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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
- Stream:
- Knowledge Production & Reflexivity
- Location:
- KQF2, King's College Quad
- Sessions:
- Thursday 5 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
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 1 Thursday 5 June, 2025, -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.
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?
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?
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.
Short abstract
I would like to contribute to the workshop with exploring positionalities in mutually vulnerable field and academic encounters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Short abstract
Navigating inter- and transdisciplinarity: collaborative, creative methods in anthropological research on Western European Rights of Rivers
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.