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Short abstract

Roundtable: Unwriting art ethnography: translating, decoding, and interpreting sensory, embodied, and participatory practices

Long abstract

This roundtable builds on our panel’s provocation to “unwrite” dominant modes of ethnographic representation by asking how artistic, embodied, and sensory practices can reshape the terms of knowledge production in anthropology and related disciplines.

We focus on practices that resist easy transcription—those that unfold through gesture, image, material, or movement - and consider how they might be translated without being flattened! What forms of understanding emerge when ethnographic attention is attuned not to narrative clarity but to atmospheric, aesthetic, and relational modes of knowing?

Intended as a shared space for researchers working at the intersections - of art, anthropology, disability studies, and performance m and beyond - this session invites collective reflection on how unwriting can function as a method: one that brings marginalised voices and non-verbal practices to the centre, and that holds space for ambiguity, partial connection, and creative translation.

Contributors draw from diverse methods including sound work, filmmaking, performance, visual and multimodal ethnography, and artistic research. The discussion will also reflect on the question, or need, to produce text based outputs in institutional and academic settings, and explore how alternative forms—exhibitions, scores, participatory processes— might serve as both research and communication?

The roundtable invites everyone to share experiences and questions around non-textual and transmodal knowledge-making, with a focus on collaboration, care, and accessibility.

Together, we ask: how might unwriting expand the possibilities for ethnographic practice—and for how we listen, record, and respond in a plural and entangled world?