Convenors:
Karen Waltorp (University of Copenhagen)
Anne S. Chahine (Research Institute for Sustainability Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS))
Alexa Färber (University of Vienna)
Abstract:
This panel creates a critical and creative space for engaging with the promises and perils of multimodal approaches in anthropology, and its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations. We invite contributions that understand multimodality as an experimental, inventive, and interconnected way of thinking, moving, feeling, and being in the world, and that draw our attention to its application beyond anthropology’s claim on the term. In particular, the panel problematizes multimodality’s current moment of what seems like a restless dance between centres and peripheries. Innately collaborative, multimodality was ‘born’ and came of age in the ‘periphery’ of anthropological research, nourished by close engagements with others in and outside the boundaries of the discipline. Over the last ten years, as a highly attractive mode of experimental research practice, multimodality has gained traction within anthropology’s more traditional centres. In addition, this collaborative and vivid multimodal way of working can readily respond to the increasing demands placed on universities to address societal challenges and communicate research beyond the academy. In this sense, it has become central. But what does this position mean for the critical, creative, and heterodox practices, and plural practices formerly developed from the ‘periphery’? What are the promises and perils of multimodality now being situated at the ‘centre’? And how does this affect the multiplicity of interests, knowledges, and temporalities that are involved, especially if they do not concur with the demands of the academy? Can this complexity be recognized and proactively contribute to the un/doing(s) of anthropology? And should it?
Accepted contributions:
. Aesthetic Anthropology reloaded. A critical illumination of Ina Maria Greverus´ “multimodal” approaches – Judith Laister (University of Graz)
. Multimodal anthropology is fancy, but what about the labour it takes to make anthropology multimodal? – Letizia Bonanno (University of Vienna)
. Navigating multidimensional: methodological challenges and opportunities in researching vernacular photography in museum collections – Aneta Kopczacka (University of Warsaw)
. Multimodal engagement: critical approaches and peripheral aesthetics – Camilo Leon-Quijano (CNRS Aix-Marseille Univ. Amidex IDEAS)
. Multimodality: the un/doing of the anthropologist? – Charlie Rumsby (Sussex University)
. Playful Confusion and Outsider Knowledge: Navigating the Threshold of Acceptability in Ethnographic Filmmaking – Jared Epp (Carleton University)
. Ethnographic Canvases: Unveiling Multimodal Promises in Singaporean Art Therapeutics – Alexandra Diana Hanae Sastrawati (Princeton University)
. Mediums of impact or a unique analytical lens? Reflections on the theoretical contribution of Graphic Ethnography and Multimodality – Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (University of Kent)