Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Lee Douglas
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
Harsha Menon (Independent)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Carlo Cubero
(Tallinn University)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Changes in Europe are pushing anthropologists to expand traditional forms of authorship. This panel will consider co-creation as a possible ethical framework for producing knowledge capable of reckoning the politics of visual representation and historical narration in times of global crisis.
Long Abstract:
Since 2015, Europe has witnessed changing migration flows as increased numbers of refugees, asylums seekers, and economic migrants have crossed the region's southernmost borders. While the conditions provoking this move north may have originated outside the geographical boundaries of the continent, they are also inherently linked to power structures defined by global capital and legacies of colonial histories. As such, new migratory flows have sparked questions about how present and past relationships between north and south are narrated, deconstructed and understood. This, in turn, has pushed anthropologists to rethink the power dynamics implicit in producing knowledge about displacement, citizenship, belonging in times of global change. Situated at these intersections, this panel considers new anthropological knowledge production practices that call for more shared forms of authorship, capable of producing more reflexive, inclusive and critical modes of narrating human experience and social life. Specifically, the methodology of co-creation--first embraced by multimodal media-makers, artists and technology entrepreneurs--will be explored as a potential ethical framework for producing anthropological knowledge capable of reckoning the politics of visual representation and historical narration. The panel invites anthropologists and practitioners of ethnographic methodologies to explore how new technologies are being deployed to expand notions of authorship, thus redefining the boundaries of the field. In doing so, it considers how co-creation can generate more multi-vocal approaches to studies of colonial/decolonial legacies, visual and aural cultural production, and shifting approaches to aesthetics. By centering intersectionality as a framework, the panel explores new anthropological horizons in and beyond Europe.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Harsha Menon (Independent)
Paper short abstract:
From early roots in colonialism, to embracing multi-vocality and shared authorship, does co-creation offer a potential framework for the current moment in anthropology? No longer speaking for, or even speaking nearby, this paper asks, can co-creation yield a more ethical paradigm for scholarship?
Paper long abstract:
An academic discipline steeped in colonialism, European 'discovery,' and natural sciences, anthropology has evolved to encourage robust self -critique.
Anthropologists are often self-conscious and self-critical, not only about personal subject positions, but also in theorizing one's inter-subjectivity, [DS1] especially in relationships to power. Lenses such as gender, sexuality, and post-coloniality are central.
MIT's Co-creation Studio defines co-creation as efforts that function outside of a single authorship, across communities and disciplines. It posits that co-creation is a form of equity and justice. What does this mean? Moreover, who decides?
Using clips from historical filmic anthropological research and co-creative anthropology, this paper asks three questions? What can be gleaned from early power dynamics in the field? In co-creation, what autonomy and authorship does the anthropologist retain? Are there current projects that find a balance of power and authorship amenable to all involved?
While this paper will ask more questions than it answers, it will elevate the urgency of emancipating the discipline of anthropology out of the colonial project to imagine spaces of ethical engagement and knowledge production that feature a multivocality. No longer speaking for subjects and cultures, the paper seeks to evoke a gesture of Trinh T. Minh-ha who states "I do not wish to speak about, only to speak nearby." In imagining different forms of inter-subjectivity, could co-creation offer an opportunity for a speaking 'with'? And given the extreme vulnerabilities of migration, climate change, and the colonial present, is not such co-creation an ethical imperative?
Manas Chowdhury (Jahangirnagar University)
Paper short abstract:
With ever-evolving spaces the perception of authorship has changed towards the new mode of agencies. But (co)authorship is not likely to change the system of meanings. Without reconfiguring the concepts, categories, premises, co-authorship would only aid to specific cultural projects.
Paper long abstract:
Authorship and agency are much of a crucial area of discussion in the recent decades, not only in core anthropological practices, but also in broader humanities and liberal studies. Founded mostly in the history of colonization and masculinities, the debate pointed at many tendencies, as well as opened up many possibilities, of knowledge production across the national borders. However, the interlocutors of these concepts often assumed texts and other expressions as to be the testimony of their authors' agency. It thus reduced agency as an act of creating (or co-creating in certain contexts) texts or (artistic) expressions, dissociating the realm of meanings those production could be read within. Readership, on the other hand, is constituted through a series of negotiations with the historical structures and political relations of the stakes, and is prevailing over the subjects themselves.
With ever-evolving spaces for texts and artistic practices and growing experimentation from the authoritative academic entities, the perception of authorship has changed towards the new mode of agencies. It revealed different forms of partnership in artistic practices and textual production. However, (co)authorship has not that appeared to pose critical understanding of, or radical alternative to, the system of meanings and the ways they are perceived in a certain historical structure. Without reconfiguring the concepts, categories, premises, co-authorship or co-creation can only aid to the cultural project of pluralism or 'melting-pot'. It may end up like as feminist poet Jo Carrillo once wrote 'Our white sisters/ radical friends/ love to own pictures of us'.
Savyasachi Anju Prabir (National Institute of Design)
Paper short abstract:
Richard Francis Burton, 19th century British explorer (among many other roles), preferred to style himself El-Hichmakani, meaning "Of No-hall, Nowhere." I would like to borrow from Burton as much as I have from my ancestry, in shaping my identity and sense of belonging.
Paper long abstract:
Images meant the truth; in our school textbooks, of our childhood and definitely of the world beyond; or so we believed. The authority of images as truth was only challenged when I started to make my own (images and meanings). To make my images was to build my world, the autonomy in authorship was liberating but soon comes the realization that this autonomy is a consequence of privilege that cannot be overlooked.
As a result of my enquiry into my position of power as a filmmaker and researcher, the works I create have gradually moved towards a reflexive stance. In honest truth, I can only co-create an authentic sense of identity, as the term 'go native', questions my nativity much more than identifying it.
My grandmother and I ask each other where we are from, individually and collectively, as citizens of the world. She, with her little shard of mirror and I, with mine. The only scope for mistake in this process is to believe that our shard can reflect the whole truth. Just as Kwame Anthony Appiah has claimed, "Cosmopolitanism isn't hard work; repudiating it is."
In order to understand my arrival at this position, it is essential to revisit and question my previous film/research projects. Does this consciousness recognize different and diverse knowledge systems? Further, how does it create space for parallel truths to exist? And, do these truths strengthen our understanding of a collective identity?
Lindsay Ofrias (Princeton University)
Paper short abstract:
Elite actors are learning how to use anti-mafia law to break down solidarity movements and this includes targeting researchers and the people they collaborate with in producing digital media. How can ethnographers' ethically and practically confront this new legal landscape?
Paper long abstract:
Decolonial scholars have encouraged collaborative media projects between ethnographers and their interlocutors, which honor the expertise of all actors, build toward a shared goal, and encourage reciprocal relationship. The innovative use of anti-mafia law by elite actors, however, is making inroads to frame certain collaborative work as constituting “conspiracy.” In one key lawsuit, a major oil company was able to confiscate 600 hours of outtake footage from a U.S. filmmaker who worked with Amazonian plaintiffs seeking corporate accountability for an oil spill, through the suggestion that he was too close to his subjects and therefore would not receive first amendment protection. The oil company then edited the subpoenaed footage to tell a new story about their Amazonian adversaries, thus to win a countersuit that depicted them as part of a criminal racket. Then, the company pressured researchers from various disciplines to retract their expert testimony--the majority of which complied. Collaboration became criminal, and what would seem like an opportunity for decolonization primarily reinforced colonial dynamics. More companies have filed suit and are now linking individuals in conspiracies with others they have never even spoken to or directly organized with. Given how this new legal playbook using anti-mafia law can undermine ethical endeavors of collaboration and decolonization, what tools then are available to ethnographers seeking to build reciprocal relationships with the communities in which they work, and speak to broader audiences through digital media? I am approaching this dilemma as I am completing my PhD in anthropology and working on a documentary with experienced filmmakers, considering the relationship between law, ethics, storytelling, and decolonial justice-seeking.
Eda Elif Tibet (University of Bern)
Paper short abstract:
Is knowledge only knowledge when offered to the academic readership? Acknowledging that written language is also a border produced in academia we emphasize the importance of artistic intimate and co-creative collaborations in locating and transforming the Global North and South divide.
Paper long abstract:
Knowledge rooted in the pain, suffering and struggle of the unfortunate, flows from peripheries and margins to the center where fortunate job holders are located. Such knowledge is converted into data sets to be held captive as institutional intellectual property in the form of university lectures, seminars, journal articles and monographs. This results in the reproduction of unfair theory cut off from its empirical origins. This particularly the case in the emotionally distanced writing up that erases research participants as co-researchers and co-authors. Following Gayatri Spivak and bell hooks we ask: whose intellect is the source of knowledge? Who do we mean by the intellectual and to whom do we assert the term? Is knowledge only knowledge when offered to the academic readership? Acknowledging that written language within anthropology is also a border within itself in the field of migration, we emphasize the importance of artistic and intimate collaborations in locating and transforming the Global North and South divide. In an attempt of bridging the gap, we discuss the processes of making a self reflexive co-creative participatory documentary film Ballad for Syria (47 mins, 2017) as the co-directors of the film and the co-authors of this paper. We explore the ways in which how we shift power dynamics by blurring hierarchies in between the researcher, the researched, the film-maker and the filmed. We shed light on how through sisterhood at times of war we enabled access to asylum and transcended the borders within the understandings and enactments of refuge itself.
Leïla Baracchini (University of Neuchâtel EHESS, Paris)
Paper short abstract:
This contribution presents the collaborative work carried out over four years with the artist Coex'ae Bob in Botswana. It retraces the methodological and scriptural paths that have led to elaborate alternative investigation methods and modes of representation.
Paper long abstract:
In the wake of the many debates that followed the crisis of representation and more recently the calls for a decolonisation of research, more and more researchers have started to critically reflect on the issues involved in doing research on the visual expression of Others in contexts marked by unequal relationships (Rutten, Dienderen & Stoetaert, 2013 ; Schneider, 2013 ; Baracchini, 2019). In the wake of the sensory turn (Pink, 2009; Ingold, 2011) and the reflections led by the Modernity/Coloniality group (Mignolo, 2001, 2015 ; Quijano & Ennis, 2000), new modes of collaborations between artists and ethnographers have emerged. Alternative models of knowledge production have been developed, exploring notably the possibilities of an anthropology "beyond text", and the creation of spaces open to horizontal dialogue between epistemes from different tradition (Schneider, 2013 ; Flynn, 2016).
Based on a field research conducted since 2010 with San artists from Botswana, this contribution presents the collaborative work carried out over four years with the artist Coex'ae Bob. It retraces the methodological and scriptural paths that have led to elaborate alternative investigation methods and modes of representation.
Daniel Barroca (University of Florida) Catarina Laranjeiro (FCSHNOVA-UNL)
Paper short abstract:
Our talk will focus on our experience as codirectors of the film "Fire in the Mud," our current film project in the south of Guinea-Bissau. We will discuss our different backgrounds, mostly in anthropology and visual arts, and how our collaboration is changing our methods of ethnographic research.
Paper long abstract:
Our talk will focus on our experience as codirectors of the film "Fire in the Mud," our current film project located in a Balanta village in the south of Guinea-Bissau called Unal. During the 1963-74 war, Unal stood between the territories controlled by the Portuguese army and the liberation movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde. We aim to discuss our backgrounds in anthropology, visual arts, psychology, and cinema. Additionally, we will reflect on how our current collaboration changed our methods of ethnographic research both in a scientific and artistic sense towards ideas of anthropological "creativity" that challenges notions of artistic and scientific production. In this line of inquiry, we will question the figure of the artist as belonging solely to the art world, and the figure of the scientist as a non-empathic professional. Recurring to our shared ethnographic experience in Unal, we will try to elaborate on the juxtaposition of the artist who collects affects and the scientist who struggles to collect "non-biased" data.
Lee Douglas (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a collaborative project that explores memories of revolution and transition in contemporary Spain and Portugal, this paper explores how ethnographic engagement with visual archives and, by extension, forms of co-creation produce knowledge about the past.
Paper long abstract:
During the 1970s, both Spain and Portugal experienced processes of radical political change that put an end to fascist regimes present in both contexts. In Portugal, anti-colonial liberation movements in Africa translated into calls for revolution that ultimately put an end to the Salazar dictatorship. In contrast, Franco's regime in Spain came to an end via a negotiated transition that promoted consensus over radical change, thus ushering in a long period of collective forgetting. Drawing on a film project that approaches visual archives as sites for the production of alternative forms of historical knowledge, this paper considers how memories of these two events can be accessed, excavated and retrieved through ethnographic engagement with audiovisual traces of political change. It considers how filmmaking is not a solitary act, but rather a potentially co-creative one, in which personal and collective narratives of the past are not only retrieved, but also produced through the process of accessing, watching, narrating and editing footage. The author uses the concept of montaje - cutting, editing, montaging - to consider how alternative historical narratives are produced with, through and alongside the materials that inhabit public and personal archives containing audiovisual traces of events from the past.