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- Convenors:
-
Jennifer Long
(MacEwan University)
Megan Highet (University of Alberta)
Sally Carraher (University of Alaska Anchorage)
- Stream:
- Worlds in motion: Anthropology in movement/Mondes en mouvement: Anthropologie en mouvement
- Location:
- FSS 1007
- Start time:
- 6 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
As anthropologists increasingly move beyond the boundaries of the discipline in order to engage in interdisciplinary collaborations and to enter into research partnerships with diverse publics, we ask what challenges and benefits await anthropologists as they move betwixt and between these spaces.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists are increasingly called upon to collaborate with interdisciplinary research teams and to partner with community-based groups that wish to engage governments and broader publics. In both cases, the anthropologist may spend much time working outside of their home department, and must become adept at moving back and forth between anthropology and other disciplines as well as between academic spaces and other spaces of work. Anthropologists moving betwixt and between fieldwork sites, academic settings, and public spaces must also be adept at moving knowledge between various stakeholders to facilitate the goals of these interdisciplinary and community-based partnerships. Such collaborative teams hinge upon effective knowledge exchange and knowledge translation in cross-cultural as well as cross-disciplinary settings to ensure the accessibility of knowledge disseminated to broad audiences of knowledge users.
In this panel, we invite papers that reflect on the ways in which anthropological theories, methods, and even anthropologists themselves are increasingly called upon to facilitate the multi-directional movement of ideas, knowledge, and goals within diverse multi-disciplinary teams and community-based research groups. In what ways do anthropological lenses illuminate the flows of ideas and meanings between communities, different academic disciplines, and broader publics? How can these lenses also reveal the sources of barriers and blockages? What obstacles challenge effective movement of knowledge in the multi-disciplinary teams that anthropologists are part of? And finally, what may anthropologists who move largely outside of an anthropology department bring back to our own discipline?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Shuji Iijima (Kyushu University)
Paper short abstract:
Today, the definition of the term “fieldwork” varies among different fields, from natural sciences to economic engineering. While doing my own fieldwork and teaching students, I have participated in several colleagues’ fieldworks in Japan. I will discuss fieldwork studies (FWS).
Paper long abstract:
Today, the meaning of "fieldwork" has been expanded by various disciplines, from natural sciences to entrepreneurship. Consequently, the term fieldwork has become a buzzword. However, the reconstruction of the humanities and social sciences in Japan questioned effectiveness of institutionalized fieldwork but can help empower other field-oriented disciplines.
In order to grasp the concept of fieldwork in different disciplines, I started my anthropological fieldwork of different fieldworks at Kyusyu University, Japan. These field sites varied from urban design in architecture to hydrology, marine biology, ecology, livestock science, and business anthropology. I tried to develop comprehensive programs of Project or Problem-Based Learning (PBL) for our university.
According my investigation, in any fieldwork, the teacher and the students seem to have different goals and motivations at the initial stage. This is because teachers mainly teach students to seek the objective of each fieldwork, but students seem to have various other motivations. However, at the last stage, through their fieldwork experience, unintentional effects of the activities of both sides seem to foster development in not only the teachers and students but also the field-site residents. This may be because of the nature of the fieldwork. However, we have to prevent unintentional risks like natural disasters and human errors in fieldwork. Otherwise, fieldwork will become unsustainable. At times, the risk can become invisible because of a teacher's naturalized recognition and a student's amateur recognition. In my presentation, I discuss how to intervene in this kind of double-blinded setting.
Eugenia Ramirez-Goicoechea (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, UNED)
Paper short abstract:
I believe in a biosocial/biohumanistic approach to our human becomings and the need of interdisciplinarity between Social Anthropology and Biological Sciences. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Biomedicine and Epigenetics, this paper will discuss the possibilities and caveats of such a collaboration.
Paper long abstract:
Articulating insights and results among differing traditions, scholarship and wisdom in new assemblies of understandings is not easy. Some of the caveats of such an endeavour can be found in our contrasting disciplinary histories, traditions, interests, objects and agendas, our divergent focus, goals, empirical/analytic scales, languages, methodologies, procedures, research settings and techniques.
Our Nature/Culture dualistic epistemo-ontologies - from which disciplines and epistemic communities have configured their divergent paths, shape our intellectual histories, interests and research programmes-. The strong and self-perpetuating cleavage between Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Life Sciences (Biology, Ecology, Ethology, Evolutionary studies, Developmental Psychology, Neurosciences, Genetics, etc.) is anchored in such opposite foundational starting points. The contrastive paradigms, categories, classificatory systems, world views, theories, etc. behind these diverging research practices and results, should be taken into account when trying to elucidating the reasons for such a traditional disciplinary breach. Conceptual openness and flexibility, eradication of prejudices and misgivings, and interdisciplinary literacy are to be developed in moving Anthropology and Biology beyond disciplinary closure and self-sufficient boundedness. Yet, it is still to be discussed the practical and procedural aspects of such an attempt in terms of the logics, temporalities, scales and spaces of specific research activities and knowledge building.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Biomedical and Genetic research institutions, I will explore some of these questions. At the same time, I will consider Epigenetics as a promising field for building a biosocial biohumanistic interdisciplinary collaborative work between Social Anthropology and the Life Science.
Christine Beaudoin (University of Ottawa)
Paper short abstract:
Crafting anthropology brings theory and method together through sensibility. This paper will explore how the intersection of biophysics, art and anthropology, as well as researcher and community, influences the development of ideas.
Paper long abstract:
I spent twelve months doing fieldwork in tissue culture facilities working at the intersection of biology, physics, art and anthropology. Immersive participant observation allowed me to focus on a set of practices, practices of movement which support an intimate human-cell relationship. It is the apparatus and craft skills at play in labs, indicator of the mobilisation of many disciplinary fields (Latour & Woolgar, 1986), which enable practitioners of cell culture to engage living materials with care and creativity. Described by Paxson (2013), craft is "located at the nexus of art and science". Anchored in bodies and not disciplines, craft brings in question sensory knowledge and intuition as there is constant movement between what is practically apprehended and the protocol.
Craft is a useful point of entry to discuss anthropology as a discipline full of moving bodies. The idea of craft as moving beyond disciplinary concerns (Paterson & Surette, 2015), brings me to the conceptualisation of anthropology itself as a crafting practice. A crafting multidisciplinary anthropology would bring theory and method together again by basing discussion in wonder and sensibility (Ingold, 2008, 2013). Engaging my research as an antidisciplinary (Ito, 2014) crafty experiment has led to the emergence of BioTown, a multidisciplinary non-profit which works towards the accessibility of biological knowledge and laboratory practices.
This paper will explore how dialogues between disciplines but also between researchers and local community allow and hinder the development of ideas. The multidisciplinary framework of crafting will allow a critical reflection on the practice of anthropology.
Wiktor Kulinski (York University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will advance scholarship and will propose new methodological and practical approaches to the anthropology of interiority by facilitating an expression of the interior dialogues of migrants through participant-driven and collaborative methods based in performance theory and psychoanalysis.
Paper long abstract:
As the principle point of departure and methodological engagement, this paper seeks to realize an anthropology of interiority in order to examine and describe the lifeworlds of Polish Canadian migrants across generations by tapping their inner dialogues. By lifeworlds I mean "a rich, multifaceted, imaginative inner life" being comprised of inner dialogues or (semi-)effable "inner speech" and also ineffable "random urges, unfinished thoughts, unarticulated moods, and much else besides" (Irving 2007). This internal process is central to a person's social life and yet it is rarely a focus of anthropological research because an ethnography of interiority is often considered incompatible with current epistemologies that tend to be framed as if there is no objective access to other people's consciousness, particularly those aspects that cannot be externalized or easily articulated (Hogan and Pink 2010; Irving 2007). This paper proposes 'disengagement' as a theoretical framework for understanding this limitation that can perhaps offer a space from which to work towards engaging the disengaged aspects of the human condition; disengagement theory was originally developed in the 1960's as a psychotherapy methodology for understanding the changes in human behaviour as we age but has yet to be applied in an anthropological and ethnographic context (Cumming & Henry 1961; Morgan & Kunkel 2007). This paper will advance this scholarship and will propose new methodological and practical approaches to the anthropology of interiority by facilitating an expression of the interior dialogues of Polish Canadian migrants through participant-driven and collaborative methods.
Lindsay Harris (University of British Columbia) Mike Evans (UBC Okanagan)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on the results of a multi-disciplinary, community based research project intended to map the potential effects of a living wage initiative in Revelstoke BC, analyzing the importance of the anthropological lens for supporting the on-going dialogue of local stakeholders.
Paper long abstract:
Regardless of the roots of poverty, dealing with its consequences is a concern for governments at all levels. The manifestations of poverty are intensely local, and civic action, in the form of campaigns to increase minimum wages and/or institute a living wage, have sprung up in cities and towns across the developed world. Living wage initiatives have emerged across Canada; intended to reduce poverty among the local working poor, they have also sparked tensions with local business communities. In this paper we reflect on the consequences of multi-disciplinary research in a specific context: a community based economic impact research project intended to map the potential effects of a living wage proposed as a poverty reduction strategy for the city of Revelstoke BC. The project partnered anthropologists and economists with local stakeholders to examine the community's concerns about the initiative, and in particular its impact on local small businesses. Many of the benefits of a living wage campaign are extraordinarily difficult to measure, while the likely range of impacts on labour costs and consequences are easier to trace. The project resulted in an interactive tool that can provide a business based context against which the wider social benefits of poverty reduction can be judged. This paper analyzes the importance of the anthropological lens to what might have been a conventional economic modelling exercise: instead of providing a "bottom line" the tools developed evolved together with the community debate, making the process visible to local stakeholders and supporting their on-going dialogue.
Jennifer Long (MacEwan University)
Paper short abstract:
How might engineers apply anthropological ethical tenets in community-based work? This paper compares ethical approaches to community work and describes how one anthropologist is teaching anthropological ethics in STEM classrooms.
Paper long abstract:
As a trained anthropologist, I have worked as an ethnographer-for-hire in market research and a facilitator for diversity and intercultural competency training, and now, I teach undergraduate engineering students how to communicate in today's diverse workplace. Using the Engineering classroom as my field site, this paper explores the application of anthropological ethical tenets into engineering curriculum as an innovative way to teach about multivocality and define "community" for future engineers working in applied contexts. Bucciarelli has argued that undergraduate engineering education lacks "attention to the complexities of context, [is] almost solely focused on individual agency [argued to be antithetical to 'real' workplace experiences], (and reflects) too narrow and simplistic a view of the responsibilities of the practicing engineer" (2007, 141). Anthropologists and engineers approach community engagement differently and from my experience working outside the discipline, I argue there is potential to integrate an anthropological (ethical) approach - the tenets we use for research - into an engineer's community-based practice. This paper positions the teaching and learning of anthropology in non-anthropological environments as a 'cross-cultural' case study; In so doing, I look to articulate possible goals for teaching the next generation of engineering students and to explore a case study of what moving beyond the disciple looks like today.