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Dear All (apologies for cross-posting),

Just a reminder about the webinar with Letizia Bonnano "Vignettes from Athens:on care, ethnography and drawing"- happening today, March 5th (Wednesday) at 17:00 – 18:30 CET/ 16:00- 17:30 GMT/ 8:00 – 9:30 PST/ 11:00-12:30 EST, on Zoom. Martina Laganà will chair the meeting and moderate the discussion.

Zoom link and more info below:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83532026490, Meeting ID: 835 3202 6490

ABOUT THE TALK

In my presentation, I will share a few ethnographic vignettes from my research project on reconfigurations of care in austerity-stricken Athens. I will discuss how the process of drawing (rather than just writing) fieldnotes not only sharpened my ways of seeing but also enabled modes of reflexivity, fostering a critical exploration of my subjectivity and positionality as an ethnographer.

Reflecting on the pervasiveness of images and the process of image-making, Lisa Stevenson (2014) argues that an “anthropology through the image” shifts anthropological attention to “imagistic rather than discursive modes of knowing” and ultimately allows us to process those experiences that might gone unthought in ethnography. Similarly, Michael Taussig (2011) emphasises the immediacy of a drawn sketch as a mode of ethnographic understanding, suggesting that “drawing intervenes in the reckoning of reality in ways that writing and photography do not.” Along similar lines, I will ask what forms of understanding drawing – as an act and a practice- affords and what access to other worlds and thoughts it enables. To address these questions, I will describe drawing as a medium for (self)invention, a way of visualising what could or should be, a method of deception, and a creative act that distorts or manipulates reality. Ultimately, I will illustrate how drawing can serve as a powerful visual strategy to unravel complexities and persuade others that reality often differs from what we have previously imagined. I argue that drawing can do all these things at once, harnessing its potential to trigger memories, evoke subjective responses, uncover details and envision alternatives: drawing is more than a mere methodological tool. As a perceptive device and an ethnographic practice, drawing can help recentre anthropological inquiry beyond text: to better appreciate its potential, throughout the seminar I will guide the participants through a series of practical exercises to explore reflexivity and positionality. These are crucial to any ethnographic endeavour.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Letizia earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2019. Since then, she has held teaching and research positions at various British universities. For her doctoral and postdoctoral research projects, she conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Athens (Greece), focusing on the reconfigurations of modes and practices of care within grassroots, self-organised healthcare facilities.

She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, where she is developing her new research project “Steel Life” on industrial labour and post-industrial futures in Taranto (Italy) and Galați (Romania). For this project, she has been awarded the SEED Grant by the University of Vienna and the Post-PhD Research Grant by the Wenner Gren Foundation. Additionally, Letizia has actively participated in in scholarly discussions on graphic anthropology, writings on its methodological and epistemological affordances. She is member of the editorial collective at Otherwise Magazine, where she serves as a visual co-editor, and she also co-edits the Anthropology of Work Review.

ABOUT THE WEBINAR SERIES ON IMAGES, AGEING AND CARE

This webinar series – free and open to all- gathers anthropologists and image-makers interested in exploring the ontological and epistemological connections between images, aging and care, treating the relationship and these phenomena as requiring and inviting interrogation. It is sponsored by the Images of Care Collective, the Association for Anthropology, Gerontology and the Life Course (AAGE), EASA’s Age and Generations Network (AgeNet) and the Network for Visual Anthropology of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (VANEASA). You can see our past webinars here.

To be informed about the next webinars, sign up for the mailing list by clicking here.

Best wishes,

Martina Laganà, Barbara Pieta and Paolo Favero

Vaneasa mailing list Vaneasa@lists.easaonline.org http://lists.easaonline.org/listinfo.cgi/vaneasa-easaonline.org