Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through fieldwork devices (edited book)

Book edited by Adolfo Estalella & Tomás Sánchez Criado

Berghahn, April 2018 | EASA Series – Volume 34

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.

Table of Contents

Preface. Collaboration Mode 3: A Found Condition of Anthropological Field Research Today… and What Might Be Made of It, George E. Marcus (University of California at Irvine).

Introduction. Experimental collaborations, Tomás Sánchez Criado (Munich Center for Technology in Society, TUM) & Adolfo Estalella (CSIC). PDF

Chapters of the book

Experimenting with data: ‘Collaboration’ as method and practice in an interdisciplinary public health project, Emma Garnett (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine).

The ‘research traineeship’: the ups and downs of para-siting ethnography, Maria Schiller (Max Planck Institute).

Finding one’s rhythm: A ‘tour de force’ of fieldwork on the road with a band, Anna Lisa Ramella (University of Siegen).

Idiotic encounters: experimenting with collaborations between ethnography and design, Andrea Gaspar (University of Coimbra).

Fieldwork as Interface: Digital technologies, moral worlds and zones of encounter, Karen Waltorp (Aarhus University).

Thrown into Collaboration: An Ethnography of Transcript Authorization, Alexandra Kasatkina (Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, St Petersburg), Roman Khandozhko (Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) & Zinaida Vasilyeva (University of Neuchatel / European University at  St.Petersburg).

A Cultural Cyclotron: Ethnography, art experiments, and a challenge of moving towards the collaborative in Rural Poland, Tomasz Rakowski (University of Warsaw).

Making fieldwork public: repurposing ethnography as a hosting platform in Hackney Wick, London , Isaac Marrero Guillamón (Goldsmiths’, University of London).

Afterword. Refiguring collaboration and experimentation, Sarah Pink (RMIT).