Collaborative Ethnography

Collaborative methodological approaches, increasingly popular within anthropology, emphasize the need to build meaningful engagements with participants that include them more deeply as partners in the process of research, from inception to textual representation. In this article I engage with methodological debates about collaboration to argue for greater disciplinary and narrative openness about the modes of relational detachment and disconnection that emerge within fieldwork collaborations. Through a series of reflective fieldwork vignettes, I consider three types of collaborative detachment. These include how the diverse and competing relational obligations within fieldwork can shift collaboration into the terrain of collusion and complicity, how participants may demand a detached stance as a preferred mode of engagement, and how the conflicting effects of anthropological engagements on participants’ life projects may demand of us ethical modes of detachment. Through these examples, I argue for a more nuanced debate about the politics and ethics of detachment within collaborative anthropology.

This is the appendix to the book that I have written with my collaborator Liria Hernández. Our book, Writing Friendship: a Reciprocal Ethnography, is written in a very accessible style, with no references or academic quotations. In this appendix I summarise for other scholars the hesitations and decisions involved in the process of creating and writing a reciprocal ethnographic work.

This is a public history project that emerged out of the Section 106 mitigation process under the Federal Historic Preservation Act. Like much of public housing after the storm, the Lafitte was shut down and demolished. The Neighborhood Story Project partnered with two other organizations, Cornerstones and Spyboy Productions to document what the development
had meant to New Orleans. Working with former Lafitte
residents, artists, archaeologists, ethnographers, community
activists, musicians, and archivists, this book reconstructs
the history of an area deeply tied to the cultural and social
movements of the city.

The book starts with the creation of the Carondelet Canal
and the formation of the racially mixed community of
Faubourg Tremé that built up around it. The neighborhood
was torn down in the early 1940s to build public housing
for African-American families. Extensive oral histories with Lafitte residents help shape the story of the community and the struggle for affordable housing after the storm.

Questa tesi si inserisce nel dibattito interdisciplinare sull'individuazione e la promozione di modelli di governance di rete capaci di migliorare la sostenibilità sociale, ambientale ed economica dei sistemi socio-ecologici. L'originalità della ricerca risiede nel tentativo di far dialogare linguaggi, teorie e pratiche dell'antropologia con quelli dell'analisi delle reti sociali e della scienza della complessità, nell'analizzare una rete di interazione tra comunità di pratiche della società civile. L'analisi si basa su un caso studio consistente nella rete di collaborazioni tra organizzazioni della società civile di Verona e sui materiali raccolti e prodotti durante un lavoro di campo prolungato.

A partir de mi experiencia de investigación con pueblos originarios que participan en un doble proceso de reemergencia y de resurgimiento indígena, en la Patagonia austral y en Uruguay, reflexionaré sobre un campo al que suelo referir como "etnografía adjetivada". Argumento que este tipo de abordajes, además de acompañar los proyectos de las organizaciones con las que trabajamos, contribuye a mejorar el diseño y la implementación de las políticas públicas y a descolonizar la ciencia. Más precisamente, las intenciones de horizontalizar los saberes no solo desafían al positivismo científico, sino que también mejoran la calidad de nuestras investigaciones. Al combinar reflexión y acción, la etnografía adjetivada opera como herramienta para el cambio social. Me pregunto entonces ¿cómo se traducen los cambios terminológicos en nuestra práctica científica? En otras palabras, si bien hemos erradicado categorías coloniales de la jerga ¿en qué medida hemos aprendido a pensar y a actuar a partir de conceptos y posicionamientos que los grupos subalternizados nos proponen y, en algunos casos, nos exigen? ¿Qué tan permeables son nuestras agendas de investigación a los planteos que surgen en el trabajo de campo? ¿Cómo impacta la etnografía adjetivada en las subjetividades que participan en estos procesos?

This article from the summer of 2013 issue of African Arts discusses the politics of representation around photographing Mardi Gras Indians, and how the House of Dance and Feathers, a small, community-based museum in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, has served as a site of memory. Using in-depth interviews from Ronald W. Lewis, the director of the museum, photographers, and Mardi Gras Indians around the city, it discusses how photography is used in and outside the tradition, and how creating a catalogue with the House of Dance and Feathers became a collaborative ethnography in repatriation.

This article introduces the concept of carceral care as those public-facing "do-better" penal practices, policies, and material actions used to ward off future investigation of underlying institutional violences of carceral spaces. As a model for denaturalizing carceral care, time, space, and the perpetuity of reform, it explores theories of deviant care, mutual aid, and QTBIPoC radical relationalism. It investigates how inhabiting deviance is a necessary care practice as modeled every day by queer bonds of survival, particularly from within the confines of carceral spaces. Based on relationships built over the last four years with trans women of color organizing inside a "male-designated" state prison in Corcoran, California, this article connects questions of deviant care as the refusal of the diagnosable and individuated self through queer black/indigenous feminist of color resistance and radical thought.

What happens when a commitment to collaborative ethnographic filmmaking runs up against a community’s ambivalence towards its own history? This paper provides an ethnohistorical account of the making of the film Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!, exploring how colonial-era “police ethnographies” and contemporary communal politics shape the collaborative endeavor. The film was made in collaboration with Budhan Theatre, an activist theater troupe from the Chhara community in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The Chhara are one of more than 198 communities labeled as “Criminal Tribes” by the British, a colonial legacy that still informs their interactions with the police. Inspired by the work of Jean Rouch, the film makes use of experimental ethnographic and cinematic techniques. These participation frameworks allowed the members of Budhan Theatre and their families to shape the structure and content of the film itself, a process sometimes at odds with the film’s ethnographic intent.

Il panel si propone di discutere esperienze e/o progetti di etnografia collaborativa nell’indagine delle forme di relazionalità familiare nel mondo contemporaneo. Oggi più che mai l’antropologo è chiamato a giustificare in termini di utilità il proprio lavoro e l’impegno che richiede alla partecipazione degli interlocutori (d’Orsi 2008). Da questa prospettiva l’etnografia collaborativa può rappresentare un valido contributo teoretico e un’efficace innovazione metodologica tali da rendere maggiormente proattiva la dimensione applicativa di un’antropologia impegnata a incalzare le questioni pubbliche e a restituire una scrittura fruibile anche da altri saperi (Rappaport 2008). ....

This paper describes a collaborative ethnography about political and pedagogical practices of the Movement of Peasant Women in Santa Catarina (Brazil). In particular, it investigates the educational potential of the agroecological practices and reflections developed by the movement, in order to rethink the "negated relation" between the peasants of European origin and the native population, into the social-political-cultural context of the State of Santa Catarina. After a brief reference to the background of the study about the educational practices of the social movements, the author presents her research and focuses on the political, ethical and methodological implications of an investigation with a social movement. How can the identification with the struggles of the social movement contribute to the research? In which way, is it possible to promote the reciprocity in all stages of the survey? Can the discussion about the researcher's interpretations with her interlocutors promote any non-individualistic modalities of ethnographic writing?

View at: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/356762576/a31ebe5955/privacy

password: cotton 2020

Video and transcript. This is a collaborative community project done with Wauja women of Central Brazil, who are teaching a master class on the art of spinning cotton. Video was recorded entirely in the Arawakan language, with no translators present to distract and inhibit the elders. The women produced seven recordings during this session; this is only one of them.

Soon after, a young Wauja scholar used these ethnographic recordings as one of the primary source materials in his anthropology Master's Thesis. In 2022, he will be attending the University of Campinas as the first Wauja PhD candidate. He plans to write his thesis on cotton in Wauja culture.

This autoethnographic duet is an artful inquiry about the tragedy of a beginning music teacher. A painful story about a music teacher and sexual allegations from an adolescent female, our composition blends music and story to transform understandings through creative engagement and push the boundaries to evoke visceral and emotional responses regarding suicide. Sociocultural issues draw deep re ection about wider political issues that arise for teachers who display di culties with moral issues and misguided choices. The epiphany-epiphony (Gouzouasis, 2013) through story and music reveals the cultural irony of ideology and secrecy in professional misconduct. Unfortunately, in this circumstance, the outcome was catastrophic.

Este ensayo es fruto de una experiencia de investigación etnográfica de carácter colaborativo y experimental, junto a técnicos de un Centro Juvenil ubicado en las proximidades de Casavalle, Montevideo. A partir de ejercicios de mapeo colectivo, recorridas y análisis de otras fuentes de información, procuramos generar conocimien-to sobre las condiciones contemporáneas de la periferia urbana, a un tiempo que se plantea una línea de intervención con la población, en particular con los jóvenes residentes en estas zonas. En primer lugar se contextualiza la investigación, explicitando las condiciones de una “revisita etnográfica” a Casavalle y su potencial conceptualizador. Luego, se profundiza desde una “experiencia oblicua” la conceptualización del territorio en cuestión, desde el caso singular proyectando diferentes niveles y sentidos de generalización en relación al habitar urbano contemporáneo. Posteriormente se pasa a una propuesta de intervención ligada a las características distintivas del fenómeno, lo que a un tiempo nos permite profundizar en la conceptualización del habitar y los procesos de subjetivación, la prácticas de diseño y comunicación, apelando a la emergencia de “sujetos cartografantes” desde un “activismo expresivo”. Finalmente, se concluye poniendo el acento en reflexionar sobre los modelos de ciudad que están en juego principalmente desde las políticas sociales y otros agentes, afirmando la necesidad de concebir formas híbridas de “rurbanidad” e intentando superar la precariedad característica de una forma de habitar históricamente reproductora de exclusión y vulneración de derechos.

A host of ambient music pieces produced in Iran appeared on social media around 2010. Against all odds, these works started to gradually form a small ‘scene’ in the Iranian capital until around 2013. This scene has since been represented publicly and legally inside the country. It is also well known within experimental electronic music circles outside the country. In a politically forced absence of many art/music forms in the public domain since the 1979 revolution, the emergence and burgeoning of such an ‘avant-garde’ scene is significant. This article argues how the scene’s aesthetics, in the broadest sense of the term, can be understood as a locus for crystallisation of a concurrent resistance against and embodiment of an invasive, yet ambiguous, form of ethical-moral-legal control. This text also makes a case for how an interdisciplinary integration of ethnographic fieldwork within a practice-based research context in music/sound and anthropology, can contribute towards formation of composite methodologies that are beneficial to both fields.

This paper explores practices and imaginations of space among young people in postwar Beirut. Relying on an innovative collaborative-mapping methodology, it shifts the focus from the traditional analysis of the city at war, centred on anxious urbanism, toward spatial dynamics of conflict transformation. It deploys an ethnographic approach to shed light on everyday perceptions of the urban landscape among a group of students. Their visions of space are composed along conventional tropes, comparable to Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes: images that connect temporal and spatial relationships to describe their ways of inhabiting the city. These images reveal that their experiences of space are not produced exclusively in relation to the memory of wartime topographies and politico-religious territories. Rather, they are also the result of their personal trajectories and agency. For these young people, ordinary encounters inspire a reframing of the political geography of the everyday, including renewed narratives on coexistence and strategies of circumventing the sense of spatial confinement they inherited from the war. The analysis shows that the experiences of these students stand in sharp contrast with the dominant image of unbending intergroup boundaries in postwar Lebanon. Young people's abilities to navigate, negotiate and rediscover social encounters in a complex, changing environment call attention to the transformative power of micro-situations in postwar contexts. Through highlighting their original lifestyles and ways of thinking, this paper argues that the city, far from only symbolizing and reproducing conflicts, is also the place where mundane practices and imaginations reinvent the social fabric.

Groping the World:
An Ethnographic Study of Blindness and (Dis)ability

The aim of the book is to provide a multi-dimensional and polyphonic
description of experiences of congenitally blind people, including the
most important cultural and social conditions of their lives. The Author
concentrates on the specificity of functioning of representatives of that
group, the course of their socialization and education, difficulties and
opportunities in terms of mobility, work and interpersonal relations. The
subject of analysis are characteristic experiences and challenges of blind
people, which result both from their cognitive limitations, as well as
common beliefs on blindness, patterns and norms of visual culture, and
institutional solutions in the field of rehabilitation of people with disabilities in Poland.
Elaborations on the lives of the book’s characters’ attempt to answer
a number of basic questions: How do congenitally blind people discover
and interpret the distinctive nature of their cognitive and social situation?
What is the course of their socialization to the role of “abnormal” and
“disabled”? What is the impact of the long-term stay in special school and
educational centers on their mentality and later lives? How do people who
do not know or do not remember visual sensations find themselves within
broadly perceived visual culture? To what extent and by what means do they adapt to the norms and orders concerning appearance? How do they cope with practical limitations which result directly from lack of the sense of seeing? How do they acquire alternative abilities and perform daily chores? How do they evaluate and make use of the means of public support for the disabled?
The primary source of presented and analyzed data is ethnographic
research conducted among the blind in the years 2011–2017. The main
were 22 blind people aged 18–42, including 20 who lost their ability to see
shortly after birth or in early childhood. The basis for the research were
numerous, regular and varied meetings with particular participants (about
450 meetings in total), including recorded interviews (92 recordings). In
addition, important interlocutors were also other blind or partially sighted
people, their friends and family members, as well as workers of institutions
and organizations working for the benefit of this group – meetings and
observations involving representatives of broadly understood “the blind
community” have contributed to enriching the collected research material.
An important element of the study was an attempt to fulfill and verify the
assumptions of collaborative ethnography, developed by social researchers such as Anna Wyka or Luke Eric Lassiter. The main postulates of such an approach include taking into consideration the voice of participants at every stage – from formulating preliminary hypotheses, through presentation of partial findings, to reading and evaluation of the final research report, as well as joint writing of academic or non-academic texts. In this publication, one of the manifestations of thusly defined cooperation are written comments of the interlocutors, which were placed in the final sections of the study’s consecutive parts.
Analysis of the collected empirical material was not interpreted
according to one particular approach. Instead, the research process involved constant comparisons, confronting and integration of various opinions and perspective – statements and behaviors of the blind participants and the researcher’s intuition, as well as gradually emerging categories and generalizations, other research findings concerning blindness and disability, theoretical concepts of culture, self-agency or social relations. The selection of particular interpretation tools and theoretical points of reference depended on the extent to which they were stimulating in cognitive terms and useful for a reliable description of the research participants’ lives.

This paper presents challenges and life strategies of highly educated single mothers in Lithuania. My ethnography traces the impact on strategies of remaining in a country where exit strategies – alcoholism, suicide, emigration – prevail and seem as an " easier " option. It is a study concerned with the relationship between precarity, single motherhood, social reproduction and everyday living. I focus on precarious living conditions, social isolation and stigmatization, unappreciated and highly gendered care-work. Based on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork material, the paper presents the micro-level attempts to negotiate what it means to be a lone caretaker , to revalorize and challenge the hegemonic narratives of individual strength and success.

Resumen
Presentamos los resultados de una experiencia de trabajo basada en la etnografía colaborativa en ambientes urbanos contemporáneos, llevada a cabo en la zona del segundo ensanche histórico de Montevideo. Nos focalizamos en lo que denominamos saberes habitantes, a través del análisis de las producciones de los participantes. En una primera parte hacemos foco en la exploración de la ciudad. Luego avanzamos en el análisis considerando los aprendizajes colaborativos desde la subjetivación etnográfica. Después nos detemos en las condiciones preexistentes según imaginarios sociales urbanos emergentes gracias a ejercicios cartográficos. Concluimos caracterizando estos saberes y retomando lo concerniente a las mediaciones urbanas.

Palabras clave: ciudad, mediaciones urbanas, narrativas barriales, etnografía colaborativa, cartografías social

As the Covid-19 pandemic gripped the world, many became physically isolated and disconnected. During this time TikTok became the most downloaded app of the year, quickly becoming a global sensation. This article offers an initial exploration of two key themes relating to the app and begins situating what made the app popular during an unprecedentedly tumultuous period. To achieve this, we consider algorithmic intimacy and representations of identity as a starting point for deeper engagement with TikTok and what makes it unique to other social media platforms. This article first explores the ways in which the TikTok algorithm captures and reflects forms of user identity through the For You Page (FYP). This is then explored in relation to the forms of intimacy, which are enabled through the algorithm both in relation to user and platform and user relationships with other users and non-users. This article describes innovative and unique collaborative ethnographic methods, which make the space between user and screen methodologically viable. Where more conventional anthropological methods would struggle, this collaborative approach also draws attention to potential ethics of care toward researchers operating in times of pandemic and the feelings of isolation and anxiety, which frequently accompany the 'lone ethnographer'.

Directly affecting the drinking water of over 300,000 people in nine counties of West Virginia, the January 9, 2014 chemical spill in the Elk River at Charleston was labeled by The New York Times as " one of the most serious incidents of chemical contamination of drinking water in American history. " Organized as a forum of informal presentations and interactive dialog, this roundtable session explores the work of several participants in a collaborative oral history project sponsored by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy and funded by the Oral History Association's Emerging Crisis Research Fund. We will describe partnerships created with other researchers, scholars, documentarians, writers, students, activists and other citizens as the project continues to emerge. Since this collective project began in earnest in the months following this catastrophic spill, several other unfolding disasters involving contaminated drinking water on a mass scale have been revealed—including, most recently, the case of widespread lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan. Against the sordid backdrop of these manifestly harmful events, as well as in the milieu of widespread concern for short and long-term impacts of hydro-fracking across the United States, this roundtable will allow for broad consideration of far-reaching social, economic, and health effects of toxic exposure as expressed in the accounts and everyday lives of local people. A physician recounts learning about the spill very late in the day and having to evacuate the hospital. An attorney and longtime activist says that he suddenly feels as though he's living in an unfamiliar world. A pregnant woman describes the fear and unease she carries along with her baby. A home health care worker questions how this threat could have gone unnoticed for decades. A small business owner wonders if he and his family would be better off someplace else. Seemingly having to pick between business interests and jobs, on the one hand, and overall quality of life and public safety, on the other, communities like Charleston may find themselves painfully torn as they seek to find a way forward in a world of imperatives shaped by powerful