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Short abstract

Over 15 years of interdisciplinary work in anthropology, sociology, and media across the UK, Denmark, and Sweden, I’ve faced the tension where "ethnography" is often reduced to short-term qualitative methods, like interviews, rather than the immersive, long-term fieldwork central to anthropology. I argue that while we should embrace diverse methods, it’s essential to uphold the value of sustained, everyday engagement to co-produce knowledge and truly understand cultures.

Long abstract

In the last 15 years, having worked in anthropology, sociology and media departments in the UK, Denmark and Sweden, taking part in three comparative and interdisciplinary EU and Danish funded projects (besides my own two individual projects), I was usually hired as the anthropologist, who will be doing the “fieldwork/ethnography”. Similar to Howell’s (2017) frustration of how other disciplines describe ethnography, I have also found myself in tension or in confusion that when the projects referred to ethnographic methods or fieldwork for me to do, they mostly meant “qualitative methods” and required for instance collecting qualitative interviews in a few months. Equivalently, when I attended conferences relating to interdisciplinary subjects, such as migration, what some migration scholars meant by ethnography was to conduct interviews in an asylum centre and visiting the centre on some occasions to volunteer. For those of us who work in between/intra/trans disciplines combining anthropology, migration and mobility studies, and media and communication, what I argue is to embrace the methodological contributions of different disciplines, but still emphasise the long-term, immersive ethnography, where the anthropologists co-produce culture and anthropological knowledge together with the informants. It is during the long-term immersive ethnography, through living together, learning together and sharing the everyday life, life at its own pace and serendipity that we, anthropologists get to know cultures and produce anthropological knowledge.

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Short abstract

Tourism studies, an interdisciplinary (un)discipline, bridges fields like ethnology/anthropology, geography, business studies and many others, which can create both innovation and marginalisation. This paper explores how "unwritten" disciplinary spaces can drive methodological creativity while navigating disciplinary boundaries and sometimes tensions.

Long abstract

Tourism studies occupies an interdisciplinary space bordering many fields including but not limited to ethnology, folklore studies, socio-cultural anthropology, human geography, sociology, business and management studies and many others. This offers space for examining some of the potentially productive tensions that arise when disciplinary boundaries are crossed which I will do based on my experience as an ethnologist/anthropologist working at a business school. I will argue that as an (un)discipline, tourism studies exemplifies the dual nature of "unwritten" spaces, serving as sites of both certain disciplinary marginalisation but also innovation. While these spaces therefore can foster methodological and theoretical creativity and development, some problems with how to navigate the (un)disciplinary boundaries and institutional recognition also arise. This paper focuses mostly on how methods and theories from ethnology and anthropology can be adapted and transformed within qualitative tourism research. Sometimes considered somewhat peripheral within the social sciences, tourism studies can nevertheless push some boundaries by questioning dichotomies like host and guest or field and home, highlighting the fluid and hybrid nature of our contemporary "glocal" mobilities. This paper therefore critically engages with both the opportunities and constraints of working across disciplines, illustrating how tourism studies embodies some of the processes of both marginalisation and creativity at the borders of academic fields and showing that the "unwritten" spaces can be grounds for innovation.

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Short abstract

The paper reflects on the experiences of the authors, a digital anthropologist and a visual anthropologist, who work in media and communication studies departments. It examines their contributions and the challenges they encounter in teaching, supervision, and research.

Long abstract

Over the last thirty years, with the advent of the digital era, anthropology has engaged in a productive dialogue with the fields of media, communication and visual studies. A love affair has taken place between these fields (Pertierra 2018), and an increasing number of anthropologists interested in matters of digital (and digital visual) culture have found the departments of communications and media studies interesting spaces for their work. This paper presents and reflects on the experiences of the authors, respectively a digital and a visual anthropologist, both active within media and communication studies departments. Starting with some reflections on the key theoretical and methodological contributions of anthropology to the field of communication studies, the paper will then proceed to examine the key challenges that they both have encountered at institutional level as well at the level of everyday practice of teaching, supervision and research. Some of the questions addressed will be:

• to what extent can communication studies accommodate for the pace and time requirements of ethnography?

• How can they capitalize upon the knowledge ethnography produces and hence upon the presence of anthropologists in their departments?

• And, reversely, how can anthropologists interested in digital visual communication gain a more critical perspective on their discipline by working in a department of communications studies?

• And finally, how can anthropologists survive and capitalize upon their research tradition in institutions dominated by different (often quantitative) research methods, by a higher speed of production and by the systematic practice of group authorship?

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Short abstract

In Romania, anthropology lacks formal recognition. However, in recent years, two anthropologists have initiated a project to popularise methodological and theoretical particularities of anthropology. Can the public arena nurture practices of ‘un/writing’ this discipline?

Long abstract

In Romania, where I am currently based, anthropology is not formally recognised as a discipline (e.g., I hold a PhD in Anthropology from a university abroad, but the Ministry of Education has recognised it as a PhD in Sociology, not in Anthropology; the profession of sociologist exists in the official nomenclature of occupations, but not that of anthropologist; I work in a department of sociology that classifies anthropology as a specialisation, not as a discipline). Informally, anthropology occupies a disciplinary niche between sociology, cultural studies, and cultural journalism. Moreover, anthropology is sometimes being depreciated as too subjective by sociologists and appropriated as storytelling by cultural journalists. However, anthropology is trendy. Mature students with different backgrounds, from arts and letters to publicity, communication, marketing, and medicine enrol in MA programmes and, less frequently, BA programmes in anthropology. This is the context in which in recent years a project of ‘unwriting’ these representations of anthropology or, in other words, ‘writing’ anthropology, has unfolded. The two anthropologists behind a research company called Antropedia have initiated this project. In addition, the project has developed with the participation of ethnologists, folklorists, and anthropologists, who contribute publicly oriented presentations of their research and emphasise the methodological and theoretical particularities of their disciplines. In this paper, I discuss the work that Antropedia does to popularise anthropology and consolidate disciplinary legitimacy. Through this paper, I invite reflection on how the public space can nurture practices of ‘un/writing’ and can turn disciplinary and institutional vulnerability into opportunity.

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Short abstract

This paper explores early 20th-century folklorists in French-speaking Switzerland who did not carry out their work in universities. We propose to look at the history of knowledge production 'from below' in order to examine whether they were able to overcome professional barriers and if they contributed to the discipline in alternative ways.

Long abstract

During the first half of the 20th century, in French-speaking Switzerland, unlike in many other parts of Europe, folklore studies didn't find their place in the academic world. This may be the reason why there is as yet no study of the practice of the discipline in this part of the country. But folklore research has been produced outside the universities. Despite the lack of institutionalization, amateur production flourished between the end of the 19th century and 1950. Those amateurs wrote for periodicals and were active in local societies, such as the 'patoisants' (dialect speakers) associations that became increasingly common in the countryside in the early 20th. This paper examines who these amateurs were, how and where they carried out their activities. In particular, it looks at their relations with academic circles in German-speaking Switzerland, where folklore studies were conducted at universities. The latter, in fact, expressed the wish to cooperate with local relays in French-speaking Switzerland in order to obtain information from the "local population" itself. Did these interactions take the form of genuine scientific interaction? On the one hand, it will be shown whether these folklorists on the margins of the academic system sought professional recognition and to what extent they managed to overcome the barriers between different milieus. On the other hand, I will consider the question whether their non-academic and often non-written participation has contributed to the discipline in a different way or whether these local amateurs have also integrated stereotypical narratives around 'popular traditions'.

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Short abstract

Area Studies face challenges as enrolments in non-English languages decline and programs close due to market-driven policies. This limits fieldwork and threatens cross-cultural research. Despite public interest in global cultures via media, academic trends undervalue area specialists, risking the spread of orientalist tropes.

Long abstract

Folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnologists have long crafted descriptions of diversity by immersing themselves in cultures across the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Today, this tradition faces significant challenges. Enrolments in non-English languages are declining, and programme closures in the UK, Australia, and beyond reflect the failures of university marketization. Reliant on student recruitment revenue and subject to populist policies, universities are increasingly less supportive of cross-cultural and multilingual scholarship.

As a result, fewer scholars engage in fieldwork in culturally distant contexts, shifting research toward topics ‘close to home.’ This trend renders area specialists more precarious—whether early-career researchers constrained by narrow funding or established academics facing institutional uncertainty. Public interest in areas such as East Asia thrives through popular media formats like podcasts and vlogging. At the same time, increasing numbers of disciplines are keen to comment on other cultures as a part of impact and decolonisation without area specialists included. In this context, the viability of area studies in academia continues to decline. The ‘cruel optimism’ of marketization has devalued area studies just as public curiosity about these regions grows. Perhaps ironically, there is increasingly high-quality popular media that generates insights scholars strive for. At the same time, problematic material abounds. Without spaces dedicated to comparative perspectives, linguistic proficiency, and the practice of rendering the ‘strange familiar,’ public discourse risks perpetuating orientalist tropes. Following the above, I explore how we are in the midst of ‘unwriting’ area specialism.