Category: experimental collaborations

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caring infrastructures events experimental collaborations objects of care and care practices

Two crises in and with STS: From ‘translation’ to ‘re-specification’?

Slightly amended version of my presentation at the opening plenary, in dialogue with Tiago Moreira and Ana Viseu, of the first joint meeting of RedesCTS and the Portuguese STS network in Lisbon at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS), 7-9 June 2017 ‘Lost in translation: People, Technologies, Practices and Concepts Across Boundaries’.

For this session we were explicitly asked to reflect a bit on how our work has been “affected by, or has dealt with, different kinds of boundaries, epistemic, geographical, disciplinary, linguistic, and so on.”

This was to be the first step of a wider debate amongst the presenters and the public. But I believe the need for this debate goes beyond this event, and even this network’s meeting. Any comments more than welcome.

In my intervention in this debate, I would like to profit this occasion to mumble or, rather, to think aloud of the process of moving from the uber-activist and hyper-collective intellectual milieu of Spain–under austerity in the last years–to the context of an ‘entrepreneurial’ public university in Munich, and into a new STS centre of Germany to be more specific.

I will try to articulate my own experience, not as an autobiographical reflection but as a mode of eliciting how moving around has made me undergo two crises in and with how STS is practiced and what its goals might be. I’ll use what these crises opened up to try out an analytic of how to go beyond ‘translation’ as a mode of, maybe paradoxically, making us experience the feeling of being ‘lost in translation.’ And will try to put forward how ‘re-specification’ rather than ‘translation’ might be conveying a more interesting stance into forms of interventive and experimental engagement with the political issues of STS’s form and content.

  1. A crisis with STS ‘as is’

My first crisis was with STS ‘as is’… Yet I think this was a particularly collective one: the collective crisis that lead to the creation of something like this network. Without any intention to speak for anyone, my interpretation is that a space like RedesCTS–an open, allegedly hierarchically flat, and voluntarily interdisciplinary network–was needed for many reasons. Allow me to briefly mention them…

First, because most of us were alone, like lost children, without any kind of institutional backing or context to share our interest in a rather minoritarian field in our surroundings; having to work within or under the framework of highly institutionalised disciplines. Hence, a network, as a form of relatedness, allowed building bridges between traditions, locales, and diverging modes of doing things which had many reasons to be in a potential dialogue: ANT, feminist technoscience studies, science and society, history of science and technology, innovation studies, etc.

Second, a network was quintessential to break even with the ‘Game of Throne-ish’ situation of post-Francoist academia or with the vast precariousness of means most of us have been plunging in since we started our ‘career’ as social scientists, a situation that has only got worse and worse, as you are all well aware. For this, a network with no membership, and allowing hybrid and impure connections, helped many people relate, and even articulate better their multiple belongings and commitments.

Third, this statute might have been part of a wider and even deeper stance that a more vernacular take on STS was needed, since this widely Anglo-Dutch discipline, hence dominated by many times foreign or strange political, historical and academic-institutional concerns was not really helping many of us to relate to our topics of interest, our surroundings, and even our incipient tradition of collective vernacular thought.

Very relevant in the form and composition of a mutable and changing network allowing diverse people ‘to keep on doing stuff’,[1] as well as in the types of debates there taking place, might have been the vicinity in its early stages with the ‘15M’ (the multifarious indignados events), and the gigantic experimentation that has been taking place in forms of collective action.[2] But also, the relevance and importance of ‘trans-feminist’, ‘functional diversity’, and ‘artivist’ ethical and political stances. As much as it had affected other spaces, this became an important vector in allowing for other forms of the possible, the say-able, and the thinkable… to name but a few of the attributes Jacques Rancière uses to define ‘politics.’

Using irony and play the very network even started to become a space for the recursive experimentation of STS, its ideas, and concepts affecting not only content but also its form. And throughout the years, the network has produced its own vernacular lingo: the very network being considered as a ‘prototype’ of other forms of academia,[3] or an interventionist and experimental space to ‘care for formats’[4] and ‘spatial modes of encounter’ with others.[5] A particularly distributed and uneven mode of searching to articulate the different ecologies of practices we have been inhabiting as researchers, activists, or regular lay people, together with others beyond academia.

I think spaces of the like should not necessarily be thought of as effects of situations of economic or financial crisis. I believe another kind crisis is much more important to account for why people feel the need to open up spaces of the like, according to the potentialities they might have: maybe the wider crisis of legitimacy of academia as an autonomous and disengaged endeavour–we could use here the much abused ‘ivory tower’ epithet–and, in particular, of scientific societies as infrastructures of collective thought and mutual support might be a more apt rendering.

If I had to define what the network has meant for me: This has been a space making available to think on our research situation in terms of both its form and content. That is, addressing the singularity of a particular thematic distribution of topics, as well as the commitment many people had in close dialogue with or even because of their belonging to activist spaces, but also forging relevant local concepts, formats as relevant modes of addressing not-only-conceptual or not-only-linguistic modes of expression, as well as a experimenting with the ‘how-to’ aspects of fostering dialogues with non-academic spaces.

But however ‘nice’ or ‘cool’ these dear spaces have always been; however much they allowed us to talk and do things in more vernacular terms, these never were spaces devoid of troubles, hierarchies or privileges. Besides, the rampant precariousness has not disappeared, and the network has only allowed people to keep connected even when they were losing their jobs or working under horrible conditions.

So, despite many attempts at translating the loss, these translations into the form of a network haven’t stopped the erosion of living under such conditions. I won’t deny the importance of attempts at articulating and finding ways to express it have made people feel less lonely in very complex times, but…

  1. A crisis with the institutionalised politics of  STS 

Anyway, many of us kept on searching. Some left, and some stayed either because they cared more for the non-career aspects of their lives, or because they couldn’t or wouldn’t or shouldn’t.[6] With no intention whatsoever of becoming a model or an example of anything, but just as a way to have an entry point into a wider argument, let me talk about my very personal case…

After a while, and thinking both that there was no exit and that I needed a change (for many reasons I cannot convey in public), I started searching for jobs abroad. After more than two years of search, I was lucky enough to be offered a well-paid job in an emergent institution, with very nice and clever colleagues, and with funding conditions granting me the opportunity to travel and share my work. Of course, I could here delve into many of the classic tropes of the 1960s migrating Spaniard to Germany, condensed in films and popular myths. And, for the most of the first year, I drowned in some versions of them, feeling really lucky but also really lonely because of what I traded to become an academic migrant (this is something many of you know better than I do).

But everything seemed different: From growing accustomed to thinking together with friends, I had to re-learn how to address a situation I had also been searching for: being treated as a more individualised researcher with his own career. I was also many times feeling a bit isolated, since despite my hopes, goals and aspirations the ecology I had learnt to live and breath in was no longer accompanying me in my everyday life. This was of course very puzzling: From feeling the abundance of possibilities and freedom I had experienced, funding and job scarcity notwithstanding, to being sometimes dominated by a strange feeling of lack of possibilities and options in a place of comfort and financial abundance.

The funniest thing is I sought to allegedly bring to the job the more experimental democratic and collaborative takes on STS issues I had learnt to articulate in the space of this network. And in a way, the job I had to deliver, working in a chair for participatory technology design, teaching both to architects and future STSers, was to bring about some of the methods and formats I had learnt in my own work together with design activists. Of course, as a de-rooted academic migrant I could say my first mistake was forgetting about what I would need to change to address the local context, its issues and problems, something I knew nothing about. To make things worse I knew no German…

However paradoxical this might seem I was, again, ‘lost in translation’ since I had to face the many difficulties or sheer impossibilities of translating the modes of thinking and doing I had learnt in the previous years to a context I couldn’t relate to very easily. In fact, this stupid idea of believing I could do it has made me feel a great sense of loss in many a dark night.

I have also had to face my naiveté or sheer audacity in having forgotten that institutional spaces of alleged financial or funding abundance are not devoid of other problems of scarcity: a chronic lack of time created by the many commitments and compromises that ‘spending money reasonably’ entail; but also, the lack of a generic care for free processes of collective thought that an individualist focus on career and unit-centric demarcations might create; not to speak of the problems deriving from how well-greased hierarchies might operate in places of monetary power…

In any case, my biggest (yet very small for others), or maybe to say it better ‘attainable’ struggle to date has been how to relate to this situation. And, maybe, I could say that one of the things I have been trying to do is searching to translate the politics of the ‘activist design collectives’ I had been working with in the past into a pedagogic agenda for the architects and social scientists I have been teaching to…

Interestingly, the agenda we have been developing in the team, led by Ignacio Farías, has been very much aligned to that. In a way, I’d say we have become interested in addressing how to turn the STS programme of ‘technical democracy,’ or the technoscientific democratisations some of us had been doing research and engaged work on, into something like a ‘teaching technicians to behave otherwise’ programme. What a challenge…

But, indeed, a very interesting one working from the belly of the Bavarian beast–if you allow me the pun to talk about the leading German ‘polytechnic’ university at the core of one of the golden cradles of global corporate capitalism. In a way I’d say we have been searching to translate these STS-minded issues into a way of affecting the future technicians, professionals or experts. This could be nothing more than a small pedagogic stance of one of the older aims of the field: to intervene technocracy. Hence, in the last two years we have been experimenting with different trials, or should I say somewhat ‘learning failures’? Failures in devising a sound teaching programme that have also entailed a whole new learning process for us.

Allow me to indicate a few examples: I talk about failures in capturing the students’ attention or in making them care about some of these things beyond ready-made humanitarian gestures. Students seemed many times uninterested, since we were not helping them be more employable in the job market they search to work in. Also, our teaching methods, based on lecturing, reading and commenting, have proven deeply inappropriate. There have also been failures in establishing productive co-teaching relations with other architects, since our task might not be very legible to them. Hence, as an outcome, our attempts have many times been facing an overall tendency to ‘problem solving’ or suffering from the perpetual reenactment of ‘technical-social divides’.

But little by little we’ve transformed our expectations, in a search for collaborations elsewhere. In fact, our trials have helped us relate with other architects from other places who seem to use a kind of common language, and who are helping us to address how we could be putting modes of design ‘in crisis’ (I am particularly thinking here of Ester Gisbert and her inspiring ‘experiments with craft‘).

Indeed, that is the exploration we are searching to unfold in our last course, titled: ‘Design in crisis: Coming to our senses.’[7] In it, we are trying to make them aware of the multi-sensory aspects of design practice, searching to teach them through sensory experiments and practices, techniques, tools and devices that I have come across in my ethnographic work on inclusive urbanism. Hence, the aim is to make them collectively prototype a multi-sensory architectural toolkit (a toolkit for a blind architect!): a set of devices, methods, and skills necessary to re-equip their very architectural practice at the same time that we make them ‘come to their senses.’

So far, the results in their embodied transformation make me really hopeful that we might have found a potential prototype: or, to say it otherwise, a ‘line of tension’ to start addressing the issue, at least with our students coming from different European countries. We are also trying to document this experience in order to be able to share it and discuss it with some other colleagues from different countries to address that very issue: how to teach STS to designers or architects when you cannot properly ‘teach them’ the lingo nor the readings?

So far so good. But who and how do we share it with in the very place where we work? Is there anyone at the end of the line? Oh dear, again ‘lost in translation’? Let’s hope for the best…

  1. From ‘translating the loss’ to ‘on-going re-specification’?

The previous two tales share something. They show two situations of a crisis with regards to what STS could be, and an attempt at changing its forms and contents, where we can witness the sheer complexities of seeking to generate overall conditions of change or transformations through these meagre trials and proposals: the joyful and horizontal politics of a prototypical network into transformations at the level of institutions, in the first case; or the contained, narrow, and humble teaching experiments searching to make ‘more sensitive’ architecture students who never felt they needed us–and nobody knows if they are ever going to use what we made them do, in the second one.

Translations that, no wonder, work somehow imperfectly and in strange ways. Yet, we have to resist the temptation of falling into despair, and believing that all we ever do is reaching dead ends. Could it be that the problem lies in how we address these issues as ones of ‘translation’? In a way, this was an old ANT tenet dwelling on the common Latin etymology of translation and treason, which has been captured beautifully in the Italian adagio traduttore, traditore, showing the difficulties and the many cases of untranslatability.

But I’d like to conclude in a less bleak tone, by briefly exploring another trope I think could help us address better what is at stake in these situations, or even find a way to discuss what STS might be allowing us to do when we want to intervene the form, format, and content of our ecology of practices and that of our counterparts in moments of feeling ‘lost in translation’.

In both cases what I think is a stake is not how to ‘scale up’ or merely ‘transpose’ methods, manifestos or ideas from one place to another but how to learn the local art of ‘re-specifying.’ What if that was our task, permanently, whenever we move from one place, discipline or context to another? That is, to re-specify our goals and aims, which means that we have to recalibrate, unlearn and relearn from the context in which we operate, as well as enter in situations that might change us forever, so that we could try to enact an opening.

In all fairness none of the two stories I told could be deemed as ‘failures.’ Indeed, they show that situations have a degree of play, however difficult it might be to find the appropriate tension in which they might become meaningful. Hence, to re-specify might be to open pores, networks, modes of being together and caring for each other’s arguments. Something like third spaces–that is, spaces that are neither fully academic nor fully non-academic, neither fully anthropological nor fully architectural, to use my examples.

What if we were to be always opening up spaces in-between? What if the only way in which our experiences from one place to another could work was to endlessly open up such third spaces of re-specification without wanting to take control of the situation? In a way that was the Zapatista issue: ‘changing the world without taking control.’[8] However, and precisely in that same Zapatista sense, I don’t mean any of this as an apostle of anything, since we would always need to re-specify even what the preachers say.

I feel that third spaces are always about the concrete and the singular, about what happens, what gathers us in a common experiential tissue. So they cannot be premised on what happened elsewhere. These third spaces should be put together grounding on what in the book In defence of school Masschelein and Simons call ‘free time’[9]–which, by the way, is the Greek etymology for the English term school, skholē. And that is what those third spaces, those pores or networks are all about: lending us time, giving time to each other to ‘re-specify’… Otherwise there’s no learning, because, in a way learning cannot but be to become another, to share our conditions of ‘study’ with others.[10]

These third spaces I am referring to might only work when they are characterised by their intimacy and a certain trust: the intimacy to fail and to err, together, in our re-specifications. And because of that they take an awful time to develop, and a lot of care, since they are constantly on the verge of being shut down. But the experimentation they afford might indeed open up potentialities, modes of doing and mutually sustaining each other in bleak times like this…

Could we now, here, open up one of these spaces? Hence, where do we start?

NOTES

[1] As expressed by Daniel López in the video produced for the #3esCTS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpQh0k9mJRU

[2] See https://redescts.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/call-3rd-meeting-of-the-spanish-network-of-sts-escts/

[3] See https://easst.net/prototyping-an-academic-network-people-places-and-connections/

[4] See https://easst.net/article/caring-for-a-displacement-in-meeting-formats-report-on-the-4th-meeting-of-the-sts-spanish-network-4-6-june-2014-salamancathere-have-been-other-previous-reports-on-the-network-its-philosophy-and-i/

[5] See https://redescts.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/los-limites-de-la-academia-y-los-formatos-espaciales/

[6] See https://redescts.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/iv-annual-meeting-of-the-social-studies-of-science-and-technology-network-red-escts-call-for-papers/

[7] See http://www.iup.mcts.tum.de/index.php?id=108

[8] Cf. Holloway, J. (2005). Change the world without taking control (New edition). London: Pluto Press.

[9] Masschelein, J; Simons, M. (2013). In Defence of The School: A Public Issue. Leuven: E-ducation, Culture & Society Publishers (I wish to thank Ester Gisbert for her strong recommendation of this book!).

[10] Cf. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.

Image credits

Postcard of Benjamin Baker’s human cantilever bridge model

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accessibility collectives events experimental collaborations functional diversity & disability rights objects of care and care practices participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures sociality & isolation urban and personal devices

STS/CSIS, UC Davis – Food For Thought event ‘Technologies of friendship: In search for a diverse common world’

Next Wednesday, April 19th – 12:00 – 2:00 pm I will have the great pleasure and honour to show my work at a STS/CSIS Food For Thought event at UC Davis (many thanks to Marisol de la Cadena for her invitation!).

Venue: STS/CSIS Conference Room (SSH Building #1246) | For those of you around, please register here

Technologies of friendship: In search for a diverse common world

The intense co-existence afforded in Spanish indignados protests by public space occupations had the unexpected effect of forging unprecedented relations and forms of affective politicisation. This had a huge impact in the activism around ‘functional diversity:’ transforming a self-representational fight by independent-living activists to substitute ‘dis/ability’ and ‘residential care’ framings into a wider exploration on how to enjoy and do things together with previously strange others. Drawing on my ethnographic engagement in the activist design collective En torno a la silla (ETS) emerging in that context, I will explore the register of friendship to narrate the intimate entanglements developed thereon: reclaiming the means to increase the conditions of access between bodily diverse people they delved into processes of collaborative prototyping and spatial intervention to remediate disabling body-environment nexuses impeding them to develop stronger bonds; and crafted meetings and documentation interfaces to articulate or share the experiences there made available, making newer alliances possible. From the very beginning their aim was not just the ‘inclusion’ of ‘disabled people’ through newer ‘technical aids’, but the sheer experimentation with spaces of encounter, bringing to the fore what ETS referred to as ‘technologies of friendship.’ Far from referring to ready-made commodities enabling a distinctive and static ontology of relations, this term designates frail and careful cosmopolitical explorations of the appropriate forms of relatedness, a recursive material opening up of friendship between bodily diverse strangers who might otherwise never meet were it not for their troublesome search for inhabiting and forging a diverse common world.

Image credits

“Sinergia” CC BY-NC-SA by negrescolor

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events experimental collaborations smart city urban and personal devices

Diseño UC – Charla: “Cacharreos documentales: Etnografía y co-producción de conocimientos”

cacharreos-documentales-redux

El próximo 14 de diciembre a las 19.00 estaré en Santiago de Chile y gracias a la amable invitación de Martín Tironi presentaré en la Escuela de Diseño, Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Estudios Urbanos de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile una versión en castellano del argumento del libro Experimental collaborations que he venido editando recientemente junto a Adolfo Estalella.

Este viaje a Chile lo realizaré desde Montevideo, puesto que en las dos semanas previas estaré dando un curso y un laboratorioen la Maestría en Psicología Social de la Facultad de Psicología de la Universidad de La República junto con Gonzalo Correa e Isaac Marrero.

Aquí os dejo más información de título y resumen de la charla en Santiago.

Cacharreos documentales: Etnografía y co-producción de conocimientos

La figura de la experimentación parece haber capturado irremediablemente la imaginación etnográfica desde hace dos décadas. En esta presentación quisiera revisitar diferentes trabajos que en antropología han venido reflexionando sobre las transformaciones en los modos de practicar y llevar a cabo trabajo y relatos de campo en numerosos sitios de la contemporaneidad. A partir de algunos casos de mi trabajo etnográfico reciente, quisiera prestar especial atención a aquellos procesos en los que la etnografía tiene lugar a través de intervenciones sociales y materiales que convierten el campo en un lugar para las colaboraciones epistémicas. A través de éstas y, sobre todo, en su despliegue a través de lo que podríamos llamar ‘dispositivos de campo’ la etnografía puede convertirse en un espacio donde las contrapartes etnográficas participan en la construcción conjunta de problematizaciones antropológicas. En esas situaciones, los tropos tradicionales del encuentro etnográfico (por ejemplo, la inmersión o la distancia) dan paso a un relato centrado en la intervención, donde la estética de la colaboración en la producción de conocimiento sustituye o se híbrida con distintas formas de observación participante. Partiendo de todas estas reflexiones, el concepto de ‘colaboraciones experimentales’ se propone para describir y conceptualizar la singularidad de esta modalidad etnográfica.

Lugar: Sala Lámpara, Edificio de Diseño, Campus Lo Contador, El comendador 1916, Providencia, Santiago de Chile

 

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caring infrastructures collectives ethics, politics and economy of care events experimental collaborations functional diversity & disability rights gendered division of labour independent-living objects of care and care practices open sourcing participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures personal autonomy politics and economy of care research projects sociality & isolation technical aids urban and personal devices valuation

Curso en la Maestría en Psicología Social, Universidad de La República – “Experimentos austeros: Los arreglos del cuidado en crisis”

2014-06-07-12-42-29

Desde el 3 al 17 de diciembre tendré el grandísimo gusto de poder estar en Montevideo, donde daré un curso y participaré en un laboratorio (esto último junto a Isaac Marrero) en la Maestría en Psicología Social de la Facultad de Psicología de la Universidad de La República, que por intermediación del queridísimo colega y amigo Gonzalo Correa (con quien tenía muchas ganas de poder tramar algo en común desde hace tiempo) ha financiado mi pasaje transatlántico y mi estancia. Agradezco enormemente el esfuerzo económico para hacer realidad el viaje y espero sólo poder compensarlo con las ganas que tengo de aprender de las realidades montevideanas y aportar en la medida de lo posible desde el trabajo que he venido realizando en los últimos años.

El curso tendrá lugar los días 5, 6, 7 y 8 de diciembre por la tarde y lleva por título “Experimentos austeros: Los arreglos del cuidado en crisis” (algo que en algún momento he pensado pudiera convertirse en el borrador de un libro o al menos de un intento de un argumento de amplio espectro–algo que quisiera poder reescribir y co-escribir con mis compas de En torno a la silla–, y agradezco enormemente la oportunidad brindada no sólo de poder presentar y discutir mi trabajo sino de tener un espacio experimental para ensayar el argumento en tan buena compañía).

Dejo por aquí la información detallada del curso.

Resumen

Este curso plantea una aproximación a las transformaciones contemporáneas en el cuidado y el auto-cuidado, prestando especial atención no sólo a sus aspectos sociales (roles de género sexualizados) o vinculados al trabajo corporal, sino a los arreglos e infraestructuras materiales. De forma más concreta, y siguiendo diferentes perspectivas dentro de la antropología de la ciencia y la tecnología, el curso pretende mostrar las democratizaciones tecnocientíficas desarrolladas en años recientes por el Movimiento de Vida Independiente (MVI): una particular forma de activismo encarnado que pone en el centro los soportes corporales, la interdependencia como fundamento para el auto-cuidado y la experiencia de la diversidad corporal. Empleando numerosos casos y el contexto de un estudio etnográfico llevado a cabo en Barcelona desde 2012–uno de los momentos de mayor efervescencia creativa y activista de la España de las medidas de austeridad, en una profunda crisis económica-financiera, institucional-democrática, moral, etc.-, el curso busca abrir un diálogo sobre los modos de teorización y de conceptualización de las infraestructuras vernáculas del cuidado, las formas de conocimiento que movilizan o las sensibilidades que concitan estos activistas del MVI. Y, particularmente, de qué manera sus “experimentos austeros” pudieran estar explorando o poniendo en práctica conceptos y modelos alternativos de bienestar.

Contenido

0) Introducción

– Una aproximación a las transformaciones contemporáneas en los arreglos socio-materiales del cuidado desde un estudio etnográfico en la España en crisis -económica-financiera, institucional-democrática, moral, etc.-, participando activamente en el colectivo En torno a la silla.

– Apunte sobre el método: Conceptualización vernácula y antropología de la ciencia y la tecnología.

– Dos grandes líneas temáticas:

  1. Cuerpo y formaciones socio-subjetivas fragmentarias y en formación: Una antropología pensada desde los soportes corporales y socio-subjetivos (Do kamo de Leenhardt y la revisión de Pazos, 2008) de la experiencia de la diversidad, lo que permitiría abrir un diálogo sobre las infraestructuras corporales/urbanas, las formas de conocimiento que movilizan y las sensibilidades que concitan.
  2. El cacharreo y sus arreglos como modo de materialización vernácula del cuidado, aspecto nuclear de esta historia.

 

1) El cacharreo como radicalización de las infraestructuras del auto-cuidado frente a la institucionalización y el cuidado familiar

– Discusión sobre el cuidado y el auto-cuidado:

  • El estado del bienestar español en discusión (1977-2006): el IMSERSO y su intento frágil y tecnocrático por ir más allá del asistencialismo, el familismo y el corporativismo; las leyes sobre discapacidad; la gran reforma de la “ley de dependencia”, el SAAD y el debate institucionalización vs. cuidado en el hogar (e.g. teleasistencia)
  • El Movimiento por la vida independiente (MVI) I: Disability Rights Movement y discusiones del concepto de cuidado / auto-cuidado
  • El MVI II : La creación del Foro de Vida Independiente y Divertad (FVID) y la diversidad funcional como concepto auto-representacional vernáculo del modelo social de la discapacidad; un foro en internet vs. el asociacionismo corporativista de la discapacidad (grandes asociaciones sectoriales y asociaciones de padres)
  • Las Oficinas de Vida Independiente (OVIs) y el asistente personal (AP) como figura de la interdependencia en discusión: el debate feminista de “Cojos y precarias haciendo vidas que importan”
  • Tecnología y MVI: entre el derecho a escoger las tecnologías o hacer lobby para su rediseño mediante pagos directos (Lifchez, Ratzka, Wienner, Werner) y la auto-fabricación
  • Radicalizaciones del cuidado: De las “comisiones de diversidad funcional” del 15M a Funcionamientos de Medialab-Prado y el surgimiento de En torno a la silla (ETS)

 

2) El cacharreo como activismo encarnado

– Figuraciones epistémicas y articulaciones relacionales en el activismo encarnado:

  • Democratizaciones tecnocientíficas y activismos encarnados: foros híbridos (Callon et al.), comunidades epistémicas (Akrich & Rabeharisoa), grupos concernidos (Callon & Rabeharisoa), epidemiología popular (Phil Brown et al.) y activismo basado en la evidencia (Akrich & Rabeharisoa et al.).
  • Lo social, lo técnico y lo subjetivo en el activismo encarnado I: “tecnologías del yo” y “política de la amistad” (Foucault)
  • Lo social, lo técnico y lo subjetivo en el activismo encarnado II: “Regímenes de im/perceptibilidad”, “immodest witnessing” y “seizing the means of reproduction” (Michelle Murphy)
  • Lo social, lo técnico y lo subjetivo en el activismo encarnado III: La pregunta por “cómo vivir en común” (Barthes)
  • El cacharreo como “interfaz documental” y como “tecnología de la amistad” en ETS

 

3) El cacharreo y la experimentación austera con los arreglos del bienestar en crisis

– Discusión sobre infraestructuras del estado del bienestar, su gubernamentalidad y sus agenciamientos mercantiles:

  • Una vida de catálogo: El catálogo orto-protésico como un dispensario público subvencionado de ayudas técnicas producidas por actores privados; el catálogo como espacio de gestión gubernamental y mutualización mediada por el estado; el catálogo como “dispositivo de mercado” o “agenciamiento mercantil” que in/habilita particulares agencias económicas (Callon et al.)
  • Alternativas institucionales al dispensario: El caso del INTI de Argentina y el encuentro Tecnologías de Bajo Coste del CEAPAT español
  • Modelos del estado del bienestar (Esping-Andersen) y regímenes del cuidado (J. Jenson et al.) y mitos fundacionales del estado (Taussig)
  • Antropología del estado del bienestar sureuropeo como proyecto permanentemente inacabado (Muehlebach y el relato más allá del debate Mauss/Douglas o Foucault/Rose sobre el estado del bienestar y sus formas de gubernamentalidad; la singularidad del gran proyecto de estado postfranquista-Expo, Barcelona ’92- y sus continuidades con el franquismo, la relación con la arquitectura y el desarrollo urbano; la “ley de dependencia” como gran nuevo relato de la España moderna: “el cuarto pilar del Estado del bienestar”)
  • El bienestar entra en crisis: impagos, medidas de austeridad, co-pagos, retrasos y la neo-vulnerabilización de “los vulnerables”
  • Experimentos austeros cacharreando con el concepto y las infraestructuras del cuidado: Diversitat Funcional 15M, Primavera Cacharrera, Pornortopedia/Yes We Fuck, Cacharratón y Red Cacharrera (analogía con la iniciativa mexicana PROJIMO); la austeridad como fragilidad material y vulnerabilidad de los soportes y de su sostén relacional; la imposibilidad de constituir un agenciamiento mercantil (agentes que no se pueden convertir en emprendedores, productos no vendibles, acceso a materiales poco nobles y/o reciclados, etc.)

 

4) El cacharreo y el diseño abierto como construcción conjunta de problemas

– Discusión sobre el significado y la función social del diseño y su apertura en un contexto de cultura libre:

  • Diseño crítico, especulativo y adversarial
  • Diseño participativo/colaborativo: Formalismos democráticos y la revolución de los usuarios
  • Diseño abierto I: Documentar la auto-fabricación y la arquitectura de la necesidad (“Architecture without architects”, “Whole Earth Catalogue”, “Cultura materiale extraurbana”, “Rikimbili”, “Handmade urbanism”)
  • Diseño abierto II: Movimiento maker, amateur experts, crowd-sourcing y emprendeduría neoliberal
  • Diseño abierto III: Critical making
  • El cacharreo de ETS como un hacer vernáculo, cuidadoso y frágil a la vez, centrado en construir problemas conjuntamente sobre el diseño y la economía de las ayudas técnicas.

 

5) El cacharreo documental y la experimentación etnográfica

– Discusión sobre experimentación etnográfica:

  • La etnografía en los sitios antropológicos de la contemporaneidad: Para-sitios y comunidades epistémicas (Rabinow et al.; Marcus & Holmes)
  • Colaboración epistémica: diferentes modos de co-laborar (Riles, Fortun et al., Tsing et al., Kelty et al.)
  • Experimentación y observación: Breve excurso sobre el uso de estos conceptos en historia de la ciencia, STS y antropología
  • Dispositivos de campo y el sitiar/situar el campo
  • Cacharreos documentales: Inscripciones, elicitaciones, realizaciones, elaboraciones y representaciones de/del campo
  • Colaboraciones experimentales: ETS como lugar del cacharreo etnográfico.

 

Bibliografía básica

Agulló, C. et al. (2011). Cojos y precarias haciendo vidas que importan. Cuaderno sobre una alianza imprescindible. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños.

Akrich, M. (2010). From Communities of Practice to Epistemic Communities: Health Mobilizations on the Internet. Sociological Research Online, 15(2).

Brown, P. et al. (Eds.). (2011). Contested Illnesses: Citizens, Science, and Health Social Movements. Berkeley, CA: Univ of California Press.

Callon, M. (2008). Economic Markets and the Rise of Interactive Agencements: From Prosthetic Agencies to Habilitated Agencies. In T. Pinch & R. Swedberg (Eds.), Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology meets Science and Technology Studies (pp. 29–56). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Callon, M., Lascoumes, P., & Barthe, Y. (2011). Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. (G. Burchell, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Callon, M., & Rabeharisoa, V. (2008). The Growing Engagement of Emergent Concerned Groups in Political and Economic Life: Lessons from the French Association of Neuromuscular Disease Patients. Science, Technology & Human Values, 33(2), 230–261.

Callon, M. et al. (2013). Sociologie des agencements marchands : Textes choisis. Paris: Presses de l’École de Mines.

Estalella, A. & Sánchez Criado, T. (Eds.) (2017). Experimental collaborations: Ethnography through fieldwork devices. Oxford: Berghahn.

Muehlebach, A. (2012). The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Murphy, M. (2012). Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Murphy, M. (2006). Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pazos, Á. (2008). El otro como sí-mismo. Observaciones antropológicas sobre las tecnologías de la subjetividad. In T. Sánchez Criado (Ed.), Tecnogénesis. La construcción técnica de las ecologías humanas (Vol. 2, pp. 145–166). Madrid: Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red.

Rabeharisoa, V., Moreira, T., & Akrich, M. (2014). Evidence-based activism: Patients’, users’ and activists’ groups in knowledge society. BioSocieties, 9(2), 111–128.

Sánchez Criado, T., Rodríguez-Giralt, I., & Mencaroni, A. (2016). Care in the (critical) making. Open prototyping, or the radicalisation of independent-living politics. ALTER – European Journal of Disability Research / Revue Européenne de Recherche Sur Le Handicap, 10(2016), 24–39.

Sánchez Criado, T., & Cereceda, M. (2016). Urban accessibility issues: Technoscientific democratizations at the documentation interface. City, 20(4), 611–628.

Sánchez Criado, T., & Rodríguez-Giralt, I. (2016). Caring through Design?: En torno a la silla and the “Joint Problem-Making” of Technical Aids. In C. Bates, R. Imrie, & K. Kullman (Eds.), Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities (pp. 200–220). Oxford: Wiley.

Shakespeare, T. (2006). Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge.

Werner, D. (Ed.). (1998). Nothing About Us Without Us: Developing Innovative Technologies For, By, and With Disabled Persons. Palo Alto, CA: Health Wrights.

Categories
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.

Categories
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
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.

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+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.

Categories
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).