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- Convenors:
-
Nikola Nölle
(Berlin University Alliance)
Britta Acksel (Wuppertal Institute for Environment, Climate, and Energy)
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- Format:
- Workshop
Short Abstract:
Using interactive mapping exercises we will explore self-positionings and visions of research relations. We focus on experience exchange, bringing our disciplines in conversation with practices from transdisciplinary and collaborative research.
Description:
In anthropology, ethnology, and related disciplines, fieldwork is one, if not the cornerstone of disciplinary identity. Ever since “Writing Culture”, field relations are of growing interest, spawning highly productive concepts for understanding, scrutinizing and criticizing these relations, including ‘cooperation’, ‘co-laboration’, and ‘collaboration’ with and within the field. In parallel, a growing interest in transdisciplinary work developed in the areas of sustainability, climate change, health, and social and environmental justice – a research approach that organizes co-creation and the sharing of knowledge between practitioners and researchers to generate applied findings for societal transformation.
In our workshop, we aim to bring ideas and concepts of different traditions and approaches from anthropology and transdisciplinary research in conversation. While they have many overlaps, they also differ in their objectives, methods, and formats. After brief introductory inputs, we invite all participants of the workshop to share how they see their research relations so far, where they would like to go and how they might design new ways of engaging with their fields.
We will use interactive mapping exercises to explore self-positioning and visions of current research projects, discussing the development of field relations within and beyond our disciplines. The result of the workshop will be a collective map, showing shifting understandings and designs of research relations.
PLEASE NOTE: There is no need to prepare a paper for this workshop. Prior experience in participatory research is not required. We encourage participants to bring curiosity and openness to transdisciplinary approaches as we navigate this collaborative exploration together.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
It will introduce the idea of and the need for an Artefaktenatelier, a multidisciplinary and multimodal space that explores urban life through the experimentation with and the fabrication of ethnographic artifacts.
Contribution long abstract:
Urban spaces are multipliCITIES happening in multiple times, velocities, formats, and scales. To approach them, an urban scholar must have a partial and situated position that is also mobile and transitory. Additionally, they must have a huge, portable, and well-equipped epistemological workbench to craft all types of methodological and theoretical tools to explore, decompose, and (un)write the particular spaces where urban life exists.
My contribution explores the idea of the Artefaktenatelier, a place for ethnographic experimentation where anthropology, journalism, sociology, and science and technology studies come together to design and imagine ethnographic devices, mixing digital and multimodal techniques, mapping, data visualization, and craftsmanship. Although the Artefaktenatelier is still a potentiality, it already has its own first product: a monthly zine exploring the minimal and seemingly irrelevant entanglements composing the city, https://tarde.info.
Contribution short abstract:
Using my ethnographic engagement with counter data practices and mapping as a point of departure, I aim to contribute to this workshop by mapping and reflecting on situated encounters, methods and politics in ethnographic fields.
Contribution long abstract:
Drawing on my current project on data politics in Turkey, I aim to contribute to this workshop by mapping and reflecting on ethnographic engagement with counterdata practices. I seek to explore the complex entanglements between researchers, counterdata actors, infrastructures, contentious data politics, and authoritarian dynamics. Using my ethnographic engagement with counter data practices and mapping as a point of departure, I propose to discuss with other workshop participants the methodological, ethical, and political questions surrounding positionality, situatedness, and collaboration. Considering ethnographic research from a position of critical proximity (Birkbak, Petersen & Jensen, 2015; Kinder-Kurlanda 2024), my aim is to critically examine the challenges and potentials of situated methods, encounters and positionings in the field - particularly in a data scape often characterised and experienced as authoritarian-populist. What methodological lessons and dilemmas do counterdata practices and methods pose for ethnographic inquiry? What boundaries, risks, and limitations come into play when engaging with counterdata practices in authoritarian-populist contexts and beyond? How do counterdata practices and ethnographic research intersect or diverge? Finally, what are the dimensions of ethnographic distance, critical proximity, and engagement both in research on data politics and in politically charged and volatile environments?
Contribution short abstract:
Peatland landscapes play an important role in climate protection, especially the use of photo-voltaic systems promises to be an innovative measure. I conduct fieldwork on the topic and receive a grant that recognizes transdisciplinary research as innovative. But how exactly could this be realised?
Contribution long abstract:
The energy supply and energy transition are two topics that are thoroughly dominating the current national and international discourse. Peatland landscapes play an important role in effectively bringing together climate protection and nature conservation in a socially acceptable manner. Especially the use of photo-voltaic systems in peatland landscapes promises to be an innovative measure and is therefore currently a topic of considerable interest.
As a member of an interdisciplinary team I am doing research on the nexus of energy and nature in Northern Germany. We carry out field research in the field of rewetting peatlands and receive a grant that recognizes transdisciplinary research as important and innovative, so we should at least theoretically deal with this area. But what challenge does a collaboration with companies mean? How do you navigate a highly emotional field like agriculture? And why I am particularly involved with those companies and institutions who offer ‘good’ and ‘green’ solutions? My motivation to take part in the workshop is based on these questions and the desire to move more confidently on this terrain.
Contribution short abstract:
I would like to contribute to the workshop with exploring positionalities in mutually vulnerable field and academic encounters.
Contribution long abstract:
While researching dwelling in emptying landscapes, I have often found myself in field situations with my interlocutors that revealed our mutual vulnerabilities. Our roles and boundaries were continuously shifting and often violated. While at one point my bodily presence in the site was an invasion, a trespassing in the life of a much too scarred community, in other moments my bodied self may have been vulnerable to anger, frustration, disillusionment, or even minor aggressions from behalf of an unfriendly environment. Methodological decisions could alter the course of my research, but monitoring possible) unintended consequences of research processes was a constant necessity. While vulnerabilities in the field were both positive and negative as experiences, and both aided and made my research more difficult, bringing these concerns back from the field and into a multitude of academic contexts, was also always a risk. Mapping these relations in the context of this workshop would provide an opportunity for me to compare my experiences with those of others, and possibly challenge both my and other’s perceived positions in our respective narratives.
Contribution short abstract:
In this workshop, I want to reflect on the limits of collaborative research specifically interrogating the problem of shared consensus in collaborative research.
Contribution long abstract:
I am an anthropologist/sociologist who works in interdisciplinary teams on questions of sustainability and responsible technological and policy design. I've written several auto-ethnographic accounts of different research projects to document how conflict or differences emerge across disciplinary and political positions. I am invested in exploring how difference and dissent work in large interdisciplinary projects, and how it affects knowledge production and collaboration. I would like to bring some of these concerns to the workshop to understand how others make sense of these dilemmas that emerge in large interdisciplinary projects.
Contribution short abstract:
What do I have to give to my interlocutors? As a non-White scholar who sees herself positioned somewhere in between her interlocutors from Mongolia and the anglophone academy, I am keen to discuss how anthropologists make and cut relations on both professional and personal levels.
Contribution long abstract:
My currently research surveys the field of contemporary art in Mongolia, while enquiring about Mongolia's contemporary condition. For this project, I conducted 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork mainly in Ulaanbaatar with occasional trips to rural Mongolia. Contemporary arts practitioners constituted the core of my interlocutors. I lived, interacted, and conversed with these people, many of whom have become personal friends, on a daily basis. As part of our ordinary interactions, I had accompanied and supported my interlocutors in organising and preparing for a range of art exhibitions, sometimes involving labour-intensive tasks such as mopping the floors of an industrial building and lifting heavy objects. A fundamental yet unresolved anthropological question nagged me constantly during and after fieldwork: What do I have to give to my interlocutors, whose contributions and life stories make the content of my intellectual project? How I give back, if I now hold the spirit of their gifts? As a non-White scholar who sees herself positioned somewhere in between her interlocutors from Mongolia and her academic institution (and the broader institution of anglophone academia), I am keen to discuss how anthropologists make and cut relations with our interlocutors, on whom we often depend during fieldwork, on both professional and personal levels. Being a young woman and a first-time fieldworker, solitary research also involved a constant negotiation of social relations that involved both expanding and cutting networks. These questions, I suggest, are important to put on the table of methodological discussions.
Contribution short abstract:
Study examines the intersection of language, body, and architecture through analogies and metaphors. By tracing bodily terms like "skeleton" and "skin" in architectural discourse, it develops a fluid classification system, offering new insights into how language shapes architectural understanding.
Contribution long abstract:
The concepts of analogy and metaphor bridge the disciplines of language and architecture, enabling a deeper understanding of their intersections. This study investigates how bodily terms such as "skeleton," "skin," and "wing" transition into architectural terminology, revealing the richness of language in shaping architectural thought and representation. By tracing these analogies and metaphors, the research explores how linguistic elements derived from human and non-human bodies inform architectural discourse and production.
The study develops a classification system titled the "Bodily, Architectural, and Personal Lexicon," which reinterprets conventional linguistic categories. This framework organizes words and metaphors into three thematic headings: "Abstraction," "Personification," and "Imitation," reflecting how architectural terminology adopts bodily attributes. Metaphors are treated as translations between experiences stored in mental and social lexicons, highlighting their ability to create intermediate meanings. This fluid classification remains open-ended, emphasizing the adaptive nature of language within architectural contexts.
By mapping the shifts between the initial and evolved meanings of words, the study identifies shared traits among selected terms, offering an inclusive framework to understand the interplay between architecture and language. This exploration challenges traditional boundaries, providing a new lens through which to view how analogies and metaphors enrich architectural understanding. Ultimately, the study positions itself as a collaborative and interdisciplinary inquiry, aligning with broader themes of rethinking and reimagining entrenched disciplinary paradigms.
Contribution short abstract:
Scales of relationality
Contribution long abstract:
My research includes direct participation as an activist and contributor to environmental movements. But how close to the action must I be to be considered a contributor? Might I be on the periphery and "walking with", or is this too a kind of extractive research design? What about all I do to contribute that has nothing to do with research, therefore not represented in any submitted text? Thanks for the opportunity to collectively explore these questions.
Contribution short abstract:
Taking the example of my current project on gender relations in Calabria and the mafia ´ndrangheta, my contribution aims to discuss a seven-dimensional coordinate system, which I propose in order to describe different aspects of positioning.
Contribution long abstract:
Relations between ethnographers and the actors in their field emerge during the research process, shaped by complex dynamics of positioning and being positioned. Drawing on my fieldwork experiences in the politicized field of anti-genderism in academic contexts and referring to historical as well as current discussions in ethnology and folklore studies, I have developed a seven-dimensional coordinate system that addresses different aspects of positioning. The researchers' position in the field is shaped by a number of factors, including their intersectional position, personal values, views on human rights discourse, adherence to an ethics of responsibility versus an ethics of attitude, understanding of ethnography as intervention versus observation-centered, power relations, and developments over time. These dimensions influence the manner in which researchers conduct themselves, for example, whether they may feel obliged to collaborate with or (actively) support their field partners and to co-produce knowledge together, or conversely, to attempt to limit their impact on the field to a minimum or even to oppose (some) of their interlocutors. Taking the example of my current project on gender relations in Calabria and the Calabrian mafia ´ndrangheta, I would like to discuss with other workshop participants firstly the potential utility of the identified dimensions of positioning in preparing for different scenarios within the field and analysing relations with field partners, and secondly the question of whether my coordinate system could be modified and/or refined.
Contribution short abstract:
Two distinct representational and cognitive practices, maps and narratives, are interconnected with reference to several Aegean modern insular communities. Can we further elaborate the concept of “narrative maps” through transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological tools?
Contribution long abstract:
This contribution draws in previous work on narrative maps as a means of spatial cognition, but also collective, social, and religious memory. In the occasion of this workshop, I propose further investigation of this social and cognitive practice, which proves to be precariously dependent on the uses of landscape and the pressure for economic development – in terms of sustainability or not. We thus attempt to link two distinct representational practices, maps and narratives, with reference to long fieldwork in several Aegean modern insular communities. Here, the concept of “narrative maps” acquires both the meaning of collective representations and of a complex cognitive function for memorising and mapping space through bodily transfers and collective memory. To what extent is a community able to preserve collective memory with its maps spontaneously? How the experience of space permeates collectivity through narratives, then and now?
A transdisciplinary approach of the concept “narrative maps”, as individual, social and fieldwork practice, would be of major interest for a large number of combined disciplines, such as anthropology, ethnoarchaelogy and folkloristics, behavioural geography, cognitive studies and (social) neuroscience.
Contribution short abstract:
Navigating inter- and transdisciplinarity: collaborative, creative methods in anthropological research on Western European Rights of Rivers
Contribution long abstract:
My research revolves around communities and actors claiming rights for rivers in Western Europe. The practice of mapping here comes with three functions, all of which I would like to further explore: reviewing international Rights of Rivers actor landscapes, collaboratively mapping river relations in fieldwork to come - and, finally, reflecting the disciplines and relations involved in such creative, collaborative research.