I am particularly happy to take part in this Winter Semester’s Public Lecture Series of the Center for Metropolitan Studies (TU Berlin), under the theme “Technologies of the City”.
Hence, next February 5th 2019 I will be presenting the following talk:
Infrastructure as ‘the people’: The social-technocracy of Barcelona’s accessible sidewalk standards
Disability rights activists have for a long time advocated for cities hospitable to bodily difference: de-stigmatizing, enabling, and supportive of their bodily diversity. Since the 1970s protests, many cities of the Global North have developed processes to sensitize architects, engineers, and civil servants so that such environments could be made to exist, creating the conditions for urban infrastructures to embody concrete arrangements of ‘sidewalk democracy.’ Drawing from archival, interview and observational work in the city of Barcelona, I would like to show different attempts at this: from the instalment of ‘free-barrier’ policies and architectural standards to more contemporary problematizations around ‘cultural’ and ‘multisensory’ approaches. Grounding on STS and Anthropology works, I would like to provide an account of the particular ‘infrastructural style’ of these undertakings, and the challenge it poses: or how a de-stigmatizing agenda is predated by its very mode of implementation.
To exemplify, I would like to reflect on the ways in which the city’s accessible sidewalks and crossings have been made and implemented to stand as infrastructures for ‘the people’. First, I will delineate the participatory governance processes–involving several representatives and associative movements of people with disabilities–through which the system of ‘urban elements’, including accessible sidewalks, was developed by the city hall. Second, I will show recent civic, techno-legal and techno-political controversies that have arisen after the enactment of a newer state-wide regulation, entailing an alternative sidewalk configuration: this will allow me to pay special attention to a ‘shared streets’ implementation in the iconic Passeig de Gràcia, which created as a response a united front of disability rights activists self-denominated ‘streets for all’, whose articulate demands were put on hold because ‘a technical solution was needed’.
In paying attention to the contested modes of composing those accessible urban infrastructures, I would like to analyze the relational architectures there arising, also reflecting on the challenges they pose to urban democracy. Even though the aspiration is openly and overtly social-democratic–these infrastructures standing for an aspiration to achieve an inclusive society for all, undoing and reworking the stigma of bodily diversity–, I call this infrastructure of public space and mobility an instance of ‘social technocracy’. In order to democratically respond to the many social demands of different stigmatized collectives and activist initiatives wishing to further use the city and move around, the only available strategy is a very paradoxical one: to produce an expert-managed, materially sealed, and procedurally closed-down to public scrutiny type of urban infrastructure. Rather tragically, in seeking to provide urban infrastructures and practices to tackle with manifold forms bodily stigma and social cohesion, newer versions of ‘inclusive exclusion’ are invented, of technocratic origin. Or, put otherwise, the material mode of expression and urban articulation of these political aspirations foregrounds infrastructures as ‘the people’. Against this background, alternative politicizations around accessibility, both intra- and extra-institutional might show us a way through: how, rather than engaging in classic political contestation, a technical democratization of these urban infrastructures is needed to avoid redoubling technocratically the harsh effects of stigma.
Meetings are, together with papers and books, perhaps the quintessential mechanism for the circulation of academic knowledge. And yet, despite their relevance, we usually resort to the most conventional formats: paper presentations, round tables, etc. Nevertheless, anthropology has recently recognised the need to explore other ways of sharing our knowledge and thinking together. The lab call that EASA has made in the last conferences evinces an interest that we at the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation (#Colleex) network also share.
In our case, we strongly believe that formats to share and think together should be considered as part and parcel of a discussion on ethnographic experimentation. In our work we have been exploring these venues using the rather loose term open formats. What are they? And, most importantly, what can an open format be? In this sense, this documentation project has a twofold goal. First, we aim at bringing for discussion the relevance of experimenting with meeting formats as pedagogical spaces for the apprenticeship of ethnographic experimentation. Second, we argue for the need to document these ‘experiments in meeting’ so that they may travel, be learnt and reproduced elsewhere.
1. Meetings as academic encounters, and venues to re-train ourselves
Adolfo: We meet to share knowledge and learn: at large conferences or intimate workshops, in the classroom with students or in seminars with colleagues. A screen, somebody standing, a series of slides over 10, 20 … even 30 minutes! Sometimes the speaker sits rather than stands. And then, questions at the end. This arrangement applies to most of the meetings we have had and are likely to have over our academic career. We meet to learn, but perhaps, and this is our point, we should learn to meet. Because meetings are, together with papers and books, quintessential in the circulation of academic knowledge. And yet, despite this, we usually resort to the most conventional formats: panels of paper presentations and round tables. We want to explore new ways to get together.
Meetings are extended bureaucratic forms, organisational techniques and forms of relationality across all kinds of collective and organisational contexts. Defined in space and time, meetings always point to a larger context. This is the argument made by Hannah Brown, Adam Reed and Thomas Yarrow (2017) in a special issue devoted to the topic. Thus the relevance of meetings has to do with the effects they produce beyond. To quote Brown et al.: “[meetings] contain and animate social worlds outside the spatially and temporally demarcated arenas through which they take place” (Brown et al. 2017: 12).
There is always something at stake beyond then: interests, contexts and agendas that shape a meeting and will be affected by it. Marilyn Strathern has argued that meetings, as organisational events, constitute miniaturise versions of the collectives they are embedded in: “meetings mimic larger apprehensions of a scaled-up object” (2017: 197). In a period of transformation that seems to call to experiment with new forms of producing knowledge, I would say that we need to mimic in our meeting methods this experimental impulse.
Tomás: At the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation we are trying to open up venues to rethink the norms and forms of ethnography, and more specifically, the ways in which we do and narrate fieldwork. Hence, since we started out almost two years ago now, we have tried to foreground the particular social and material interventions, the devices and the spaces, the discourses and the practices, through which forms of fieldwork beyond the canonic participant observation could be examined in closer detail.
Seeking to explore alternative meeting formats, we organised our first workshop in Lisbon last year. We devoted half of the programme to an exploration of situation-based, art-oriented, multi-sensory, spatial and audio-visual and other work that we called ‘open formats’. In this alternative meeting mode to the regular paper presentation, we not only experimented with fieldwork and how to learn to do it differently. Also, open formats became reflexive situations whereby what it might mean to experiment could be centre-staged, highlighted, examined, and debated. But as we would like to discuss today, our interest in ‘open formats’ goes beyond a mere playful exploration in a workshop. This is why we are suggesting to meet today in order to learn how to meet in many different alternative ways: Meeting in order to learn how to do fieldwork otherwise, meeting to appreciate what it means to experiment in fieldwork and what it brings. In fact, we believe that we should devote time and space to understanding open formats as interesting learning and fieldwork devices, and to making them relevant for teaching and research…
An image of one of the open formats organized in the 1st Colleex Workshop (Lisbon, 2017) (Vitor Barros).
Adolfo: One source of inspiration has been the realisation, captured by Michael J. Fischer, that “life is outrunning the pedagogies in which we have been trained” (2003: 37). Or, to put it differently, engaging with forms of ethnographic experimentation has made us realise that conventional ethnographic training–or, to be more specific, the canon expressed in many handbooks and manuals of ethnography–is not adequate to the challenges fieldwork poses today. A second source would be our own very ethnographic engagement: some of us at Colleex we have learnt from our epistemic partners in the field, such artists and activists, alternative ways to come together. This doesn’t just mean that they have shown us specific meeting formats but that we have learn to inhabit in sophisticated ‘how-to’ meeting cultures: ones that mobilise an ecology of practices whose key goal is to get us together to engage in forms of joint research. From our partners we’ve learned about composing ambiences for discussion, arranging spatial layouts, deploying varied technologies for record keeping and documentation, unfolding practices of care… That is, practices whereby ethnography becomes an art of learning to relate–meet, tell, forge relations– in order to relate–that is, to keep on meeting, telling, and forging relations– .
Eeva: We agree that heterodox and improvisational formats also generate academic value, and that they could and should be supported further through documentation. And so we thank EASA for the way it is seeking to break out of such constraints through, for instance, labs. EASA has been trying to raise awareness and give some relevance in the programme to labs. To us, labs are not just ‘blah’ they are not a mere playful format, but fundamental sites where the renewal of learning and ethnographic fieldwork might be attempted in a miniaturised time and space. Hence, this lab focuses on how labs matter. This is, then, a lab on how labs operate, a lab of labs…
Anna: In that sense, and putting open formats centre-stage, perhaps we should outline some different modes in which open formats happen. I can think of three modes: (a) meetings in which we convey our knowledge through open formats; (b) meetings in which we generate knowledge through open formats; or (c) meetings in which we show experimental fieldwork devices through open formats. Of course they aren’t as distinct from each other as this, but we need to disentangle their different moments: (a) knowledge-production happening before the format takes place, (b) knowledge being simultaneous or reciprocal with regards to the format, and (c) knowledge being derived from the open format. Meetings of academic content combine these by sharing knowledge from the field and generating more knowledge around it in the meeting. By analogy with paper presentations, later developed into articles or fully written-up papers, what would be the most finished form of an open format? How can we translate this step of the process where knowledge becomes more integrated into open formats? How could we generate the situational knowledge we could to take beyond the situation, and how could it be shared? What role would documentation play in this? And, also, what kinds of documentation are we talking about?
Eeva: We recognize a need for more adequate accounts of fieldwork than tropes and modes that build on ‘participant observation.’ We share an imperative to verbalize or articulate in more-than-textual terms but also to embody the formats and devices through which we encounter and engage the world. We also recognize the need to give some structure and even a little order to the space we as #colleex are occupying, and which we hope enables further developments in heterodox forms of research. There are multiple voices and divergent projects in this space, not just the wider network, but even among ourselves as convenors. (We don’t want to kill the network or limit ourselves by trying to agree on everything, let alone reach consensus.)
But if we are to practice new ethnographic modes and have them recognized and valued, we do need to take a position on what experimental fieldwork might constructively be guided towards and why, and this is where documenting and discussing the ways in which we do it, or drawing inspiration from one another to attempt newer ways, plays a fundamental role. Though of course any attempt at articulating this in any genre is likely to be somewhat hesitant, always contingent and probably relational. It’s not reform so much as a recognition of already productive work and thinking that’s needed. This won’t be easy in the university’s profit-oriented institutional set up, but a drive to push along these lines is definitely there. In places it’s already possible to work without reducing ethnographic insight to text or things like ‘key performance indicators’, plus it’s clear that the extremely serious can easily and productively dovetail with the playful. What we now need is a lively, possibly provisional, documentation format that can travel and contribute to pedagogy.
Adolfo: A reflection on how and why to do this, is an integral part of our work about ethnographic experimentation, as a specific ethnographic modality beyond participant observation. But beyond just talking about it or giving it value, the challenge ethnographic experimentation poses is that it requires different forms of ethnographic training. This argument links to a debate on the transformations of fieldwork in the contemporary and the need to re-equip our discipline (Rees 2008). Paul Rabinow, Chris Kelty and Kim Fortun for instance have explored other forms of learning with their students and young researchers (Rabinow 2011, Marcus 2013, Kelty 2008, Fortun 2008). The volume edited by George E. Marcus and James D. Faubion (2009), Fieldwork is not what it used to be, is exemplary in this sense. It makes a strong case for the need to renew pedagogies in the anthropological profession if we want to measure up to the challenges of the contemporary. Specifically the PhD is an exceptional learning moment or space to experiment with the possibilities of ethnography, as Marcus has argued: it constitutes a threshold where the limits of the norm and form of field work are negotiated (Marcus 2009). This has led to rehearsing formats borrowed from other disciplines, such as the ethnocharrette or the design or art studio. In a similar vein, Paul Rabinow has explored what he designates labminar, a space of academic exchange that remediated–that, is, changed from one media to another– the meetings of the laboratories he studied. In these spaces Rabinow, together with his students, explored the possibility of “new forms of inquiry through ways collaborative guided by an ethic of care” (2011: 142).
An image of one of the 1st Colleex Workshop (Lisbon, 2017) (Vitor Barros).
2. On the importance of archiving documentation of meetings and open formats
Adolfo: If ethnography is moving beyond the solitary to the collaborative, shifting away from the visual to multi-sensory, being captured not just textually but in other mediums, how are these conveyed? Can and should they be captured and re-moved to other locations?
Tomás: Perhaps we need to reflect on how to document, how to tell, how to narrate all these experiences, beyond the very situations in which they happen… How to make them travel?
Anna: And how can the multi-sensory experiences be documented or made relatable at all? For instance, open formats in mode (c) as I introduced it earlier – that is, as meetings in which the production of knowledge derives from the very open format itself – entail a particular form of documentation. And the documentation of fieldwork encounters and experiments is different, I think, from the documentation of the open formats with which we either seek to produce knowledge (b) or to just transmit knowledge (a).
Tomás: What if we gathered the documentation of open formats into something like a collection… Would this help to discern different approaches to ethnographic experimentation, or serve as inspiration to practice more experimental forms of ethnography?
Eeva: Assuming this is desirable, and that documentation should be easily accessible, what should we call this thing? Not a handbook… An inventory or list, taxonomy even? An archive? A library of how-to manuals or toolkits, even a protocol? A recipe collection or a cookbook?
Tomás: There are implications in calling it an inventory or a cookbook. Both are nice terms, but they connect to different powerful imaginaries and aesthetics that could have a potential impact on the output…
Eeva: Terminology always carries baggage. The term cookbook is perhaps most open and tolerant of gaps. Inventory is perhaps the most rigid and colonizing word we might use. This is certainly so if it consists of standardised entries to be completed in each case, and assuming some underlying structure that is infinitely transferable from context to context.
Tomás: I think there are also different notions of these terms, and I am not that sure that an inventory is colonial per se… It certainly brings to mind an imaginary of knowledge as taxonomy and logistics. Is that the connotation that we want? If we’re talking about a gathering of open formats, their very openness suggests more the idea of recipes people can alter, transform, adapt, that the openness doesn’t just refer to the types of meetings being experimented, but also the types of documentation being attempted, not to speak of the openness of their subsequent uses?
Anna: I think if we use the word cookbook it will need a very clear explanation of our understanding of recipe, that it is a mix of things whose outcome can vary. My first association with recipe is still the “take a+b, get c” type of thing, and I don’t think that’s what we mean. Maybe we could even be more open with our metaphor and use something that is more abstract and doesn’t yet have that connotation, I’m thinking carousel (for dynamics) or something that is a an open collection, not a box and not an a+b=c connotation.
Eeva: Metaphors and words do matter. Still, as texts and in texts, these vocabularies can all be read as if they were fixed, but they can also all be invitations to improvise and work on them further. One of the key motivations for documenting any research is to share experiences and inspire further adaptation. I think what we are calling for is ways of expanding our academic (and other) imagination. At the same time, some people might be reading documents to get going, to learn something totally new, in which case a step-by-step set of instructions might be handy. Documentation as a way of giving an account (whether as a story or financially) is also simply an invitation to engage and respond, to continue. In the case of #colleex, it’s a kind of reconstructed epistemic practice we’re looking for, that cares for the ethnographic in all its dimensions: as interpersonal engagement, fieldwork, description, theory and combinations of them all.
Tomás/Adolfo/Anna/Eeva: Hence, in this spirit, we are meeting today to show you our first steps in attempting how and why to document, something that started after our workshop in Lisbon. In what follows, we will show previous documentation of several open formats. But our aspiration would be to think beyond these first baby steps, and to invite you to join us in meeting to further discuss how we might imagine to document the inventiveness of open formats, and what for? What should be the appropriate genres, archival modes, styles? And, after discussing this, we would also like to propose engaging in a process of documenting the experimental ethnographic practices and accounts of open formats in the conference’s labs: where we think this might be a bit more explicit. But we also reckon that not every lab has to be necessarily experimental, and maybe experimentation in and around open formats might also be discussed in presentations across the conference.
Our proposal would be to display such a documentation in our digital platforms, so that we could open up a further discussion and a learning space on how to train ourselves to undertake experimental ethnographic modes. For this, we could use the hashtag #colleexperiments to collect the documentation gathered by all of us. It is our hope that the reflections and the hands-on work in this lab, could pave the way to something like the alternative to the handbook we discussed beforehand. Perhaps, in doing this we could collectively imagine how to make such a cookbook?
An image of one of the open formats organized in the 1st Colleex Workshop (Lisbon, 2017) (Vitor Barros).
References
Brown, H., Reed, A. & Yarrow, T. (2017). Introduction: towards an ethnography of meeting. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23(S1): 10-26.
Faubion, James D. & George E. Marcus (eds.). 2009. Fieldwork is not what it used to be. Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Fischer, Michael M. J. 2003. Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fortun, Kim. 2009. “Figuring out ethnography”, in James Faubion y George Marcus (eds.), Fieldwork isn’t what it used to be: 167-183. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kelty, Christopher et alt. 2008. “Fieldwork after the Internet. Collaboration, coordination and composition”, in James Faubion and George Marcus (eds.), Fieldwork isn’t what it used to be: 184-206. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Marcus, George E. 2009. “Introduction. Notes toward an Ethnographic Memoir of Supervising Graduate Research through Anthropology’s Decades of Transformation”, in James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus, Fieldwork is not what it used to be. Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition:1-34. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Marcus, George E. 2013. “Experimental forms for the expression of norms in the ethnography of the contemporary”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory3(2):197–217.
Rabinow, P., Marcus, G. E., Faubion, J. D., & Rees, T. (2008). Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rabinow, P. (2011). The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Rees, Tobias. 2008. “Introduction”, in Paul Rabinow, George Marcus, James D. Faubion y Tobias Rees (eds.), Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary: 1-13. Durham, London: Duke University Press
Strathern, M. (2017). Afterword. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23(S1).
In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as ‘fieldwork devices’—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of ‘experimental collaborations’ to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality
The introduction’s PDF is freely available for download here
It has been a long journey, full of conversations and collaborative writing: A process of learning together how to practice contemporary anthropology; a collective project that required the generosity and effort of many people involved in the project. Therefore, we would like to share some of our joy and open up conversations of what it might imply in a series of forthcoming events:
#xcol-book launch event_1 Barcelona, 3 de mayo de 2018, 18–20h [ES]
Humboldt University of Berlin’s Department of European Ethnology Institutskolloquium ‘Conjunctures & Creations: Anthropological Transformations/Transforming Anthropology’. Moderated by Prof. Dr. Ignacio Farías.
It will take place Friday July 27th at the Marketplace 13:00-14:00 (this will be a brown bag event, so from 12:30 to 13:00 feel welcome to grab your lunch before coming), and we will have Yana Boeva (York University, Toronto) and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak (Linköping University) as guest commentators.
In the last decades, the institutionalization of STS in technical universities has made urgent the challenge of how to teach STS sensibilities and political commitments to a project of technical democracy when operating in the belly of the beast. Focusing on the crossroads of design and STS, “Re-learning Design: Pedagogical experiments with STS in design studio courses” is a bilingual issue of DISEÑA recently edited by Ignacio Farías and Tomás S. Criado, which features a series of interviews and articles on pedagogical experiments with STS in design studio courses undertaken by a diverse range of academics from Europe and the Americas.
In particular, in my presentation–titled Technologies of friendship? Open design objects and their figurations of relatedness–I will be speaking about some of the particular creative processes of En torno a la silla (or ETS, the Barcelona-based critical disability and open design collective I have been part of since 2012), gadgets and indoor/outdoor spatial interventions whose conception and execution have entailed a series of experiments whereby the relation between the people involved was granted particular architectural and design affordances. Indeed, and thanks to particular relations they have afforded, I will refer to them using the particular name the very collective has employed: i.e. technologies of friendship. Thinking from there I will search to unfold how En torno a la silla’s open design objects should not only be described as inscribing and supporting already existing relations but also affording a plexus of potential figurations of forms of relatedness, whereby the process of making is also a process of relating. Or, as I would call it, an exploration into a ‘how-to’ friendship: a particular mode of relating premised on the very concern of discussing and showing the how-to of relations.
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This Winter school, with the title Building Lives, invites for a reflection on the place buildings occupy in peoples’ biographies by studying the transformations of built forms and its correlation with individual subjectivities and societal changes at large. Specifically, the objective of the event is to explore the possibilities to correlate personal maturing and the life states of buildings and provide new tools, concepts and frameworks for understanding the plural life stages of the built environment.
A key proposition behind this Winter School is that comparisons can be drawn between the biographies of persons and the biographies of buildings, yet perhaps the metaphor of biography highlights a too linear process of change, instead of the eventful discontinuation and change of states they might go through.
The programme is set up to reconsider the birth, death, and reconstitution of the built environment by paying attention to the different relations that emerge between buildings and people. The event will consist of lectures, workshops and artists talks, including a keynote and four excursions. Some possible lines of thought addressed by papers may be:
What are the recognised stages of a building’s life?
Can we use human metaphors to study the built environment?
In which ways do buildings store personal memories and social significance?
What discrete activities are engendered to maintain buildings alive?
When or what is the ultimate no-return point that marks the death of buildings and their functional discontinuation?
Organiser: Francisco Martínez
Invited scholars: Tomás Errázuriz (Andrés Bello, Chile); Andres Kurg (EKA); Patrick Laviolette (Tallinn Univ.), Michał Murawski (Queen Mary Univ. of London); Tomás Sánchez Criado (Munich Center for Technology in Society)
Artists, designers & architects: Andra Aaloe; Flo Kasearu; Paul Kuimet; Laura Kuusk; Karli Luik; Triin Ojari; Margit Säde; Ingel Vaikla and Tüüne-Kristin Vaikla.
Programme
15th, Monday(Suur Kloostri 11, Interior Design Dept.)
10:30 Introduction and lecture by F. Martínez, Architectural Taxidermy
11:45 Seminar by P. Kuimet
14:00 Seminar by L. Kuusk
15:00 Lecture by T. Errázuriz, When new is not better: the making of home through holding on to objects
16:00 Seminar by T.K. Vaikla, How long is the life of a building? Screening the film ‘The House Guard’ (I. Vaikla, 2014),
17:00 Excursion to the F. Kasearu Museum.
16th, Tuesday (Suur Kloostri 11, Interior Design Dept.)
10:30 Students’ Seminar.
14:00 Excursion to the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design.
16:00 Excursion: Sense of Domesticity by A. Aaloe & M. Säde.
17th, Wednesday Independent research by the students, preparing their own work on the biographical correlation between people and buildings / the built space.
18th, Thursday (Suur Kloostri 11, Room 103, Art History Dept.)
10:00 Keynote Lecture by M. Murawski, People make buildings (and buildings make people), but not under conditions of their own choosing. Chair, A. Kurg.
12:00 Round table about the life stages of buildings with T. K. Vaikla, K. Luik, T. Ojari, A. Kurg, and M. Murawski.
14:00 Independent research by the students
19th, Friday(Suur Kloostri 11, Interior Design Dept.)
10:30 Lecture by T. Sánchez Criado, Technologies of friendship? Open design objects and their figurations of relatedness.
A cardboard set for an egalitarian reading group methodology…
Originally developed for a reading group in Barcelona (called TEO – Taller de Experimentación Objetual / Object Experimentation Workshop) on infrastructures and STS.
The cardboard design is licensed CC BY NC SA 2014Carla Boserman.
Method developed by TEO (Carla Boserman, Blanca Callén, Marcos Cereceda, Gonzalo Correa, Aída de Prada, Daniel López, Guillem Palà, Jara Rocha, Natalia Rodríguez di Tomaso & Tomás Sánchez Criado).
English adaptation CC BY NC SA 2017 by Tomás Sánchez Criado & Anna Gonchar.
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SEMINARIO A LA CARTA (Versión en castellano)
Juego de cartas para seminarios de lecturas con una metodología igualitaria…
Este método “a la carta” fue diseñado por/para un grupo de discusión sobre infraestructuras y STS (titulado TEO – Taller de Experimentación Objetual), que tuvo lugar en Barcelona.
El diseño del juego de cartas tiene una licencia CC BY NC SA 2014Carla Boserman.
El método fue desarrollado por TEO (Carla Boserman, Blanca Callén, Marcos Cereceda, Gonzalo Correa, Aída de Prada, Daniel López, Guillem Palà, Jara Rocha, Natalia Rodríguez di Tomaso & Tomás Sánchez Criado).
Next November 28th I will be in Brno to take part in the Antropologie Umělcům, a series of course of lectures, discussions and screenings organized by Kristína Jamrichová on current approaches and various forms of collaboration between Social Sciences and Contemporary Art not only within the so-called Visual Studies but including also other fields and topics such as experiment, engagement, applicability or design. The courses will take place from 16th to 30th November 2017 in Aula FAVU VUT in Brno, Czech Republic.
Here you can access the information of mine’s:
A ‘how-to’ anthropology? The ‘ethnographic recursions’ of tutorial and documentation-driven projects
In the last years, I have engaged as ethnographer in extensive tutorial and open documentation projects of different activist ‘free culture’ and ‘DIY’ urban groups in Spain (mainly, the activist design collective of Barcelona “En torno a la silla” and other associated endeavours). In my ethnographic work with them I have had to partake of art-related and design-inspired multimodal playful experimentations addressing styles, genres, and formats of documenting design processes and events. Thus, what might have only been a descriptive stance of a particular design culture became an inventive process, full of ‘re-descriptive’ moments, holding in suspension the very aims and goals, as well as the modes of authorship, the devices and the narrative styles brought to bear to ethnographic endeavours as practices ‘documenting’ the life of others. Such joint modes of relating–that is, of producing encounters or forms of togetherness as well as accounts–had a lasting impact on my very ethnographic practice, generating many moments of ‘unlearning.’ Here I wish to address the ‘ethnographic recursions’ they made me enter. Indeed, my involvement in such projects premised on the idea of the ‘how-to’ as a grounding trope has somehow urged me, in collaboration with other colleagues (namely, the ones we are gathering around the EASA’s Colleex network), to reinvent our fieldwork devices drawing inspiration from the how-to ontology of our epistemic partners. In showing somewhat playful attempts at translating that ‘how-to’ ontology into academic debates for the discipline I would like to delineate here the productivity of addressing forms of methodological rather than conceptual recursion as a way into other modes of learning and doing anthropology.
Mañana tendré el inmenso placer de poder estar en Alicante (algo que me apetecía especialmente desde hace mucho tiempo), gracias a la intermediación de Ester Gisbert y Miguel Mesa del Castillo, en el Máster en Arquitectura de la Universitat d’Alacant (Sala 01, Politécnica IV).
Mi intervención y los talleres en que estaremos trabajando, girarán en torno a los “efectos documentales“. En los últimos años–y sobre todo a partir tanto de mi participación como etnógrafo/documentador en el colectivo En torno a la silla, como de la experiencia pedagógica en una facultad de arquitectura–me ha venido interesando enormemente la importancia de una indagación sobre las “interfaces documentales”. A pesar de que en particular me he centrado en los ámbitos de diseño abierto y el activismo de la diversidad funcional, cada vez más me está interesando particularmente experimentar y reflexionar sobre cómo los diferentes tipos de trazos–en diferentes lenguajes, géneros o estilos, producidos para el recuerdo o la puntualización de la experiencia de momentos de gran intensidad colaborativa, o donde se está más preocupado por hacer más que por el pensar sobre lo que se hace–producen efectos particulares sobre quién, cómo y qué se diseña. Y, por ello, quisiera que prestáramos particular atención a diferentes dispositivos, plataformas, sistemas de registro, o métodos para la generación de encuentros donde producir acercamientos y situaciones para compartir las experiencias; esto es, interfaces donde la documentación–entendida más bien como una experimentación con diferentes medios, formatos, sensibilidades y momentos que al modo enciclopédico o positivista–se nos aparece como un recurso esencial para el descubrimiento y articulación de la experiencia compartida en la relación entre quienes construyen y los diferentes materiales con los que lo hacen; esto es, para el trazado de ciertas transformaciones o efectos, pero también para permitir, recursivamente, generar otras relaciones en y a través de los procesos de diseño.
Soy consciente de que muy probablemente la principal impugnación o crítica de inicio a lo que voy a plantear aquí es que “no documentar así” también tiene sus efectos sobre el diseño, y me encantaría discutirlos; aunque me parece que la documentación, con todas sus dificultades y efectos complejos (porque aquí hablaré de la documentación que se enfoca en el proceso, no en ese proceso de documentarse para diseñar o en la producción de una divulgación a posteriori para hacer circular o vender un diseño), que a veces bloquean o paralizan un proceso de diseño, nos acerca a una reflexion mucho más mundana sobre las prácticas y la política del diseñar. Pero siendo una de sus principales virtude que abre registros de lo político que van más allá del “hacer visible” y que, al menos en los casos que he venido estudiando, plantean redistribuciones de la experticia, circulaciones de saberes, aperturas de relaciones e incorporaciones constantes de elementos o reacciones en los propios procesos y materializaciones (algo que no puedo llamar de otra forma que “auto-experimentación”).
IMAGE CREDITS: Navajo sand-painting, negative made from postcard CC BY Wellcome Trust
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The Chilean journal DISEÑA has just published its latest bilingual issue (Spanish & English), a detailed reflection on the relations between Politics & Design (DISEÑA #11), carefully edited by Martín Tironi.
I collaborate with a reflection (pp. 148-159) on the ‘politics’ of design–in a Rancièrian sense–undertaken by ‘functional diversity’ activism after the 15-M uprisings, and my participation in the En torno a la silla collective.
¿La diversidad funcional como una política del diseño?
Este artículo es una indagación sobre el activismo de la “diversidad funcional” tras la ocupación de las plazas del 15-M español, y, más concretamente, acerca de cómo a partir de ella la diversidad funcional se convierte en un repertorio que politiza el diseño (particularmente el mercado de ayudas técnicas y entornos accesibles desarrollados de acuerdo con el modelo social de la discapacidad). Para apuntalar una lectura de la política del diseño —en el sentido de la filosofía política de Jacques Rancière— que ahí aparece, tomaré como caso un pequeño proyecto colaborativo desarrollado por el colectivo de diseño abierto radicado en Barcelona En torno a la silla.
15-M _ Diversidad funcional _ En torno a la silla _ política del diseño _ Rancière
Functional diversity as a politics of design?
This article is an inquiry into the activism around ‘functional diversity’ after the public square occupations of the Spanish 15-M movement; and, more specifically, how, in them, ‘functional diversity’ developed into a repertoire for the politicisation of design (notably, the market of technical aids and accessible environments created according to the social model of disability). To underpin the particular reading of the politics of design —in the sense developed by political philosopher Jacques Rancière— that appears there, I will describe a small collaborative project put together by the Barcelona-based open design collective En torno a la silla.
15M _ En torno a la silla _ Functional diversity _ Politics of design _ Rancière
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