Multimodal Values: The Challenge of Institutionalizing and Evaluating More-than-textual Ethnography

The last issue of the wonderful journal project entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography came with the sad news that they’re closing down shop. It’s perhaps telling that our call for institutionalising more-than-textual ethnography appears in that very last issue. Perhaps it symbolically means that there’s loads of work to be done for multimodality to thrive.

This is also a text that came to be published as I discovered I would be moving to greener career pastures, after many wonderful years developing the vision we here present, and that I hope I can continue to work on as associate researcher of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology.

Many thanks to Ignacio Farías, Julia Schröder and our many collaborators in different projects for their inspiration to think together more-than-textual anthropological worlds!

The end is the beginning is the end is the beginning!

Abstract

In this collective text, we introduce the vision and work of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and propose to explore the values of multimodal ethnographic projects, broadly construed. Thinking from our very explorations in multimodal production, foregrounding a concern on values is critical to share a conundrum that has been haunting us in recent times. Indeed, while engaging in various multimodal projects, we have been confronted with a predicament that we assume many multimodally-invested colleagues must have faced at some point: the problem of how to evaluate and even institutionalize multimodal anthropological projects. This question has started to become pressing when discussing our projects in different academic contexts. In what follows, we aim to expound and discuss the particular challenges of evaluating multimodal productions and thus of institutionalizing values for the multimodal. 

Keywords: valuation, ethnography, multimodality, evaluation, Institutionalization

Recommended citation: Criado, T., Farías, I. and Schröder, J. (2022). ‘Multimodal Values: The Challenge of Institutionalizing and Evaluating More-than-textual Ethnography’, entanglements, 5(1/2): 94-107 | PDF

[Klicken Sie hier für eine deutsche Version dieses Textes]