Popular music is a key instance for looking at the imaginary of different societies. It reflects day-to-day life, cultural values, and above all expression of emotions. As in other countries, in Brazil and the United States, the majority of composers are men, and they tend to use music as one of the few public spheres in which they allow themselves to speak more freely about their private feelings. They will sing about their weaknesses, their fear of loss, and their sentiments toward women. Suffering, related to love, abandonment, and lack of money is a central element both in Brazilian and North American popular music of the 20th Century and my paper will compare how it is expressed in different songs.

Focusing on young Matses in Peruvian Amazonia, I explore how images produced by children can tell a story about Matses lifeworlds, short-term histories and future horizons.

I move from drawings and photographs taken by the children and illustrating aspects of life that young Matses are concerned with in their everydayness. By highlighting these aspects of concern, I elaborate ethno-graphic illustrations that suggest how such elements are entangled with a wider range of materials, tools, activities and types of environments in Matses world.

I argue that any object, action and element disclosed by the images does not make sense on its own terms, but only within a referential whole of other tools, places, materials and practices. I therefore suggest how these aspects, encountered in a present moment which is captured by the images, can tell a story about the world in which young Matses move. At the same time, these elements tell a story about past events in Matses history and future horizons that the children's concerns gesture towards.

Therefore, my ethno-graphics will move from the here-and-now of life to then expand the focus of attention and see how aspects perceived in the present can light up a referential whole within which these elements are entangled. Moving from the children's accounts and always referring to the experience we shared in the field, my aim is to bring out how young Matses directly perceive and experience the world but also to suggest how their experiences are always dynamic and caught in ongoing movement of life.

A Ghanaian proverb goes: "A person who rides a donkey does not know the ground is hot".

As researchers we often run the risk of objectifying the social realities we come close to during fieldwork by claiming the knowledge within theories that belong to academic discourses which, as time goes on, become fixed and static, impenetrable to the heat of the ground and to stories of lived experience. As part of my practice based research, I intend to make a claim for creative practice to occupy a fundamental role in anthropological research, particularly because besides contributing to exploring new theoretical directions it also changes our approach to knowledge altogether. My research in particular has been looking at the often unspeakable and intangible imaginary worlds that emerge during experiences of illegal migration by exploring applied storytelling and participatory animation workshops, as practices that can be useful for these realms of existence to emerge in expressive forms that often evade the verbal.

This presentation intends to offer an insight into the creative process that was developed during my fieldwork with Egyptian undocumented migrants in Milan and their neighbourhoods of origin in Egypt. At the same time it wishes to propose an exchange with the audience through some experiential activities that could be useful in making anthropological questions more accessible and relevant wider audiences.

During my fieldwork into commercial and non-commercial public sexual encounters between men along a stretch of canal in Manchester, I was often offered differing explanations and opinions about the people, events and relationships I observed. In this presentation I will present a series of extracts, of combinations of writing and drawing in the form of multi-media slide-shows that aim to simultaneously show the way two informants explained their relationship to me.

Recent works by Tim Ingold (2007, 2012), and others (Galman 2007, 2009,) have revitalised a discussion around the use of drawings and graphical material in Anthropology. Such forms are useful in conveying more sensuous and ambiguous aspects of life, whilst preserving anonymity and facilitating involvement in the ethnographic process. Unlike linear sequence of conventional ethnographic writing and prose, the graphic novella can simultaneously represent and describe the co-presence of ethnographic material in non-linear ways, for example contradictory utterances and arguments, discrepancies between a person's public speech and inner thought, or two or more people speaking together at the same time or over each other. The presentation will be based around Each of them framed their exchanges of intimacy and money differently. Rather than attempting to access an underlying 'truth' of this situation through a singular ethnographic flow, the use of a combination of different streams of text and image within the graphic novella, allow the situation they describe to exist ethnographically 'as is': a combination of different simultaneous, understandings or stories.

Due to the changes in the international traffic of cocaine, more and more women get caught every year in the Italian airports. Abruptly removed from their country of origin, these women are suddenly asked to stop being mothers, wives and citizens. This video, realized in collaboration between an anthropologist, an artist and a video-art editor, aims at giving a sense of what it means to be caught up into an interrupted journey.

The session will consist of the screening of a documentary film chronicling the development of an ethnotheatre piece with a group of high school students. Following the documentary, the presenter will explain her process and answer questions. The audience will then be invited to discuss the combined use of ethnography, theatre and therapy with adolescents in schools. This project was conducted as part of the presenter's final master's research project in drama therapy at Concordia University in Montreal, with the funding of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The MA student worked in a high school with seven students with various social and behavioural difficulties. These difficulties lead them to be part of special education classes, drop out of or change schools, and, invariably, fall behind on the required curriculum during their turbulent time in the education system. Over the course of seven months, the researcher and her participants created, wrote, and produced an ethnotheatre piece that was presented to fellow students, teachers, school workers, family members and friends. Post-performance discussions were conducted in order to create a dialogue between the public and the participants. The documentary film was made alongside this process in order to archive the progression of the research, disseminate the results and share the experience in different conferences and educational contexts. Please come and see how ethnography, theatre and drama therapy can be used with teens to help them voice their experience of educational challenges in a positive, constructive and therapeutic way!

Dragon*Con is the largest fan-run popular culture convention held in North America. This work focuses on cosplaying, or "costumed play," as a form of performative intertextuality or citational practice wherein the fantastic is embodied and brought to life. In cosplay, individuals don costumes and take on alternate gesture and speech repertoires as a means to generate an association between their body and a set of "publicly available" mass mediated source texts from which their body is modeled and made to relate. It will examine a number of intertextual and representational strategies that cosplayers use to creatively replicate, revise, recombine, and modulate a public stockpile of ready-made textual constructs found in video games, print, film and video, action figures, trading cards, animated television series, comic books, etc. Building upon the hypermedia ethnography works of Peter Biella, Bella Dicks, Alan Howard, Sarah Pink, Jeff Todd Titon, Gary Seaman, Homer Williams, etc., this presentation will integrate text, images, video, animated graphics, etc. into a single multimedia whole.

The paper draws on the praxis of "participatory video" within anthropological research, developed by the author in different community contexts in Brazil and Portugal. The joint production of documentary videos with minority groups on both sides of the Atlantic is discussed as a process which leads beyond the confines of a merely instrumental view of audio-visual means within ethnographic fieldwork. Questions of narrative and storytelling of film are closely related to such of textual anthropological "products", and the reasoning involved in the making of a video resembles in many ways that of the "thick description" sought after by ethnographers. Artistic forms of ethnographic expression and participatory video in particularly may potentially overcome the misleading divide between "description" and "analysis" within anthropological research and the representation and presentation of anthropological knowledge.

Ethno science-fiction is a development of Jean Rouch's ethnofiction. While ethnofiction draws on projective improvisation as an ethnographic film method to explore past and present experiences of ethnographic significance though creative expression and reflexivity, ethno-science fiction is exclusively concerned with the uncertainty of the future. The film method refers to the popular film and literary genre to indicate the impact the process of imagining an uncertain future has on present experiences and how the imagined narratives of the ethno-science fiction influence the creation of strategies for the future.

The paper will draw on performance and film clips to suggest how participatory video in combination with applied theatre can be used as a method to explore the process of anticipation, worry and fear in relation to future environmental threats, in the everyday life of Mancunians. 'Science' has an additional meaning in this context since scientists for the first time in history are able to predict certain consequences of climate change in a long term perspective and with improved accuracy. The imagined narratives of the future scenarios are thus generated in the tension between the personal imagination of the participants and the predictions of the scientists.

Differently from what occurs with cultural expressions that nowadays concretize a positive sense of a 'Lusophone multiculturality', the physical environment of migrant settlements is approached by public authorities as a source of problems such as over-densification and an unsafe environment. This obscures other aspects far more at the centre of people's lived experience and invested in the self-constructed home. Such a focus on 'problems' legitimates processes of urban renewal based on demolitions of the existing urban tissue, as already in course in other areas of the same municipality.

Whilst poetics is at the core of the way in which Rap communicates, could it enrich ethnographic narratives willing to convey the role of non-literal communication in place-making? After an overview of the parallel works of academic research and Rap productions undertaken since the early nineties at a particular bairro, named Cova da Moura, the authors wish to explore possible dialogues between research regarding the right to the city in Greater Lisbon (GL) and the Rap productions that address critical aspects of GL's uneven development. This project originates in a shared concern with giving voice to unarticulated social experience.