s long heritage of living with water and flooding. The project’s community engagement work took archival and literary stories of Hull’s watery histories and used them as inspiration for a range of creative and participatory activities.

These included an intensive season of participatory textile workshops, working with local artist-practitioners and flood-impacted communities around the city to create a range of embroidered and woven textile pieces that respond in different ways to Hull’s flood history.

This paper outlines the process of these workshops, and explores the outputs created during them and exhibited as part of the ‘Follow the Thread’ exhibition. These textiles include whimsical, challenging, and abstracted perceptions of Hull’s flood history, encoding memories of the city’s last major flood event in 2007. In particular, we discuss the importance of participatory arts in uncovering previously hidden traumatic histories, echoing experiences elsewhere about the impact of peer-to-peer story-telling in the context of climate-induced disasters, including the impact on artist practitioners as well as academics.

This work shows the crucial opportunity offered by participatory textiles for elevating everyday, marginalised and ‘unofficial’ stories, but also poses challenges for the integration of this material within the socio-hydrological academic literature, the discourses of which are still dominated by quantitative, ‘scientific’ approaches to generating new knowledge.

Paper Short Abstract:

Based on 30 self-crafted mental-emotional cartographies of Hong by Southeast-Asian migrant domestic workers, this presentation explores the potentiality of participatory arts-based methods in: (1) creating unique spaces for emotionality, self-reflection and self-expression (and their meaning in the context of both, the lives of subaltern actors and the academic production); (2) unveiling the intangible layers of the emic experience that remain unreachable to conventional methodological and text-centric representational models.

Paper Abstract:

Since the 1970s Hong Kong has been a primary destination for Southeast-Asian female migrants. The foreign domestic workers constitute the 4.5% of the HK population, even though they are largely exposed to very hard living and work conditions, often characterized by abuse and exploitation. These women are forced by law to live in their employer’s houses where they work between 12-18 hours a day and, in most cases, they don’t have their own room or private space. On their day off (Sunday) they all go out driving to an intensive occupation of the public space across the city: squares, sidewalks, parks, walkaways, etc. become covered by camping tents, open umbrellas and cardboard boxes which serve as a rug for picnicking, napping or singing karaoke, among many other activities; modifying the physical, social and cultural landscape of (Monday to Saturday) HK.

The relationship of these women and the city becomes mediated by the power (dis)continuities between the public and private spheres in a context in which both, the physical and symbolic dimensions of the space(s) matter. Based on a twelve-months multimodal ethnography which includes the crafting of 30 mental-emotional cartographies of Hong Kong through participatory inquiry, this presentation explores the potentiality of participatory arts-based methods in: (1) creating unique spaces for emotionality, self-reflection and self-expression and their meaning in the context of both, the lives of subaltern actors and the academic production; (2) unveiling the intangible layers of the emic experience that remain unreachable to conventional methodological and text-centric representational models.

Paper Short Abstract:

Folk education–an education of, for, and by the people– can meet many challenges requiring unwriting in higher education today. Drawing upon our experiences in folk schools, field schools, community environmental initiatives, and craft pedagogies, we engage around radical lessons that embrace popular approaches from non-formal education.

Paper Abstract:

Through the lens of folkloristics, academia serves as an institution of learning where formal and informal customs and traditions emerge, shaping ideas of “knowledge” as something that is always in flux. The materials of our educational traditions are tangible and intangible, and as with all traditions, education creates the future out of the past. Unwriting–as a tool of progress–can aid in creating equitable and resilient learning environments that shift what currently counts as scholarship and research, where what we know emerges.

In this paper, we suggest that drawing upon folk education–an education of, for, and by the people– could meet many challenges that require unwriting in higher education and society-at-large today. Folk pedagogies are non-competitive and participatory–frequently based in oral tradition, song, and material culture. They derive from Danish philosopher Nicholai Grundtvig, whose critiques of higher education inspired the Danish folkhøjskole in the mid-1800s and, in the early 1900s, the North American folk schools. Drawing upon our own participation in folk schools, field schools, community environmental initiatives, and craft pedagogies, we engage around radical lessons from pedagogical practices in higher education that embrace popular approaches borrowed from non-formal education. We consider the following questions: What are the goals of education? How do we create pedagogies of learning and sharing – as opposed to pedagogies of competition and so-called achievement? Why are place and culture important in scholarship and research? Given the scale of the crises we face, it is time to unwrite prevailing pedagogical approaches to sustain our shared futures.

Paper Short Abstract:

A research practice that focuses on continuing collaborations with research participants beyond the fieldwork experience not only responds to ethical and decolonial concerns, but also proves fruitful for the construction of knowledge for both researchers and participants.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines how the conceptualisation of a visual archive emerged from the practice of co-construction of knowledge. In 2021, I invited a Peruvian research participant to a dissemination and restitution event in Switzerland, where she made effective use of what I conceive of as a visual archive. As an introduction to a silkscreen print workshop, she was invited to provide for European academics, she displayed digital photographs of wheat-pasted posters on walls, lampposts and garbage bins in the streets of Lima. Referring to these public interventions as acts of resistance, she commented on the images by chronicling the political events that have motivated the creation and pasting of the posters. Through her presentation, it became clear that what the research participant exhibited was a vessel for collective memory, which she effectively used to narrate a shared history of protest.

The construction of a visual archive was part of Limeñian female cultural worker’s collective efforts to record and document their political activism of posting graphics, stencils, and prints in public space. Thinking of these records and private collections of images as a visual archive allows for their recognition “as potential resources and repositories for unofficial histories” (Lee 2020:180).

The paper outlines how this argument grew out of following discussions that reflected the experience and nurtured our respective reflections on theory and practice. Creating research dissemination and communication events with research participants proved fruitful for both researcher and participants.

Paper Short Abstract:

On the eve of a green energy transition in Central Germany, the ethnographer asked a range of participants who experienced life under socialism—former chemical factory workers of a former East German city, Halle-Neustadt, as well as postmigrant actors from former Socialist Republics now living in what is now a suburb of Halle—about how they wish to be represented. The resulting "ethnographic portraits" painted by the researcher, which include both realistic and fantastical elements, demonstrate an innovative, participatory method of engaging with ethnographic participants using multimodal, art-based research.

Paper Abstract:

This art-based, participatory research project investigates social perceptions of former East German urban environments undergoing structural change. As part of ethnographic fieldwork in Halle-Neustadt, a centrally-planned large housing estate developed in the socialist GDR in the 1960s as Chemiearbeiterstadt, “a city of chemical workers,” the ethnographer invited residents to share how they view the long transition from socialism to a polity marked by a discourse of sustainability and climate neutrality. The process of structural change echoes the transition towards German re-unification, which repudiated socialist ideology and devalued East German lifestyles. However, as former East German cities experienced population loss due to internal migration, migrants from the former Socialist Bloc found accessible housing in the vacating concrete panel-block housing estates. Owing to a lack of cross-cultural dialogue, these neighbourhoods came to be nicknamed "mentality ghettos," effectively equating where people lived, with who they were. Acknowledging the historical impact of socialism in Central Germany, how do former residents whose working-class position was elevated under socialism regard their present-day role in society? Similarly, how do actors of postmigration imagine, and creatively shape their neighbourhoods? To gauge how residents see themselves as participants in the energy transition and in wider society, and as part of art-based research, the ethnographer recorded a series of interviews asking research participants how they wish to be represented in the urban environment. Taking inspiration from these interviews, the ethnographer then painted a series of "ethnographic portraits," engaging participants in a cross-cultural dialogue on their role in Germany's green transition.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper draws on my ethnographic work with formerly incarcerated women in Lebanon. I start by introducing the collaborative storytelling project co-developed with my interlocutors before reflecting on how art can invite profound realms of expression and alternative modes of knowledge in research.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, I draw on my ethnographic project with formerly incarcerated women in Lebanon to consider the implications of employing artistic methods in research.

Soon after I began conducting in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated women in Lebanon, I realized that words would not be enough to encapsulate their experiences. Indeed, they often struggled to verbalize their thoughts, memories, and feelings about imprisonment. Instead, many of them tended towards artistic means such as drawing, painting, songwriting, etc. to better express themselves. Together, we initiated an artistic and collaborative storytelling project with the aim of chronicling and comprehending their individual and collective experiences.

My paper will discuss how the incorporation of such artistic participatory methods provided my interlocutors the means to share their otherwise-indescribable memories of prison life – the “thoughts that can’t be put into words,” as one woman put it. These methods also enabled us to fulfill our collective goal of moving the project beyond the academy: we aspire towards publishing a comic book based on our work together.

In sum, arts-based participatory methods opened possibilities for me and my interlocutors: it enabled us to explore alternative realms of expression and experience while allowing us to escape the strict discursive boundaries and limited audiences of academia. Yet more than that, these methods also invited questions about what kind of knowledge is valuable. My paper concludes by reflecting on these questions, suggesting that artistic research methods compel us to make peace with uncertainty in knowledge-making.

Paper Short Abstract:

I use participatory approaches and ethnographic methods to explore interactions between language, education and identity. I showcase a collaborative arts workshop exploring Scots language with a group of school pupils, and tension around writing up a joyful, embodied process into an academic output.

Paper Abstract:

In my work, I use participatory, creative, approaches and ethnographic research methods to explore the interaction between language, education and community identity. This presentation will showcase a collaborative arts workshop that formed part of my PhD fieldwork exploring what the Scots language meant to a group of school pupils and their local community in the North-East of Scotland.

The workshop created a space for the pupils, artist, and I to work together equals, co-producing ethnographic knowledge. Following Freire (1993:61), I was no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself [sic] taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn, while being taught also teach. Together we took photographs, interviewed people in the school, and made decisions collaboratively. We were embodied; walking, talking, laughing and sharing stories from multiple perspectives.

My own story and language background is woven through this work. At different points I was a researcher or practitioner or activist or ethnologist (Skillman 2020). I used my shifting positionality to listen closely and carefully, to amplify participants’ stories to a wider audience, and to promote positive attitudinal change towards Scots.

It is a challenge to funnel this participatory, joyful, experience into academic writing. As a community educator, I learnt that the process is often as important as the product, and I reflect on the difficulties this tension has caused me as I struggle to write my thesis.