Last week we published a series of #Colleex blog posts at Allegra Lab.
‘Ethnographic experimentation‘ is the topic we explore in the six posts of this thematic thread whose publication evolved from the first workshop held by the new EASA network #Colleex (‘Ethnographic Experimentation. Fieldwork Devices and Companions’, 13th–15th July 2017, Jardim Botânico Tropical, Lisbon’).
We would like to accompany the debate we sought to open up in Lisbon with this publication in Allegra’s digital platform, an association that has supported our venture since its very beginnings.
Hope you enjoy them, and if so please forward them to anyone potentially interested!
1. ‘Ethnographic experimentation: Other tales of the field‘ | Adolfo Estalella & Tomás Criado
Ethnographic experimentation refers to an ethnographic modality where anthropologists venture into the collaborative production of venues for knowledge creation that turn the field into a site for the construction of joint anthropological problematizations.
2. ‘Devicing’ fieldwork | Tomás Criado & Adolfo Estalella
Collaboration is an epistemic figure resulting from the careful craft of articulating inventive shared modes of doing together with our companions in the field. The field turns into a site for the construction of joint problematizations.
3. ‘Accidental experimental ethnography’ | Eeva Berglund
Researching with social movements (environmental activism, makerspaces) brings ethnography’s nuanced, embodied and collective sense-making to the fore. I also argue that anthropological research within academia is important in its own right.
4. Experimenting with Stories | Rasmus Rodineliussen
Stories are a venue for experimentation and research, they tell about, define, create, and interact with social realities. Therefore they are important to include in analysis, and in order to do so the researcher must be open-minded and confront these stories with a toolkit of methodologies.
5. Note-taking: A ‘fieldwork device’ duplex? | Tomás Criado
A re-description of my two-fold engagement as ethnographer-cum-documenter in the activist design collective En torno a la silla. Highlighting the importance of note-taking as a ‘fieldwork device’ for the problematizing and relating in the field.
6. Notes from inside a Twitter Experiment: #ESIFRice as a participant | Rachel Douglas-Jones
Using participation in a collective online experiment with Twitter as a springboard, I interrogate the tweet as a fieldnote. How do the temporalities of tweeting intersect with disciplinary understandings and imaginings of “field time”, and how might we address fraught question of audiences, transparency and visibility brought about by tweeting from the field?