On July 3rd 2018 12:00–14:00, Dr. Tomás Sánchez Criado (IfEE, HU Berlin) & Dr. Adolfo Estalella (Social and Cultural Anthropology, Complutense University of Madrid) will be introducing the book project together with the project it is part of at the Humboldt University of Berlin’s Department of European Ethnology Seminar Series ‘Conjunctures & Creations: Anthropological Transformations/Transforming Anthropology’.
The presentation will be moderated by Prof. Dr. Ignacio Farías.
Organized by Michael Guggenheim, Dan Neyland, Alex Wilkie
Recent Science and Technology Studies (STS) work on experiments has provided a basis for rethinking the terms, practices and consequences of experimentation. This has opened up opportunities to question, for example, experimental controls, provocative containments, training and professional practice. This work has also broadened the traditional STS focus on scientific laboratories to also include economic, social scientific and commercial experimentation, exploring new territories of experimentation and their attendant means of reproducing the world.
At the same time, scholars in STS, Sociology, Anthropology and Design have pursued experiments not just as an object of study, but also as something to do. Here we find, for example, experiments with algorithmic walks, expertise and issues. An earlier critique of experiments as artificial and interventionist has given way to a new embracing of material staging of situations and problems.
Social researchers have come to acknowledge we can learn precisely because of the non-naturalism of experiments. Experiments have become legitimate forms to intervene in the world, and to invent new worlds. In this way STS scholars have begun to think again about the realities in which they participate. In this workshop we will feature recent experimenters within STS with scholars who have analysed experiments in specific fields.
Programme:
10.00: Welcome
10.15-11.30: Pelle Ehn (Design, Malmö):
democratic design experiments (in the small)
Commentator: Kim Kullmann (Sociology, Goldmsiths)
11.45-1pm: Tomás Sánchez Criado (STS, Munich):
The Ethnographic Experiment, Revisited: Experimental Collaborations, or the ‘Devicing’ of Fieldwork for Joint Problem-Making
Commentator: Isaac Marrero-Guillamón (Anthropology, Goldsmiths)
In this paper we would like to explore an ethnographic mode that takes the shape of experimentation in the field. We will draw on the ethnographies (Adolfo’s & Tomás’s) we have been carrying out in the last five years in urban contexts populated by urban activists, guerrilla architects, amateur tinkerers, and disability rights advocates located in Barcelona and Madrid. These projects account for the wave of urban creativity and civic invention that has spread out through these cities after the uprising of the ‘15M movement’ (the Spanish precursor of the Occupy movement).
Our ethnographic sites are populated by people struggling to transform the city: they do so building infrastructures, producing a vast amount of documentation that describes their own practices and exploring methodologies for the production of knowledge. Very often, these collectives invoke the trope of experimentation to refer to their relationship to the city. In a way, the locations we are describing might be aptly characterised as ‘para-sites’, following Douglas Holmes and George Marcus (2008) description of ethnographic sites populated by people whose research practices resonate with those of the anthropologists.
Even though ours has been a deep involvement in these sites, activist or militant registers and vocabularies would not be the best description of our practice. For lack of a better term, our engagement has been of an ‘epistemic’ kind. Indeed, during our fieldwork we both became gradually involved in the production of shared spaces of investigation, in the construction of material and digital infrastructures, and in the process of documentation, sometimes even taking a leading role, as we will describe here. We would like to suggest that our ethnographic projects were dragged into the experimental ethos of these projects.
Our ethnographies have been infused by these forms of experimentation: Somehow, our fieldworks seem to have incorporated in a recursive gesture the epistemic experimental practices of our counterparts in the field, as we seek to describe today. Thus, drawing on Tomás fieldwork we describe the distinctive practice of tinkering of an activist design collective called En torno a la silla. Working among tinkerers that extremely value the production of documentation, Tomás fieldwork turned into a tentative practice of tinkering with documentation. Describing his fieldwork in these terms (as a form of fieldwork tinkering), our attempt here is to provide a tentative descriptive vocabulary to account for this ethnographic mode we call ‘experimental collaborations’.
II. Tinkering in/with fieldwork
Barcelona, it’s the morning of February 8th 2013. We’re in the bedroom of Antonio’s house. I (Tomás) am struggling to adjust a semi-professional Canon EOS 60D camera that a good friend has lent me to shoot a video. The plan according to the rather informal script we have discussed is to re-enact for the record how the armrest-briefcase we have designed in the last months for Antonio’s wheelchair works. I take some shots of Alida disassembling the former armrest and assembling the new gadget to Antonio’s wheelchair. Later on we start improvising and moving around to demonstrate different uses of the briefcase. Since I am not a professional I struggle with the light settings in the inner parts of the house. The next month is really busy for us and I slowly learn to edit these video materials using an amateur software package.
After I have it, two months after shooting the video we three meet at Antonio’s house to discuss it using his big TV screen and my laptop. They like it and have nothing to comment, even though I spot and make them pay attention to some of the mistakes I’ve made with the light settings and the shots, to understand whether we should be recording it again. After some talk we decide that we cannot get stuck, that it’s good enough and we have to move on since this is only a very small thing of the many other projects that En torno a la silla is working on.
However, given that the video only shows the processes of disassembling, reassembling and use, Alida also wants to work to produce some exhaustive hand-drawn sketches to create a downloadable text and image tutorial showing the technical detail: how to build it and why, what were the main technical challenges in the conception and production, as well as showing detail on important pieces, such as the joystick-briefcase junction. We will work on that in the following weeks. That day the discussion leads us to upload the video to YouTube, later embedding it in a blog post, also adding a couple of high quality pictures, and collaboratively write on the spot the explanatory paragraph telling what the gadget is.
En torno a la silla was originally put together in the summer of 2012 in Barcelona by Alida – architect with a large experience in activist collectives in the city–; Antonio – mathematician, powered wheelchair user and one of the most renowned independent-living activists in the country–; and Rai – an anthropologist graduate who works as a wood craftsman and who also has a large experience in activist collectives in the city–. En torno a la silla was set up as a project seeking to prototype an open-source wheelchair kit to ‘habilitate other possibilities to the user.’ The kit consisted of three elements: a portable wheelchair ramp, a foldable table, and the armrest-briefcase described in the vignette.
The group started to work on the fabrication of these technologies in October 2012. We came to use the Spanish term cacharrear –to tinker– to talk about what we were doing. None of us were expert designers of technical aids, and neither of us were trained craftspeople in the many skills that the gadgets we have started learning to fabricate required. What we called tinkering was always characterised by playful learning processes, a rather mundane exploratory practice of searching for inspiration from tutorials, sketching and fabricating, sometimes searching for help from specialists in a given craft.
But I would like to explore a different nuance of the term tinkering, grounding on STS literature, where scholars like Karin Knorr-Cetina (1981) or Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997) have qualified the technoscientific practices of reasoning and laboratory experimentation as particular forms of tinkering. Tinkering is also an apt metaphor to foreground not only experimentation as an ‘opportunistic’ and open-ended reasoning practice, but also the important role of tweaking and setting material and spatial infrastructures in knowledge production: An arrangement that, if successful, might allow experimenters to pose new questions that they did not have in advance.
En torno a la silla also wanted to engage in another particular form of tinkering: from the onset they were worried about producing an open documentation of the process wishing to make it public so that their prototypes might be replicated by or serve as inspiration to others. When I approached the project for the first time in search for a case study for my postdoctoral project on participatory design in care technologies they were sharp in relation to my role: “You can’t be an observer here”, an imperative aligned with the motto of independent-living movement whose philosophy pervades En torno a la silla: “Nothing about us without us.” So when I started hanging around with them I was quickly dragged into their exploratory material and documentary practices of fabrication in a way that I would like to suggest infused my ethnographic practice with an experimental gesture.
III. Tinkering with documentation
Hence, I joined the project taking the responsibility of the documentation process shortly after it had began. This happened given that the ethnographic skills and interests that I had been displaying in our first encounters were thought to be useful for the project. But this also entailed a considerable effort, since I had to test and try a whole set of technologies to take care of documenting the design and fabrication processes. The regular notepad gave way to the use of Evernote software on my smartphone since I needed to take pictures and make quick notes. In other occasions I jotted down exhaustive minutes including verbatim quotes using my email that I would send others, and I later learnt to use WordPress blogs and many plugin services to manage the different aspects of the project’s documentation.
Indeed, I had to fabricate a shared environment to document and circulate the fabrication process. Testing digital platforms, discussing the records in joint meetings, collecting material from different sources and combining the appropriate media format for the records, I experimented with the documentation in a similar way to how the project struggled to fabricate an environment for the wheelchair. My fieldwork recursively became a tinkering ethnographic space. Tinkering ‘around the wheelchair’ indeed involved a twofold dimension: both material and documentary; that is, we had to explore the open source design of gadgets while testing the appropriate techniques and record genres to open up their process of fabrication.
At some moments in meetings where I was in charge of taking the minutes the distinction between design documentation and field notes blurred: taking the minutes of meetings later forwarded by email to the group I sometimes turned them into ethnographic notes of sorts, using verbatim quotes as well as remarks on personal impressions of emotional climates or situations. In other occasions it was the other way around: my very personal field notes were turned into the documentation of the process of fabrication, being scanned or shared for the common record after the fact. Often this double-register made very difficult to keep my record practices untouched. The distinctive written genre of my field notes seemed to blur with documentation, but my ethnographic practice blurred too. This went beyond a mere experimentation with literary styles.
IV. Experimental collaborations
Tomás’s collaboration tinkering with documentation unearthed an experimental moment in fieldwork. Tinkering with documentation took Tomás into a close relationship of collaboration with his tinkering counterparts through an open process of documentation and reflections. A collaboration that was neither a militant nor an ethical gesture, but an effect of the shared space of joint tinkering practices, both material and documentary.
My ethnographic experience (Adolfo’s) in the field has been similar to Tomás’s. I would say that during my work with urban activists and guerrilla architects I was also trapped by the experimental ethos of my counterparts. In a way close to Tomás’s experience, I felt that I was transgressing the norm and form of the ethnographic fieldwork I had learned and I felt the need of an appropriate conceptual vocabulary to account for my fieldwork practice.
Our joint discussions sharing the oddity of our experiences led us to work on an edited compilation focusing on similar experiences, where we refer to this particular ethnographic mode as a form of ‘experimental collaboration’, one whose relationality in the field is articulated (and described) in terms of collaboration (and not only participation); and in which the epistemic figure describing knowledge-production invokes experimentation (instead of only observation). But our invocation of experimentation is not new to anthropology.
Our invocation of experimentation is not completely new to anthropology. The reflexive turn of the eighties inaugurated a wave of writing experiments that addressed a deep reconsideration of authority and authorship, and explored different representational forms and textual genres or expanded authorship beyond the single ethnographer to include fieldwork counterparts. In recent times, an experimental invocation has been increasingly translated from the space of ethnographic representation to the fieldwork. Experimentation, hence, is invoked as a way to renew the norm and form of ethnographic fieldwork.
Our description does not invoke experimentation metaphorically. On the contrary, our fieldwork account foregrounding tinkering with documentation seeks to explore a vocabulary that is faithful to the empirical practices that we have found in the field and have infused our own production of knowledge. We have thus explored a descriptive vocabulary around tinkering but many more singular conceptual empirical languages could be developed to account for other anthropological forms of experimental collaboration in the field.
We are tempted to say that experimentation has always been an art part of the ethnographic repertoire in fieldwork, an epistemic practice that however has not been foregrounded in the tales of the field that have narrated our empirical practice in terms of participant observation and sometimes using the register of rapport or the instrumental management of relations in the field ‘participating in order to write’ (Emerson et al., 1995: 26-29). We have tried in this account to test a different tale of the field, one that describes our fieldwork through the mode of experimental collaboration.
References
Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Holmes, D. R., & Marcus, G. E. (2008). Collaboration Today and the Re-Imagination of the Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter. Collaborative Anthropologies, 1(1), 81–101.
Knorr-Cetina, K. D. (1981). The manufacture of knowledge: An essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science. Oxford: Pergamon.
Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997). Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Please consider submitting a paper for the 4S-EASST 2016 conference taking place from August 31st to September 3rd in Barcelona to our open track!
We’d be very grateful if you could also forward it to potentially interested colleagues.
Wild research: Radical openings in technoscientific practice?
A collaborative spectre is haunting science and technology. In the past decades we have witnessed an explosion of radical openings of research practices where increasingly technified citizens and engaged professionals collaborate in the most diverse forms of knowledge production in both online and offline platforms of all kinds. In these efforts they generate and put into circulation documentation on the most diverse range of issues, attempting to materially intervene their everyday worlds with different political aims. Practices that, for lack of a better term, might be described as ‘wild research’ not only signal collaborative redistributions of the who, how, when and where of knowledge production, circulation and validation, but also more experiential and sociologically-related expansions of the knowledge registers and material interventions there emerging: a whole constellation of practices forging different versions of ‘science and technology by other means’. Paying attention to these transformations this track would like to welcome ethnographic and historical works analyzing in depth open, collaborative and experimental ‘wild research’ projects helping to expand what STS up to date has considered more collaborative or more democratic forms of technoscientific production: participatory engagements of lay people into expert-driven processes such as in citizen science or articulations of counter-expertise and evidence-based activism to engage in conversations with experts. We are particularly interested in analyzing not only the different forms of knowledge and the political, but also the forms of STS otherwise that these radical collaborative openings in technoscientific practice might be bringing to the fore.
Convenors: Tomas S. Criado (MCTS, TU München) & Adolfo Estalella (Spanish National Research Council – CSIC)
For more information on how to propose a paper, please check the conference’s call for papers
To submit a paper to this open track, please click here
Participants in the workshop will discuss the draft chapters for the book, for those interested in getting a copy send an email to jestalellaf AT uoc.edu (Adolfo Estalella) or tomas.criado AT tum.de (Tomás Sánchez Criado).
Selina Blasco (UCM), Olga Fernández (UCM), Aida Sánchez de Serdio (MNCARS) y Roger Sansi-Roca (Goldsmiths).
Moderada por Isaac Marrero Guillamón (Goldsmiths).
La antropología y el arte tienen una larga historia de intercambios, contrabandos e inspiraciones cruzadas. No son pocos los y las artistas que han encontrado inspiración en la crítica al etnocentrismo inherente a la antropología, o en la etnografía como estrategia de investigación relacional. Asimismo, es bien conocida la influencia que las vanguardias artísticas han tenido en la experimentación formal en la escritura etnográfica, o la estrecha relación entre ciertas formas de antropología visual/sensorial y de arte visual.
La relación entre arte y antropología ha sido ella misma objeto de conceptualización, dando lugar a argumentos en torno a la “apropiación” (más o menos indebida), la “envidia mutua” (Foster), o la existencia de una “afinidad profunda” (Schneider).
Reconociendo esta trayectoria, pero también queriendo distanciarnos de la voluntad de tipologizar la relación, esta sesión busca situar el debate a partir de la discusión de prácticas de investigación y de producción de conocimientos en/tre el arte y la antropología. Más concretamente, nos interesa explorar las diferentes formas de trabajo colaborativo que se han venido desarrollando en/tre ambas disciplinas, y cómo estas pueden pensarse como dispositivos epistémicos experimentales. En otras palabras, buscamos reflexionar sobre cómo estas colaboraciones experimentales (y/o experimentaciones colaborativas) transforman los modos de investigar y la definición de lo que cuenta como conocimiento (válido).
La estética relacional, el arte participativo, la etnografía colaborativa o la co-investigación serían algunos ejemplos de prácticas que deslocalizan y re-localizan la relación entre autoría, públicos y conocimiento, y que por tanto ofrecen un espacio fértil de reflexión. Queremos pensar sobre cómo los sujetos y los objetos de la investigación antropológica y la práctica artística han experimentado procesos reflexivos, recursivos, de desmaterialización y re-materialización. Nos interesan las hibridaciones poco ortodoxas, las articulaciones inusuales, las fertilizaciones cruzadas en/tre arte y antropología. Texto de Isaac Marrero Guillamón.
Selina Blasco (UCM), Olga Fernández (UCM), Isaac Marrero Guillamón (Goldsmiths), Aida Sánchez de Serdio (MNCARS) y Roger Sansi-Roca (Goldsmiths).
La antropología y el arte tienen una larga historia de intercambios, contrabandos e inspiraciones cruzadas. No son pocos los y las artistas que han encontrado inspiración en la crítica al etnocentrismo inherente a la antropología, o en la etnografía como estrategia de investigación relacional. Asimismo, es bien conocida la influencia que las vanguardias artísticas han tenido en la experimentación formal en la escritura etnográfica, o la estrecha relación entre ciertas formas de antropología visual/sensorial y de arte visual.La relación entre arte y antropología ha sido ella misma objeto de conceptualización, dando lugar a argumentos en torno a la “apropiación” (más o menos indebida), la “envidia mutua” (Foster), o la existencia de una “afinidad profunda” (Schneider).
Reconociendo esta trayectoria, pero también queriendo distanciarnos de la voluntad de tipologizar la relación, esta sesión busca situar el debate a partir de la discusión de prácticas de investigación y de producción de conocimientos en/tre el arte y la antropología. Más concretamente, nos interesa explorar las diferentes formas de trabajo colaborativo que se han venido desarrollando en/tre ambas disciplinas, y cómo estas pueden pensarse como dispositivos epistémicos experimentales. En otras palabras, buscamos reflexionar sobre cómo estas colaboraciones experimentales (y/o experimentaciones colaborativas) transforman los modos de investigar y la definición de lo que cuenta como conocimiento (válido). Esta sesión busca situar el debate a partir de la discusión de prácticas de investigación y de producción de conocimentos en/tre el arte y la antropología. Texto de Isaac Marrero Guillamón.
Adolfo Estalella (CSIC), Emma Garnett (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), Andrea Gaspar (University of Coimbra), Alexandra Kasatkina, (Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration), Isaac Marrero Guillamón (Goldsmiths’, University of London), Tomasz Rakowski (University of Warsaw), Anna Lisa Ramella (Universität Bremen), Tomás Sánchez Criado (Munich Center for Technology in Society, TUM), Maria Schiller (Max Planck Institute), Zinaida Vasilyeva (Russian Academy of National Economy and .
This workshop gathers for discussion a set of anthropological fieldworks that in their engagement with art, science and activism push forward the methodological limits of participant observation in ethnography.
Anthropology has historically consolidated its ethnographic practice of knowledge production around the figure of participant observation, a social and epistemic situation that requires social involvement during fieldwork while at the same time demand a detachment and distance to observe the social worlds under investigation.
Drawing on a set of ethnographies carried on in Africa, America and Europe, the workshop explores modes of doing fieldwork whose form of engagement in the field overflow the notion of participation and whose form of knowledge production cannot be properly characterized as observation. The anthropologists describe their ethnographic fieldworks as forms of ‘experimental collaboration’.
The figure of experimental collaboration intends to describe a mode of fieldwork that is carried on in collaboration with our counterparts in the field through the articulation of instances of epistemic experimentation. It is a mode of doing ethnography that is adjacent, complementary or even substitutive of participant observation.
The figure has a twofold goal. It intends to be a descriptive notion for certain forms of ethnographic fieldwork and it proposes a research and pedagogic program aimed to intervene in current forms of ethnographic practice and learning.
La Asociación de Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red organiza el I Congreso Internacional de Antropología AIBR bajo el lema “El Ser Humano: culturas, orígenes y destinos”, que se celebrará en Madrid entre el 7 y el 10 de julio de 2015. Aquí podéis descargar el programa en PDF.
El día 8 de julio de 9:00 a 11:00 y de 11:30 a 13:30 en el Aula Magna de la Facultad de Psicología de la UAM, organizamos un par de paneles especiales sobre las Colaboraciones experimentales con el objetivo de discutir con proyectos afines e inspiradores. Os dejamos por aquí el resumen de la sesión y de cada una de las intervenciones.
SEMINARIO “EL ETNÓGRAFO ESCRIBIENTE: LA TRANSCRIPCIÓN-DIGITALIZACIÓN COMO ESTRATEGÍA DE EXPANSIÓN PERFORMATIVA DEL ARCHIVO”
Impartido por el Dr. Pablo Hoyos, Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana
Miércoles 11 de febrero de 16:30 a 19 en la sala 8B del MediaTIC (ahora Barcelona Growth Center) de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (carrer Roc Boronat con Sancho Dávila).
Pablo Hoyos se doctoró en 2012 en el departament de Psicologia Social de la UAB con una tesis sobre la poesía como dispositivo de producción discursiva y es ahora profesor en México en la Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana . Ha venido haciendo en los últimos años un interesantísimo trabajo de campo etnográfico en cárceles de México. En fechas recientes Pablo ha comenzado a recopilar un archivo de relatos de los presidiarios, que ahora está en proceso de edición y publicación. Es de este proceso de recopilación de materiales de campo como producción colaborativa y experimental de un texto etnográfico y de sus cuestiones y diatribas que vendrá a hablarnos y a lo que dedicaremos el seminario (véase resumen más adelante).
Este encuentro quisiera ser un primer momento de una serie de seminarios o talleres que en los próximos meses iremos planteando en Barcelona junto a Adolfo Estalella sobre las colaboraciones experimentales en la etnografía (de lo que podéis saber más en la siguiente web: www.xcol.org #xcol ).
RESUMEN
Dándole la vuelta a la famosa frase de Bartleby, y llevada a un contexto de trabajo etnográfico en el que nuestro rol pasa del antropólogo clásico al del acompañante, cuyas notas pasan por la transcripción y/o digitalización de las apreciaciones de actores en condiciones específicas, el etnógrafo escribiente diría “preferiría sí hacerlo”. El sí se apoyaría en dos motivos complementarios, (1) su registro genera un archivo de inscripciones a través de los cuáles se preservan acontecimientos y testimonios que de otra forma no serían reconocidos, y (2) por el mero hecho de archivar estas notas, los acontecimientos y testimonios serían producidos.
La presente conferencia se yergue sobre la reflexión anclada al segundo motivo del sí, a través del trabajo de campo realizado en el Centro Varonil de Reinserción Social, CEVARESO, Santa Martha Acatitla, en la Ciudad de México, en el marco de un taller de performance en el que los participantes decidieron ser escritores. El rol del etnógrafo pasó a ser el transcriptor-digitalizador de las textualidades producidas a mano por los escritores para en la recopilación de estas escrituras literario-testimoniales llevar a cabo la edición de una plaquette que le fue entregada, devuelta, a los participantes para que éstos la distribuyeran a libre disposición.
Debido al carácter de los textos, El etnógrafo escribiente, en su labor, tuvo que atender a los modos de escribir “maltrecho” de cada escritor, por lo que para ser fiel al material hubo de modificar los comandos del programa del software, así como los aprendizajes propios vinculados con la buena escritura. La escritura “maltrecha” de los participantes es una escritura política, donde más allá del corrector ortográfico del software, nosotros, académicos, tendemos a corregir en la lectura las “faltas”, donde los textos piden, demandan, una lectura corporal, táctil, a menudo incómoda, ya que casi hay que pasar por entre las letras, las sintetizaciones vocálicas y consonánticas.
En estas escrituras, podemos encontrar una longitud de onda que atiende a un complejo de relaciones sociales que suelen ser omitidas tanto por las instancias jurídicas, las evaluaciones psicológicas, como por el sistema carcelario (Wacquant, 2010). Al sumarse al estas escrituras “maltrechas” al archivo, lo pluraliza, lo abre, no sólo por la forma “vulgar” o “coloquial” de su contenido sino porque antes de haber sido archivadas, no formaban parte de él, contribuyendo a la expansión performativa del archivo.
