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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.
Long Abstract:
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:
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.