Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Patricia Scalco
(University of Helsinki)
Samar Kanafani (Ethnography and Knowledge Collective)
Zina Sawaf (Lebanese American University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
In tune with the celebration of EASA's 30th anniversary, this panel seeks to reflect on the current state-of-the-art, and future directions of anthropological methods and methodologies in the light of new institutional, epistemological, material and political sensibilities.
Long Abstract:
The current atmosphere of increasing political and institutional constraints exerted upon ethnographic research under the rubric of 'safety', 'ethics' and 'data protection' has revitalised anthropology's attention on research methods. Taking stock of the paramount significance of these debates, and in tune with the celebration of EASA's 30th anniversary, this panel seeks to reflect on the current state-of-the-art, and future directions of anthropological methods and methodologies in the light of new institutional and epistemological shifts and challenges. Situating anthropological methods and practices in the context of emerging forms of knowledge production, use and dissemination, we reflect on changes in the 'doing' of anthropology in the past and present, from implications of technological change and data processing, to new forms of collaboration, and to the development of anthropological thinking and writing under ever-changing material, institutional and political sensibilities. Focusing on methodological practices, the panel seeks to develop critical insights on current and future directions of anthropology and its methods through contributions that contemplate but are not limited to:
Conceptualisations, implementations, limitations and innovations associated with core anthropological method(ologies) in an era of 'big-data'
Roles, potentialities and shortcomings of ethnography and anthropological insight in the context of competing appraisals of 'multi-scalable', 'impactful' forms of 'knowledge'
Insights and potential concerns regarding the use of anthropological method(ologies) in the context of other disciplines and fields of practice.
Impacts of the changing material, political and institutional sensibilities on anthropological method(ologies).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -Monica Heintz (University of Paris Nanterre)
Paper short abstract:
This paper asks how Open Data policies promoted by plan S at the European level are bound to shape current anthropological practices of data collection and archiving, while still remaining coherent with the anthropologist's ethics and commitment to the communities where data has been co-produced.
Paper long abstract:
In 2018 two European laws intended for the regulation of data accelerate concerns about the ethnographic data archiving and circulation, which the digitalisation process had already started two decades ago. On the one hand Plan S incites at the opening of scientific data resulting from public research and on the other hand the General Data Protection and Regulation act frames the treatment and circulation of personal data- supporting one fundamental requirement in anthropology, that of confidentiality, which pushes towards the quasi-systematic anonymisation of data and its protection. If ethnographic data produced within the ethnographic relation between anthropologists and communities belong to both, how can researchers exercise their scientific duty of making it available according to Open Science principles? Under what juridical, ethical and technical constraints will they work in the future? How are limits to the openness of data negotiated and technically enacted? In order to answer this question, I will draw on a current project initiated on French scientific archives of current and past researchers which brings together researchers, data specialists, jurists and documentalists and deals with limit-cases of ethnographic data that 'resists' being open and shared for ethical, technical or scientific reasons.
Samar Kanafani (Ethnography and Knowledge Collective) Zina Sawaf (Lebanese American University)
Paper short abstract:
Attention to the fieldwork experience enables an intimate reckoning with the overbearing circumstances that affect informants and researchers alike, unlocking valuable forms of critical knowledge of the field, and inviting a "relational" reflexivity in ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
From its initial absence, to its rise in popularity in the 1980s, and its eventual routinization in academia, amid its growing absence in popular culture and rejection within reactionary politics, this paper first reexamines reflexivity's displacement by a narrow understanding of positionality, which considers the researcher's own identity categories as the primary analytical lens. Through examples of ethnographic work from various contexts of the Arab region, it then discusses the interplay between methodology and knowing the field, passing through the ethnographer's critical self-awareness about method and prevailing field conditions, identified as crisis-ridden and overbearing. The paper reveals how attention to the ethnographic experience enables an intimate reckoning with the circumstances that come to bear on informants and researchers alike, in significant and sometimes unavoidable ways, and in so doing contributes to a critical understanding of the field. It argues that conditions of the field that imprint themselves on the ethnographer's emotional, sensorial and sometimes unconscious experiences during fieldwork, translate into particular methodological adaptations and strategies to grapple with impasses or anxieties, thereby unlocking particular forms of knowledge on the spatial, material, discursive/rhetorical and emotive registers. Recognizing a growing preoccupation and a binding solidarity with the overbearing conditions of our fieldsites, the paper invites a conversation about ways of elaborating a "relational reflexivity" born of a collective rather than atomized self-awareness, and its implications for the evolution of our methodology.
Patricia Scalco (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on various temporal and spatial registers that converge, give meaning and calibrate value in the Istanbul Grand Baazar, the paper reflects on the identification and 'management' of radical scalar shifts in processes of 'locating the field' in anthropological fieldwork.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic research in the context of the iconic trade of rugs and kilims in the Istanbul Grand Bazaar, this paper will reflect on the impact of scale in processes of 'locating the field' and qualifying 'context' in anthropological research. Taking stock of the various temporal and spatial registers that converge, give meaning and calibrate value in the Istanbul Grand Baazar, the paper reflects on methodological challenges concerning the identification and 'management' of radical scalar shifts in ethnographic fieldwork.
Acknowledging anthropological methods in their unique and powerful potential for capturing complex phenomena at various levels and registers of everyday life, the paper explores how those radical scalar shifts and dissonances that increasingly qualify 'context', by the same token, increasingly problematise the process of 'locating the field'. Drawing on research concepts developed through collaborative, multidisciplinary and multi-sited efforts, the paper argues for the importance of anchoring processes of 'locating the field' in a critical approach to the notion of 'location' in the first place.