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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.

Long 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.

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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.

Long 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.

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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.

Long 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.

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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.

Long 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.

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This collaboration between an ethnography-led architect-researcher and a documentalist photographer suggests that the multi-sensory aesthetics of urban peripheries in Spain can be read through a creative cultural perspective that makes the meaning of heritage less dogmatic and more inclusive.

Long abstract

Over the third quarter of the 20th century, vast residential neighborhoods were built on the outskirts of Spanish cities to accommodate rural migrants, marking the most significant urban transformation in the country's history and often resulting in homogenous, mundane buildings that, though ubiquitous, remain largely unnoticed today. Informed by an online ethnography that treated the Facebook group ‘Amigos del Toldo Verde’ as a visual archive reviewed in multiple press releases, together with a series of urban walks during which fieldnotes and more than 20,000 pictures were taken by photographer Kike Carbajal, this collaborative research –a photo-book recently published (https://bit.ly/4fyS3MZ)– combines creative textual descriptions with uncanny images that disorient the viewer by elevating working-class architectures and strangely familiar urban scenes to the status of postcards. Here, we deploy the multimodal character of postcards (Gugganig and Schor 2020), offering fragmented micro-reflections open to diverse writing styles that embrace immediacy and speculation; paralleling this, we build on the assertion that “good pictures in anthropology are always relative, incomplete, uncertain, sometimes inconsistent, and contradictory” (León-Quijano 2022). This presentation delves into said two-voiced, multi-sensory aesthetics to, ultimately, suggest a humble-yet-authentic heritage approach where the term ‘heritage’ is stripped of idealism to become a mirror that confronts us with the paradoxes of our imperfect but real cities. Thus, by oscillating between the advocacy of neighborhood culture and the questioning of the dysfunctionalities embedded in its spaces, our work evidences the role of visual anthropology experimentations to build a more critical and democratic image of heritage.

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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.

Long 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.

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Short abstract

This paper presents relational filmmaking as a decolonial, participatory method emphasizing ethics of engagement. It explores how collaborative audiovisual practices foster equitable knowledge co-production, resist extractive paradigms, and amplify marginalized voices.

Long abstract

This paper proposes relational filmmaking as a decolonial, participatory method that challenges extractive forms of anthropological research and the dominance of written dissemination. Drawing on long-term, collaborative audiovisual fieldwork, relational filmmaking foregrounds shared process, ethical negotiation, and ongoing dialogue between researcher and participants. It engages filmmaking not as documentation, but as an epistemological and political practice where knowledge is co-produced through co-presence, improvisation, and embodied interaction.

Building on Faye Ginsburg’s “embedded aesthetics” (1994), the practice of coinvolvement (2018), and Audra Simpson’s notion of “ethnographic refusal” (2014), this approach intervenes in the visual regime of anthropology by centering the terms and rhythms of engagement as determined with, not for, collaborators. It reconfigures authorship, authority, and temporality in the research encounter, resisting the fixity of text-bound representations.

As an early career researcher, I reflect on the tensions between embodied, affective, and situated fieldwork and the challenge of translating such experience into conventional academic outputs. Relational filmmaking insists that the process is the knowledge, raising questions about where and how that knowledge can live and be recognized within academic structures.

This paper contributes to conversations on practice-based knowledge by showing how relational filmmaking can amplify marginalized voices - not by speaking about them but by co-creating space with them. It advocates for multimodal scholarship that is not only inclusive in content but also structurally transformative in how knowledge is produced, circulated, and valued.

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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.

Long 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.

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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.

Long 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.