Author: tscriado

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accessibility caring infrastructures ethics, politics and economy of care events experimental collaborations objects of care and care practices participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures sociality & isolation

Goldsmiths Anthropology research >< practice seminar series – 'Technologies of friendship'

research >< practice seminar series

Next 9 Nov 2016 from 4-6pm, I will be sharing bits and pieces of my recent ethnographic work and reflections at the Goldsmiths Anthropology  research >< practice seminar series at RHB 256, Richard Hoggart Building

This seminar series explores the currency of practice research within and without anthropology. It will unpack some of the ways in which the relationship between these two “modes of engagement” has been understood and articulated, from militancy to co-design, from enskillment to collaborative art projects. Drawing from their first-hand experience in the field, the speakers will consider the epistemological challenges and opportunities of practice-led and practice-based research (as well as research-led practice).

Moderator and Organiser: Dr Isaac Marrero-Guillamon

‘Technologies of friendship’: Independent-living activism, open design and the refiguration of the social and the ethnographic

What stories–and more specifically ethnographic stories–would open design allow us to tell? Whereas open design is commonly associated with a multifarious transformation of knowledge-production and economic practices in and around design, in this presentation I will focus on their effect on the practice of ethnography and on the materialisation of forms of relatedness. To do this, I will draw from my engagement since 2012 as ethnographer/documentator in the Barcelona-based activist design collective En torno a la silla (ETS), whose primary principle–resonating with other aspects of the independent-living movement it is part of–is to grant value to experience as a form of knowledge to be used in processes of collaborative alteration of our material surroundings, engaging in the auto-fabrication of open design objects. Operating in a harsh context of austerity measures, fighting for accessibility for ETS has always implied reclaiming the necessary material means to increase the conditions of access between bodily diverse people. Hence, the interest is not to create ‘inclusive objects’–that seek to ‘integrate’ or, rather, open up the gates of an already existing community to those who had been formerly expelled from it–but to produce what they have usually referred to as ‘technologies of friendship’ (tecnologías de la amistad): this term does not bring to the fore a distinctive and static ontology of relations, but thanks to the reflexivity afforded by the investment in documentation, it signals a recursive interstitial form of probing into alternative material forms of relatedness to the ones offered by the state and the market.

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caring infrastructures ethics, politics and economy of care events functional diversity & disability rights independent-living objects of care and care practices open sourcing participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures personal autonomy policies politics and economy of care technical aids urban and personal devices

MCTS, TU Munich – Research Colloquium: ‘Tinkering with care’

Tutorial rampa portátil, En torno a la silla CC BY NC SA 2015

On Tuesday, 25 Oct 2016, Dr. Tomás S. Criado (MCTS) will give a talk on “Tinkering with care: Austere experiments with alternative welfare infrastructures” at the MCTS (TU Munich) Research Colloquium.

The event will take place at MCTS, Augustenstr. 46, seminar room 270 and start at 5:00 pm.

The MCTS Research Colloquium is designed to present recent Science and Technology Studies projects as well as to stimulate discussion on the various research activities by MCTS scholars and their guests.

**

Abstract for the talk

Once considered the primary institutional expression of care in the global North, the Welfare State and its infrastructures are now under great strains. Apart from neoliberal attempts at streamlining ‘the social’, different versions of Welfare across Europe have also been contested by disability rights movements due to their articulation around ‘dependence’. In this presentation, I will show a particular set of experiments at tinkering with such articulations of care and citizenship in particularly ‘austere’ times. Indeed, I will reflect on the practices I have been studying ethnographically in the past years in Spain, involving activist self-management or auto-fabrication of self-care devices by independent-living collectives. This is a response to both recent legal developments, the inadequacy of standardized market products, the increasing lack of funds, and the cracks in the public services, such as the system of provision of technical aids–a particular care regime I will generically refer to as ‘the catalogue’. As part of my involvement with different collectives tinkering, in their own idiom, with care arrangements, I will narrate the collaborative design practices and the strategies of different independent-living activists and engaged professionals attempting to bring into existence alternative and more caring forms of envisioning, materializing and valuing these arrangements. In sheer contrast with the state/corporate expert-based ‘catalogue’ of products and services, tinkering with care for these groups entails engaging in austere and fragile self-experimental design practices where alternative epistemic, economic and political ‘regimes of co-production’ (experience-based, collaborative, and self-produced) are tested and demonstrated. In describing this, I will not only try to ethnographically take issue with the understandings of welfare ‘otherwise’ they bring to the fore, but also with how they might help us address, in a more vernacular light, the different notions of care being developed recently in STS.

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accessibility caring infrastructures events legal participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures policies politics and economy of care urban and personal devices valuation

ICS, ULisboa – Visiting Researcher seminar: ‘Give Us an Institute and We Will Raise an Accessible Barcelona’

Give Us an Institute and We Will Raise an Accessible Barcelona

Next week I will be giving a Visiting Researcher seminar at the ICS-ULisboa

Organized by Dr. Ana Delicado, Research group ‘Environment, Territory and Society’

**

Give Us an Institute and We Will Raise an Accessible Barcelona

12 October 2016 14.30h – 16.30h

Sala 2, ICS-ULisboa

This presentation reports on ethnographic and archival work undertaken in 2014 and 2016 at a very small and peripheral institute, part of Barcelona’s City Hall, the Institut Municipal de Persones amb Discapacitat (IMPD): enforcing and supervising the city-wide planning and implementation of accessible urban and transport infrastructures. Allegedly, the IMPD has been crucial for Barcelona’s huge transformation into one of the most accessible cities in the world. Officially founded in 1990–merging disability-specific management units (patronats) that emerged after the disability rights struggles in the late 1970s–this institute’s main objective has been that of offering a way for disabled people to take part in the city’s planning. Indeed, the IMPD’s council is jointly managed by civil servants–mostly social workers–and disabled people’s representatives elected every 4 years. But how could such a small entity have a lasting impact on a huge and extremely complex municipal structure? And how, in doing so, could it grant the ‘material expression’ of accessibility rights for its most vulnerable citizens?

In this presentation I will seek to explain this paying particular attention to the ‘documentary interfaces’ put together to articulate interesting relationships between the technicians and the accessibility advocates. To be more specific, not only will I seek to report on (a) on the role of topic-specific ‘commissions of participation’, where experiential and embodied knowledge from the disabled is documented and brought together to sensitize the architects and engineers in charge of implementing wider municipal projects; but also on other ‘smaller interventions’, such as: (b) its regular publications, sensitization campaigns and outreach leaflets; and (c) the work of its technicians, constantly supervising and writing reports on the designs, materials, and implementation of different urban accessibility projects. Building from this, I seek to foreground the IMPD as a ‘sensitizing device’, affecting in different modes the wider implementation of an ‘accessibility culture’ within the City Hall’s urban professionals’ planning and interventions. A fragile and fallible diplomatic task of affecting peripherally the multifarious sociomaterial articulation of accessibility arrangements, where many compromises have to be made with the goal of making Barcelona a city ‘for all’.

Categories
caring infrastructures ethics, politics and economy of care functional diversity & disability rights objects of care and care practices participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures politics and economy of care publications technical aids techniques & ways of doing urban and personal devices

Caring through Design?: En torno a la silla and the ‘Joint Problem-Making’ of Technical Aids

1119053498

Charlotte Bates, Rob Imrie, and Kim Kullman have edited the challenging compilation Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities (out November 2016 with Wiley-Blackwell).
In their words, the book: “connects the study of design with care, and explores how concepts of care may have relevance for the ways in which urban environments are designed. It explores how practices and spaces of care are sustained specifically in urban settings, thereby throwing light on an important arena of care that current work has rarely discussed in detail.”
Israel Rodríguez-Giralt and I contribute with the Chapter 11 “Caring through Design?: En torno a la silla and the ‘Joint Problem-Making’ of Technical Aids“ (pp. 198-218).
The idea for a wheelchair armrest/briefcase CC BY NC SA En torno a la silla (2012)

Abstract

In this paper, we engage with the practices of En torno a la silla (ETS), which involve fostering small DIY interventions and collective material explorations, in order to demonstrate how these present a particularly interesting mode of caring through design. They do so, firstly, by responding to the pressing needs and widespread instability that our wheelchair friends face in present-day Spain, and, secondly, through the intermingling of open design and the Independent-Living movement’s practices and method, which, taken together, enable a politicisation and problematisation of the usual roles of people and objects in the design process. In the more conventional creation of commoditized care technologies, such as technical aids, the role of the designer as expert is clearly disconnected from that of the lay or end user. Rather, technical aids are objects embodying the expertise of the designer to address the needs of the user. As we will argue, ETS unfolds a ‘more radical’ approach to the design of these gadgets through what we will term ‘joint problem-making,’ whereby caring is understood as a way of sharing problems between users and designers, bringing together different skills to collaboratively explore potential solutions.

PDF

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events experimental collaborations functional diversity & disability rights independent-living participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures

CISP, Goldsmiths – ‘The New Experimentalisms’ workshop

CISP-Goldsmiths

I will be presenting the introduction to the forthcoming book ‘Experimental collaborations: Ethnography through fieldwork devices‘ (co-edited with Adolfo Estalella) at the The New Experimentalisms, a one day workshop at CISP/Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Tuesday September 20th 2016, 10-5pm

Room RHB 137a

Organized by Michael Guggenheim, Dan Neyland, Alex Wilkie

Recent Science and Technology Studies (STS) work on experiments has provided a basis for rethinking the terms, practices and consequences of experimentation. This has opened up opportunities to question, for example, experimental controls, provocative containments, training and professional practice. This work has also broadened the traditional STS focus on scientific laboratories to also include economic, social scientific and commercial experimentation, exploring new territories of experimentation and their attendant means of reproducing the world.

At the same time, scholars in STS, Sociology, Anthropology and Design have pursued experiments not just as an object of study, but also as something to do. Here we find, for example, experiments with algorithmic walks, expertise and issues. An earlier critique of experiments as artificial and interventionist has given way to a new embracing of material staging of situations and problems.

Social researchers have come to acknowledge we can learn precisely because of the non-naturalism of experiments. Experiments have become legitimate forms to intervene in the world, and to invent new worlds.  In this way STS scholars have begun to think again about the realities in which they participate. In this workshop we will feature recent experimenters within STS with scholars who have analysed experiments in specific fields.

 

Programme

10.00: Welcome

10.15-11.30: Pelle Ehn (Design, Malmö):

democratic design experiments (in the small)

Commentator: Kim Kullmann (Sociology, Goldmsiths) 

11.45-1pm: Tomás Sánchez Criado (STS, Munich):

The Ethnographic Experiment, Revisited: Experimental Collaborations, or the ‘Devicing’ of Fieldwork for Joint Problem-Making

Commentator: Isaac Marrero-Guillamón (Anthropology, Goldsmiths)

1pm – 2pm: lunch

2pm-3.15pm: Claire Waterton (Sociology, Lancaster):

An Experimental Collective: Working Through Modalities and the Enrichment of Land and Water

Commentator: Jennifer Gabrys (Sociology, Goldsmiths) 

3.30pm-4.45pm: Tobias Bornakke Jørgensen (Sociology, Copenhagen):

Sensing Data: The Emergence of Sensor-Based Experiments in the Social Sciences

Commentator: Noortje Marres (Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Warwick).

Categories
accessibility caring infrastructures independent-living legal objects of care and care practices open sourcing participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures publications technical aids urban and personal devices

Urban accessibility issues: Technoscientific democratizations at the documentation interface

 

Picture CC BY Maria José Agüero
Carrers per a tothom demonstration, Barcelona, 14 March 2015 CC BY M.J. Agüero

As part of a special feature in the journal CITY edited by Ignacio Farías and Anders Blok on “Technical democracy as a challenge for urban studies”, Marcos Cereceda and I are publishing this article on accessibility struggles in Barcelona and their documentation interfaces.

CITY, 2016 VOL. 20, NO. 4, pp. 619-636, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1194004

Abstract

After many struggles from disability rights and independent-living advocates, urban accessibility has gradually become a concern for many urban planners across post-industrial countries. In this paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork studies in Barcelona working with urban accessibility professionals and activists, we argue for the importance of the ‘documentation interfaces’ created in their struggles: that is, the relational processes to collaboratively build multi-media accounts in a diversity of formats seeking to enforce different translations of bodily needs into specific urban accessibility arrangements. In discussion with the asymmetries that the ongoing expertization of accessibility might be opening up, we would like to foreground these apparently irrelevant practices as an interesting site to reflect on how urban accessibility struggles might allow us to rethink the project of technical democracy and its applications to urban issues. Two cases are analyzed: (1) the creation of Streets for All, a platform to contest and to sensitize technicians and citizens alike of the problems of ‘shared streets’ for the blind and partially sighted led by the Catalan Association for the Blind; and (2) the organization of the Tinkerthon, a DIY and open-source hardware workshop boosted by En torno a la silla to facilitate the creation of a network of tinkerers seeking to self-manage accessibility infrastructures. These cases not only bring to the fore different takes on the democratization of the relations between technical professionals and disability rights advocates, but also offer different approaches to the politics of universals in the design of urban accessibility arrangements.

Journal’s website (free PDF access)

PDF

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experimental collaborations publications research projects

Colleex: A Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation | Allegra Lab

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ALLEGRA LAB

Fieldwork, the cornerstone to the ethnographer’s magic, seems to be under siege in recent times. The invocation that it ‘is not what it used to be’ runs parallel to intense debates on the place of ethnography in the production of anthropological knowledge (see for instance the recent take and forth on Ingold’s critique on ethnography here, here, and here). Challenges to fieldwork (and ethnography) come from all the corners of the discipline: anthropologist injecting a sensory approach to ethnography, drawing inspiration of design practices to devise new venues for the production of anthropological knowledge or endeavouring into partnerships with other disciplines and substituting the traditional trope of comparison for that of collaboration.

Amid this broad debate on the norm and form of fieldwork, we intend to open a debate on the place of experimentation in anthropology.

The invocation of experimentation in anthropology is not completely new, as we would like to recall, ‘the reflexive turn’ of the 1980s inaugurated a period of creative exploration of writing genres that George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer described in experimental terms: ‘What is happening seems to us to be a pregnant moment in which every individual project of ethnographic research and writing is potentially an experiment’. While this turn focussed on the space of representation (particularly the written form), we suggest now the opportunity to emplace the experimental drive of ethnography into fieldwork. A call that echoes and draws inspiration of a number of projects carried out in recent times by a series of anthropologist (we find especially inspiring the work of Paul Rabinow, George E. Marcus and Douglas Holmes, Kim Fortun, Michael Fortun, Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Annelise Riles, among many others).

A very important caveat, we do not intend to place experimentation and (participant) observation in opposition, only highlight their specificities. Indeed we think that both epistemic practices usually establish complex relationships in our fieldwork, at times they are entangled, juxtaposed or alternated.

Despite these relationships, we contend that experimentation involves a different epistemic practice to participant observation and it constitutes an alternative trope to describe our forms of engagement in the field.

Colleex thus intents to open a space for debate and intervention around experimental forms of ethnographic fieldwork. It seeks to work as a collaboratory whose main agenda is to foster theoretical debates and practical explorations on this topic. Below you can read the statement for the network proposal; if you are interested just send as an email (tomas.criado@tum.de and jestalellaf@uoc.edu) or sign the proposal here. The network builds on and intends to continue the work we have been doing in the previous two years in a series of meetings and writings, you can have a glimpsed of it here.

Colleex: A Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation

Colleex is a network that aims to open a space for debate and intervention around experimental forms of ethnographic fieldwork. Amid profound debates in recent years on the nature and conventions of ethnography, Colleex seeks to explore novel forms of knowledge production for anthropology. The network is organized as a collaboratory whose main agenda is to foster theoretical debates and practical explorations on what we call ethnographic experimentation.

Fieldwork

Fieldwork has traditionally been understood as the cornerstone epistemic situation for the production of anthropological knowledge in ethnography. Both an empirical practice and disciplinary narrative, we know that nowadays fieldwork is not what it used to be —or maybe it has never been what the canon narrates. The solitary confined research practice of ethnography has given way to collaborative projects, far-away locations have been replaced by close-to-home field sites, and traditional visual predominance has been expanded into a multi-sensory concern.

Anthropological imagination has traditionally understood the epistemic practice of fieldwork in observational terms. The core trope of participant observation has worked both as description and prescription for the kind of social relationships and epistemic practices through which anthropologists produce knowledge in the field.

The entrance of anthropology in novel empirical sites and the construction of new objects of study in the last decades seem to require from us to urgently revise and devise other forms of practising fieldwork.

Experimentation

Invoking the figure of the experiment acts as a provocation to investigate alternative epistemic practices in ethnography. Colleex intends to explore the infrastructures, spaces, forms of relationships, methods and techniques required to inject an experimental sensibility in fieldwork. Nevertheless, there is no intention to oppose experimentation to observation. On the contrary, Colleex seeks to discern the multiple forms of relationship between these two epistemic forms —and their correlate modes of relationality— that in different circumstances and situations may be complementary, adjacent or substitutive.

Not alien to the anthropological endeavour, experimentation was invoked decades ago as an opportunity to renovate the discipline through novel forms of ethnographic writing and representation. Colleex network would like to further develop that experimental impulse present in many anthropological sensibilities, shifting its locus from the process of writing to the practice of fieldwork. The intention is to work on a question: What would ethnographic fieldwork look like if it was shaped around the epistemic practice of experimentation?

Hence, fieldwork experimentation is not being invoked just for its own sake but because there is a prospect that it could help foster new forms of anthropological theorization.

Collaboration

The network seeks to connect with anthropologists and other practitioners of ethnography interested in discussing their fieldwork practice. It could be of interest for specialists in the fields of visual anthropology, sensory anthropology, digital ethnography, design anthropology, creative intersections of art and anthropology, or anthropology and STS. The network also seeks to include specialists from other domains like art, cultural producers, designers and practitioners of any discipline interested in the creative experimentation with ethnographic practice. The inventive unfolding of ethnography taking place in those areas could greatly contribute to strengthen the reach of anthropological fieldwork practices.

Colleex is established as a collaboratory, a project that aims at promoting forms of collaboration among all those interested in the topic under discussion.

In contrast with permanent networks, from its very inception Colleex would like to work with a temporary horizon of 5 years, after which we expect to deliver a contribution of the work done by the network in appropriate formats, be it in conventional academic and/or more experimental formats faithful to the collaboratory sensibility we are invoking. Four convenors will develop their task for periods of two years. The network will only continue after the first period of five years if a designed program for its continuity is agreed by its members.

**

+ìnfo on the Colleex Network: EASA website & the network’s blog

Categories
experimental collaborations participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures publications

CLEENIK: A Clinic for Ethnographic Experimentation Syndromes | Allegra Lab

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ALLEGRA LAB

Have you been affected by Ethnographic Experimentation Breakdown (EEB) or Excess of Engagement Stress (EES)? Are you suffering from breach-of-the-canon infection (BOTS)? Do you know how to detect the symptoms of Collaborative Fieldwork Disorder (CoFD) or Transdisciplinary/Interdisciplinary Associative Disorder (TRIAD)? If you have been experiencing some of these symptoms perhaps the CLEENIK integral treatment could be what you need. CLEENIK is a specialized anthropological clinic treating anthropologists suffering from the multiple syndromes consequence of ethnographic experiments in fieldwork.

This was our call for the laboratory that we organized in the last EASA conference (Milano, 2016). Laboratories grant spaces to play with academic formats and, hence, we took advantage of this opportunity to organize a meeting that staged a group therapy session for all those anthropologists whose fieldwork had taken an experimental detour. Our objective was to create the grounds for a discussion around the epistemic figure of ethnographic experimentation in fieldwork.

This session and our recent work on ethnographic experimentation stems from recent reflections contending that contemporary ethnographic fieldwork ‘is not what it used to be’ (as James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus phrased it in their edited book and debates on the transformation of the norm and form of fieldwork. We may refer to recent projects that have injected an experimental drive in their fieldwork, among them those of Paul Rabinow (in his collaborative work with Gaymon Bennett and Anthony Stavrianakis), Kim and Michael Fortun and Douglas Holmes and George Marcus.

Invoking the figure of experimentation is for us a provocation to investigate epistemic practices and descriptions of fieldwork that may not be encapsulated under the heading of participant observation.

What would ethnographic fieldwork look like if shaped by practices of experimentation? The previously referred authors offer some insights (this is the topic too of a book we have been editing and contributing to for the EASA book series, more on it here). Yet, describing their fieldwork in experimental terms instead of drawing on the trope of participant observation poses anthropologists (especially those in early career stages) difficult questions: Have I been too involved in my fieldwork? Have I correctly followed the method? Have I maintained a proper distance? We designed the workspace of the lab attempting to address scholars facing this kind of questions.

The idea for the CLEENIK was to open a therapeutic space to face the worries that appear in experimental fieldwork, those situations that seem to transgress the methodological canon. It is a playful façade for a topic we take very seriously, an investigation into the appropriate venues to share and discuss these fragile and vulnerable methodological situations. The reference to a therapy group intends to underlie the need for intimacy and care, complicity and collaboration when discussing certain crucial situations of our fieldwork experiences.

The CLEENIK session lasted 90 minutes, in which each participant played alternatively the role of patient and doctor – these positions were made reversible (thanks, Alfred Gell!). The dynamic was organized in four parts around a mundane technology: a file card designed as a clinical report aimed at prompting reflection (here is a sample, feel free to use it). First, each ‘patient’ was asked to fill in a clinical report, where she or he would describe his/her ‘fieldwork symptoms’. Second, each of them passed the report to the participant nearby, who would then analyse these symptoms, identifying the disorder and providing a diagnosis (prior to the start of this we had introduced the Ethnographic Disorder Manual v1.0 who could guide them in the process of attributing syndromes or in compiling new ones. Third, the clinical report was passed again to a third participant who then offered a treatment proposal. In the final stage we shared all the contributions (where some new syndromes were identified like the terrible Lack-of-Funditis) and opened a debate with the lab participants.

The CLEENIK prolongs and adapts for anthropological audiences a methodology we had previously tested in an event organized in Spain in collaboration with ColaBoraBora, a group of cultural researchers that had been part of the fieldwork of some of us. We drew inspiration from their methodologies and brought them to our discipline. Organizing this lab we somehow wanted to bring these ‘foreign’ creative and epistemic resources into our disciplinary spaces. The lab thus evinces a topic of our interest: working with these experts, we wonder how we can use the ‘epistemic contamination’ we experienced in our collaborations to transform our anthropological practices.

We know very well that often, as anthropologists/social scientists, we appear to the eyes of those professionals we study as “too literal” and “too serious”, so bringing an ironic and playful inflection (that, by the way, we think is very appropriate for Allegra’s sensibility) we wanted to self-reflexively play with our anthropological practices and disciplinary-methodological assumptions. Needless to say that perhaps our condition of southern European early academics and our heightened sense of the precariousness of (academic) life, much contributed to the fearless use of such strange-to-the-discipline techniques, we did it to have fun – fun also being a desperate strategy of academic survival.

But acknowledging that fun is also temporary, we want to introduce a proposal to open a permanent space for those playful and experimental moments, the biggest proposal of the closing moments of the laboratory being devoted to discussing the interest to promote an EASA network Colleex: A Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation.

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experimental collaborations

Tema emergente (RDTP) – Colaboraciones experimentales

rdtp-xcol cover

Acaba de salir el nuevo tema emergente editado conjuntamente con Adolfo Estalella, publicado en la Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares Vol 71, No 1 (2016) sobre “Colaboraciones experimentales: Una modalidad etnográfica“. (DOI: 10.3989/rdtp.2016.v71.i1)

¡Con un buen puñado de trabajos bien interesantes y todo el contenido libre para descarga!

Parte del proyecto #xcol

RESUMEN TEMA EMERGENTE

Este tema propone una discusión en torno a la figura conceptual de las ‘colaboraciones experimentales’, una modalidad etnográfica cuya producción de conocimiento adopta una forma experimental fundada en relaciones colaborativas en el campo. Las contribuciones reunidas en el compendio dan cuenta de etnografías realizadas en sitios de activismo urbano o espacios artísticos, contextos poblados por comunidades epistémicas dedicadas a la producción de conocimiento, altamente reflexivas sobre sus condiciones de producción. Aunque breves en su provocación, las contribuciones dejan constancia de cómo esos sitios parecen ofrecernos la posibilidad, o plantearnos la necesidad, de reconsiderar la forma y norma del trabajo de campo etnográfico. La figura de las colaboraciones experimentales intenta nombrar y describir la implicación de los antropólogos y antropólogas en esos sitios. Es por lo tanto una figura descriptiva y una propuesta conceptual. Los trabajos aquí presentados nos ofrecen un vocabulario que describe la etnografía a través de conceptos como ‘infraestructuras de campo’, ‘plataformas públicas’ o ‘eventos realizados en colaboración’, que da cuenta del trabajo de campo como un ‘estado borrador’ o que propone formas de ‘etnografía acción participativa’ o ‘experimentación participante’.

RESUMEN INTRODUCCIÓN

¿Cómo sería un ejercicio de experimentación etnográfica en el trabajo de campo? Pareciera que las etnografías de las últimas décadas dedicadas al estudio de los nuevos medios, la ciencia y las organizaciones globales nos ofrecieran la posibilidad, o plantearan la necesidad, de reconsiderar la forma y norma del trabajo de campo etnográfico. Este artículo discute a partir de nuestra experiencia etnográfica lo que designamos como formas de trabajo de campo experimentales. Planteamos nuestro argumento a través de la narración de un proyecto de pedagogía urbana realizado en estrecha colaboración con dos colectivos de arquitectura: una infraestructura urbana de aprendizaje, informada por los lenguajes vernáculos del campo y nuestras conceptualizaciones etnográficas, un gesto recursivo que vuelve nuestros hallazgos etnográficos sobre nuestra propia práctica. Argumentamos que este proyecto nos ofrece la posibilidad de re-aprender y reimaginar nuestra experiencia etnográfica, no mediante la estética tradicional del encuentro etnográfico sino a través de una instalación infraestructural que acondiciona el campo para lo que describimos como un ejercicio experimental. Nuestra evocación de lo experimental no pretende ser un ejercicio de ruptura con el método sino una renovación del vocabulario descriptivo y lenguaje conceptual de los relatos de campo de nuestras etnografías.

Sumario y trabajos

[es] Experimentación etnográfica: infraestructuras de campo y re-aprendizajes de la antropología 9-30
RESUMEN PDF
Adolfo Estalella, Tomás Sánchez Criado
[es] Objetos textuales y dispositivos colaborativos: de la etnografía como plataforma pública 31-38
RESUMEN PDF
Isaac Marrero Guillamón
[es] Tiempos de colaboración: performances del conocimiento urbano 39-48
RESUMEN PDF
Montserrat Cañedo Rodríguez
[es] La colaboración como condición: la etnografía participativa como oportunidad para la acción 49-57
RESUMEN PDF
Luis Berraquero-Díaz, Francisco Maya-Rodríguez, Francisco Javier Escalera Reyes
[es] Auto-borradores: la antropología y la cultura difuminándose mutuamente 59-66
RESUMEN PDF
Alberto Corsín Jiménez
[es] Experimentaciones participantes en arte y antropología 67-73
RESUMEN PDF
Roger Sansi
Categories
experimental collaborations

CLEENIK: Clinic of anthropological ethnographic experiments in fieldwork @EASA2016 Milano

cleenik

CLEENIK is searching for “sick” ethnographers interested in donating their time for science, sharing their suffering experiences, and helping others find the #xcol™ cure! 

For this, you would be receiving a treatment FOR FREE in our internationally renowned CLEENIK, an institution with the most innovative experimental collaboration techniques for the treatment of contemporary fieldwork disorders. 

Have you ever suffered from…

EES – Excess of Engagement Stress?

When you and your natives get ‘too involved’ or simply ‘become too strange’. Symptoms may include permanent conflicts, provocations, an excess of questioning, quarrels, love & hate relationships, irritation, misunderstandings, too much objections, mutual aggressions, constant jokes, natives making fun of you/you making fun of them, playful inversion of roles or blurring the boundaries sensation (‘natives’ becoming the observers and you the object of their scrutiny), frictional effects, unpredictable consequences – and in extreme situations, ethnographic breakdown.

GN – Goingnativosis?

It’s that point when you realize you did it all wrong – in the ethnographic process you have become a ‘professional native’. Symptoms may include (cultural, disciplinary) identity crisis, feeling like a foreign in your own culture, feeling unadapted when back home, becoming too critical about your own culture (the ‘things are so much better back there’ kind of feeling), feeling like being a stranger within the anthropologist community, or never being able to ‘come back’ (physically, emotionally, etc.).

TRIAD – Transdisciplinary/Interdisciplinary Associative Disorder?

“One does not born, but rather becomes, an anthropologist”. The more typical symptoms of TRIAD are disciplinary disorientation. In our clinic we make change-of-discipline interventions – either from anthropology to other disciplines or from other disciplines to anthropology. You can also choose the hybrid half-way.

Come and share them at the CLEENIK, an #EASA2016 Lab05 (22 July 9am Room 2)

CLEENIK is a specialized anthropological clinic. We treat anthropologists suffering from the multiple syndromes consequence of ethnographic experiments in fieldwork.  If you think you may have suffered any of these syndromes or you want to prevent in case of starting fieldwork, you may just drop by to our session and ask for advice and treatment.

In the CLEENIK we will create the grounds for a discussion around the figure of ethnographic experimentation in fieldwork. For this, we ask participants to share the diseases they have suffered in their fieldwork.

As a way to find a cure, in the session we will propose the construction a network of Ethnographic Experimentation.

Convenors: Dr. Anna Gaspar (Coimbra University), Dr. Adolfo Estalella (CSIC), Dr. Tomás S. Criado (MCTS, TUM)

Download the postcard flyer and spread the word!

Postcard design: Anna Gonchar | Image credits CC BY Lwp Kommunikáció

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CLEENIK is an open-source adaptation and a continuation for ethnographic audiences of ColaBoraBora’s Klinika also an adaptation of an initiative by Maria Salazar, part of her artistic residence at Muelle3 in Bilbao (more info here).