This article assesses a collaborative digital storytelling project between Chief Leschi Schools, a Puyallup Tribal K-12 school, and University of Washington students, teachers, and institutional leaders. This assessment emphasizes the importance of and examines how to build trust and facilitate co-planning in digital storytelling workshops centering Indigenous voices. Collaboration between Indigenous and non-indigenous students and teachers offered unconventional learning experiences and community celebrations of Indigenous youth. Inductive, qualitative research drawing from personal memos, interviews, focus groups, and surveys revealed the significance of co-planning and trust-building between participants of distinct social and formal education backgrounds. This analysis showcases how these different factors shaped and sustained the project, resulting in what the authors hope will be an enduring commitment. Recommendations include: (1) Emphasis on consistent and ongoing participation to cultivate trust and facilitate continuous communication; (2) purposeful engagement of students’ fundamental skills, presenting digital narratives that align with their interests and competencies; and (3) adopting an approach for non-indigenous academics and academic institutions of prioritizing and actively engaging in collaborative partnerships with Indigenous communities. The article underscores the significance of recognizing and resolving complex power and cultural dynamics between universities and tribes for successful project co-planning and implementation.
Why take the same class three times in a row? This simple question sits at the heart of our article's exploration of higher education and temporality. We examine the disruptive and generative potential of a pedagogical collaboration in which undergraduate students may enroll for three semesters in a course focusing on peer-based teaching in anthropology. Against a neoliberal educational ethos that positions courses as mere steppingstones toward graduation and careers, this class encourages students to repeat practices and actions multiple times over the course of up to a year and a half. In this repetition students develop compounding skills and learn to revel in the variations and patterns possible through iterative and collaborative work. This article is structured as a reflective conversation among six student participants in this course and the instructor, a cultural anthropologist. Collectively, we think about what it means for students to engage in a collaborative process that focuses on dwelling in repetition and which, we argue, pushes back against the linearity of degree programs and the commodification of educational time. Authorial note: Authors two through seven committed equal time to the creation of this article and are organized here alphabetically.
Abstract: This article describes the process of developing collaborative methods and the outcome for creating ex-situ digital drawings to depict the housing situations and movement trajectories of Russian-speaking migrants in Japan. The study presents a two-part methodology that was applied to ethnographic data, such as transcribed interviews, photographs, and fieldnotes. The first part focused on the emic specifics of the migrant experience of home and housing; we applied to the data a free drawing that followed a six-point extraction technique. The second part focused on the precise housing types occupied by the study participants and the participants’ moving-home trajectories over the course of their lives. Here we employed a taxonomic approach, using drawings and captions for the 14 housing types extracted from the data. The taxonomic drawings served as icons for the entire sample. This two-part methodological combination effectively communicates the research findings and respects the internal perspectives and emotions of the participants. It also provides a holistic and comparable view of the lifelong housing trajectories of migrants in Japan. The unique positioning of the drawer as a participant in this research results in a dense, collaborative approach that allows for an emphasis on indigenous categories.
Abstract: In this article we argue that the epistolary form can be used as collaborative practice—further expanding researcher-informant relations—where both parties enter an epistemic partnership and become co-researchers, co-theorizing and co-creating the research output together. We have been using the epistolary form as a means to exchange observations, ideas, and positionalities about coloniality in Kalaallit (Greenlandic Inuit) society today, and to investigate the stance young people take in this discussion. The article has developed from correspondence via letter-writing between the two authors and renders visible the dynamics of our epistemic relationship, an essential element of the collaborative process that often stays hidden. We hereby experiment with collaborative research practices and alternative ways of creating knowledge, as advocated by practitioners working with collaborative and experimental research practices in anthropology, clearly positioning ourselves as authors, an Indigenous scholar and a non-Indigenous researcher, in relation to each other as well as to the world around us.
Abstract: This article highlights ethnography as a method for mapping interactions between NGOs and host-country governments, civil servants, and citizens. However, data can differ drastically in terms of access, transparency, and quality depending on the researcher’s positionality. Using examples from our work in Malawi, we demonstrate trade-offs for the researcher based on the approach taken, whereby certain types of data are accessed while others remain unseen. We argue that researcher positionality has implications for data collection and theory-building exercises and can significantly alter research findings, making it a crucial consideration in the design and implementation of ethnographic research in international development.
Abstract: During these times of overlapping crises brought forth by the dominant destructive world-making practices of what John Law (2011) calls the “One-World World,” we need to re/imagine how ethnographic methods might respond to and dance along with uncertain times. This essay details a collaborative ethnographic project that methodologically builds from the tools of socially engaged art practice and is oriented around uncertainty and not-knowing as a way of redefining “survival” outside the ontological coordinates of heteropatriarchal capitalist modernity. I chronicle the process under which I engaged in an ethnographic experiment with people from an unemployment center in Vaasa, Finland, during the time of the year when the sun never sets. Because we had a lot of “free” time, we followed our bodies and the rhythms of the land/scape to trouble and transgress capitalist time/space. I theorize how ethnographic practice steeped in collaborative uncertainty might help communities find ways of worlding outside the dictates imposed upon us, shifting geographical landscapes as well as the ontological and affective landscapes inside of each of us.
Abstract: Anthropologists have long grappled with how and to what extent researchers should disentangle personal emotions from their analysis of their interlocutors. For scholar-activists, this complexity is enriched if/when researchers are directly engaging in social movements or activist organizing. How does a researcher navigate the blurred boundaries between participating in a social movement—planning, organizing, campaigning—and analyzing the intricate human relationships, theories, and actions that comprise a movement, and what is an anthropologist’s role in these processes? While a multitude of scholars have sought to answer these questions (Hale 2006; Sanford and Angel-Ajani 2006), during my fieldwork an additional layer of contention was added with the emergence of COVID-19. This article provides a descriptive account of my personal experience completing fieldwork among US-Latin American solidarity activists from 2019 to 2021 during the most intense phases of COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States. Throughout this article I illustrate how COVID-19 impacted my research and relationships with my interlocutors, often leading to an array of circumstantial affects that both complicated and enriched my analytical process. I demonstrate the emotional navigation that takes place amid fieldwork with friends and organizers during a global pandemic. In doing so, I re-examine the role of both affect and social crisis in directing the positioning of activist anthropologists.
Abstract: This article assesses a collaborative digital storytelling project between Chief Leschi Schools, a Puyallup Tribal K-12 school, and University of Washington students, teachers, and institutional leaders. This assessment emphasizes the importance of and examines how to build trust and facilitate co-planning in digital storytelling workshops centering Indigenous voices. Collaboration between Indigenous and non-indigenous students and teachers offered unconventional learning experiences and community celebrations of Indigenous youth. Inductive, qualitative research drawing from personal memos, interviews, focus groups, and surveys revealed the significance of co-planning and trust-building between participants of distinct social and formal education backgrounds. This analysis showcases how these different factors shaped and sustained the project, resulting in what the authors hope will be an enduring commitment. Recommendations include: (1) Emphasis on consistent and ongoing participation to cultivate trust and facilitate continuous communication; (2) purposeful engagement of students’ fundamental skills, presenting digital narratives that align with their interests and competencies; and (3) adopting an approach for non-indigenous academics and academic institutions of prioritizing and actively engaging in collaborative partnerships with Indigenous communities. The article underscores the significance of recognizing and resolving complex power and cultural dynamics between universities and tribes for successful project co-planning and implementation.
An Introduction to the Special Issue Amanda Hilton (bio) and Angela D. Storey (bio) Introduction In July 2020 the authors in this special issue assembled at a digital conference amidst a global pandemic—an experience that seemed in many ways to defy time. Instead of gathering in Lisbon at the European Association of Social Anthropologists meetings, we sat in front of computer screens, in homes and offices spread from Arizona to Germany. For some, the panel was mid-afternoon, following a full day of conferencing and work. For those farthest west it was early morning, a first coffee in hand. The COVID-19 pandemic had already drastically reshaped our daily lives, producing a sensation of temporal displacement and global pause as we shifted patterns of behavior to stay at home and physically apart. Despite what our bodies and minds told us, we were together in the panel—assembled at the same time and virtual place to talk about what it means to practice an anthropology that builds collaborative futures. In work set from Windhoek to London, and from Louisville to Paris, the seven articles in this issue are the result of that out-of-time panel. Each piece explores what it means to link anthropological practices and queries through processes of acting and being together, discussing the outcomes of collaborations wrought across multiple temporal modes and scales. Authors draw from scholarship in the discipline on time and futurity (cf. Munn 1992; Bear 2016; Bryant and Knight 2019) as well as from sensory, participatory, and decolonial work remaking how we [End Page 1] practice, learn, and vision the discipline in the world (cf. Austin 2004; Alonso Bejarano et al. 2019; Kohn and Ushigua 2020). Collaboration is examined as both a means and an end. It is an approach chosen for multiple purposes and temporalities: addressing the exclusions of the past, shifting possibility within the present, and working toward imagined futures. Collectively, the articles in this issue explore what we call "collaborative timescapes," ways of thinking about anthropological praxis that center time and togetherness. This includes the nuance of methodological and interpersonal interactions within fieldwork, the patterning of experience in coursework, and the performance of life within our everyday settings. In focusing on anthropological and ethnographic work specifically, we consider how, why, and to what ends we act toward imagined futures together. Two genres of collaborative timescapes can be seen in the articles included: those of reflection and of presence. Within the former, authors Orbach, Conte, and Weisskoeppel explore how shared spaces of looking backward provide ways to look forward. For the latter, authors Bayfield, Storey and co-authors, Rios Sandoval, and Sheehan and co-authors meditate on experiences of the now in order to articulate and imagine what is to come. For all, the focus is ultimately on the future—on what it means to think and do anthropology in a way that moves us into new futures, new disciplinary frameworks, and new collaborative worlds. In this introduction to the special issue, we examine scholarship on time and futurity, discuss how this pairs with collaboration, and explore what it means for each of our authors to think temporally together. Time and Futurity in Anthropology Although the study of time is sometimes relegated to the realm of philosophy, the combination of time's ubiquity and everydayness, set in contrast with its seemingly incomprehensible scope, make it relevant to anthropology. In Munn's formative essay on the anthropology of time, she refers to the "diffuse, endlessly multiplying studies of sociocultural time" as reflecting "time's pervasiveness as an inescapable dimension of all aspects of social experience and practice" (Munn 1992, 93). Indeed, time has a slippery character; it is pervasive and yet easily forgotten. [End Page 2] Time and temporality—the relationship individuals have with time—have been present in anthropological inquiry since the inception of the discipline (e.g., Malinowski 1927; Evans-Pritchard 1939). Early approaches sought to delineate disparate cultural conceptions and experiences of time and placed these in "traditional" time (Fabian 1983, 31) set against a Western and presumed objective time (Birth 2012, 169). In addition to reproducing colonial hierarchies and processes of othering, this temporal split between tradition and...
This article introduces the term "ludic heritage" to describe how people relocate histories in migration through play. In a collaboration between the Museum of London, an Albanian supplementary school, and the researcher, play became a point of intersection between adults' and children's worlds, the museum and minority communities, and imagination, memory, and reality. UK supplementary schools set up by migrant communities teach children their cultural heritages not taught in mainstream schools or represented at the museum. Despite an estimation of 3,000-5,000 supplementary schools in London alone, they exist on the periphery of public life. In school plays performed in museum festivals children embodied the past whilst improvising cultural representations on stage, redirecting the future of heritage in migration. Framing time as technique (Bear 2016) and as an embodied mental capacity (Da Silva Sinha 2019), I observe how people construct the temporalities they inhabit through a praxis (Munn 1992) in which play—as an adaptable and malleable form of cultural heritage—reconfigures cultural identities and mobilizes a new community in diaspora. I draw attention to how different partners approached play, as research method, embodied memory, pedagogy, or museum engagement or through transient cultural artifacts that open temporal possibilities.
In the spring and summer of 2020, the world broke down. A worldly breakdown often gives rise to forms of moral breakdown, or those “moments” when some worldly event or occurrence forces a person or persons to critically reflect on their until then unquestioned way of being-in-the-world (Zigon 2007). From the persistence of the global pandemic, to the collapse of the economy, to the murder of George Floyd by police officers on camera, to the worldwide response to that injustice, the world and its human inhabitants experienced a breakdown in those months and it became impossible to ever see, hear, understand, or be in the world in the same way again. This special issue of Puncta brings together anthropologists and philosophers who take up a critical phenomenological or hermeneutic approach for thinking the contemporary condition. From the possibility of inhabiting a world conditioned by a global pandemic, to the impossibility of dwelling in conditions of systemic racism, from the question of how to face a future that presents itself as looming, to a present that denies the very possibility of truth: this collection responds to these and more in the hope of showing not only the contemporary conditions of existence, but that other conditions always remain as an ever-present potentiality
Addressing colonial legacies has become an urgent task for national societies of the Global North involved in projects of colonialism in the Global South. German institutions of education are challenged to decolonize their curriculum, to develop strategies to involve future generations in processes of reconciliation, and to establish dialogue with populations of the Global South who entered the struggle of postcolonial transformation after colonial liberation. How can scholars of the humanities and social sciences contribute to such transcultural processes of public memorialization and future making? How might we support local interventions that make colonial legacies visible and expand public knowledge? In this paper I reflect on a collaborative walk-shop conducted in the urban environment of Windhoek, Namibia, in 2019, which included a wide array of places, from remains of colonial infrastructure to existing memorial sites. In reflecting upon my own experience within this gathering of participants from different backgrounds and professions, I discuss how this work contributed to a creative process of interpretation by exploring hidden tracks in the landscape and exchanging fragments of knowledge.
The COVID-19 pandemic with its social distancing measures changed the course of many anthropological projects involving fieldwork, rendering many unfeasible but also opening up new possibilities. The cancellation of a participatory filmmaking project is the starting point of the aural collaborations discussed in this article. These consist in a series of podcasts I co-created with an environmental journalist who specialized in radio, podcast, and soundscape production. In these sound pieces the research participants—a musician, a bird specialist and activists mobilized against territorial inequalities—build on their perception of the aural environment during the first coronavirus lockdown of 2020 to reflect on the present and on possible, perhaps more livable futures.
This article considers how live storytelling events in Toronto, Canada, use a community-oriented model of engagement as a way to model more equitable futures collectively. The genre examined here, called "confessional storytelling" by its practitioners, features firsthand accounts of lived experience that are told in front of a live audience. These events are conceptualized and enacted to center community engagement, allowing for the imagining of collective models of futurity. The events come into existence through cooperative and voluntary collaborations that both resist neoliberal logics of profit and individualism and provide a platform for community members to inspire a questioning of current lived experience by sharing their personal experiences on stage. Examining this model provides an example of how temporal explorations of subjective experience through storytelling, and performance more broadly, can be used to identify and/or challenge unequitable aspects of the present and to imagine better futures collectively. This article draws from research conducted in 2016 with storytelling communities that operated through the voluntary participation of both event organizers and storytellers.
In this article we reflect upon recursive temporalities that shaped collaborative work on campus food insecurity. Our research examined disparities in access to food and dining services in order to understand the strategies college students use to mitigate the challenges of obtaining food and to develop suggestions to reduce the prevalence of food insecurity at our school. This collaborative endeavor and our research findings are both framed by perceptions and limitations of time. Within our team, we navigated semester turnover, cyclical incorporation of student researchers, competing commitments, and different time frames for quantitative and qualitive data collection and analysis. Our research participants—college students—juggled multiple responsibilities and experienced temporal shifts by semester, advancement through their school years, and housing changes that significantly impacted their food practices. Time constraints and conflicting temporal rhythms shaped our research and contextualized student engagements with food, creating challenges for conducting collaborative research and for students' everyday access to meals. We argue for a reflexive consideration of the multiple temporalities, countertempos, and hidden rhythms that shape collaboration and contextualize research conducted on college campuses.
This article has three aims. First, it suggests that for collaborators to navigate their way out of uncertainty, they produce a shared "activity timespace" (cf. Bryant and Knight 2019a). I argue that this involves (i) the coalescence of future orientations, as a shared understanding of the purpose(s) of the collaboration is produced; (ii) rhythmic synchronicity, as activities become coordinated; and (iii) the reproduction of the roles of collaborators in relation to one another. The second aim is to illustrate two ways in which ethnographer and collaborators navigate their way out of a space of uncertainty to create a shared activity timespace. One is intentional and uses questioning to align knowledge. The other is unintentional, as the ethnographer is encouraged to "be there" until an opportunity to collaborate emerges. The third goal of the article is to suggest that analysis of anticipation within ethnographic collaboration needs to focus not only on the anticipation of events but on our roles in relation to one another (cf. Stephan and Flaherty 2019). Through collaboration, it is not only anticipation about what the future could be that is forced into flux, but also anticipation about how those futures might come to be built, as "cultural futures" (Appadurai 2013) are embedded within expectations of how to act and what to aim for in collaborative encounters.
The repatriation of sacred objects from the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History to the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation in North Dakota established the foundation for a long-term research partnership that resulted in an oral history project and documentary about the life and times of a missionary to the reservation in the past, and it provided a means for elders to historicize the present and communicate to the next generation their concerns about contemporary times. Through a collaborative filmmaking process that highlighted visual sovereignty and engaged in Indigenous storywork, the resulting video represented the past in the community members’ own terms, sparked dialogue in community vetting sessions about the oil boom, and became a teaching resource for the tribal college.
Although collaborative experimental methods are gaining ground in anthropology, there is little research on the forms such collaborations take. This article begins to explore the question of form with assistance from two recent analyses of "moments" within collaborative projects by Hastrup (2018) and Korsby and Stavrianakis (2018) respectively. The article discusses the potential for knowledge production in such moments, using examples from a collaborative project in the form of a workshop initiated by the researcher and carried out with two photographers and a group of four young interlocutors in a city in Denmark. The ambition of the workshop was to articulate and understand the emergent phenomenon "mental vulnerability" in novel ways through the experimental production of photographs and text. The article shows how, by working collaboratively with both visual and textual modes of expression, new experiential (understood as emotional, sensorial, atmospheric or even magical) points of entrance for understanding mental vulnerability could be reached momentarily. The aim of the article is firstly to convey ethnographic insights from the project and secondly to discuss the epistemological potentials of moments in collaborative research.
Abstract:In DIY punk scenes around the world there are varying interpretations of what ‘doing-it-yourself ’ means. For the punks at Rumah Pirata, a punk collective near Bandung, Indonesia, DIY is a form of practiced anarchism. They frame their definition of DIY around interactions based on mutual aid, non-hierarchical organizational practices, and deep-seated anti-capitalist sentiments. To them, doing-it-yourself means doing-it-with-friends and doing-it-without-profiting. In many ways, the power dynamics embedded in standard ethnographic research run counter to Rumah Pirata’s collectivist ethics. In this article I discuss a collaborative visual ethnography project done in conjunction with the Rumah Pirata collective, designed to incorporate DIY anarchist principles into ethnographic methods. Through participatory ethnographic photography and the collective construction of a photo-book/zine, I demonstrate that collaborative visual methods offer a way to curtail the power dynamics inherent in ethnography, thereby facilitating enhanced understandings of the interworking of a punk anarchist collective.
A Review of Indigenous Women and Violence: Feminist Activist Research in Heightened States of Injustice Zoe Schwandt (bio) Indigenous Women and Violence is an edited volume by Lynn Stephen and Shannon Speed focusing on the topic(s) of racialized and gendered violence under settler-colonialism. Each author’s own research is based in the United States, Mexico, and/or Guatemala, with much of the research crucially extending past artificial borders and challenging the reader’s relationship to land and territory. Each researcher discusses different contexts, communities, and events, but they all share and demonstrate the omnipresence of settler-colonial violence and the power in resistance and self-organization executed by Indigenous women. Some of the topics covered by the authors in this volume include the case of Sepur Zarco (chapter 4), two tribunals on the armed conflict in Guatemala (chapter 7), the experiences of Indigenous women in a Texas immigration detention center (chapter 1), and a creative writing workshop for Indigenous women imprisoned in Mexico (chapter 2). While these authors’ research is most obviously connected geographically and topically, they also share a commitment to engaged and activist scholarship. Engaged scholarship for these authors is specific to the context of working with Indigenous women who have faced sexual, physical, and spiritual or emotional violence. This type of work demands collaboration, care, and time. It requires an intersectional feminist lens, which the authors implement in their own research, but it also requires a framework that interrogates the way the structure of settler-colonialism makes [End Page 74] Indigenous women “multiply vulnerable” to many kinds of violence (Stephen and Speed 2021, 3). Each chapter emphasizes the inseparability of “domestic” or private violence, empire building or maintenance, and global neoliberal capitalism. The modern settler state “is structured on that violence [against Indigenous women], at once generating it and normalizing it” (Stephen and Speed 2021, 11). Settler colonialism effectively engenders and racializes Indigenous women, forcing them into being colonial subjects and, in doing so, rendering them vulnerable, rendering them killable, disposable, rapable. Thus the violence faced by Indigenous women across Central America and North America cannot be disentangled from the structures of ongoing settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. The authors note that this violence is a continuity of the historical violence of settler-colonialism, highlighting the way that colonialism acts as a structure and process rather than a temporally defined event. This emphasis on emotions and strong bonds is also central to this volume and to the authors’ shared understanding of an engaged anthropology. The authors do not merely denounce “objectivity” but uplift the tools of engagement, emotion, and embodiment as a legitimate alternative. After all, Speed asks, if we are meant to “suspend” subjectivity, then what does one do with the subjective experiences of race, gender, sexuality, class? “Why is it reasonable to draw on these aspects of our subjectivities, but not our emotional knowledge?” (2021, 39). She is not alone in this book in demonstrating how emotions are a strength and essential to a type of knowledge production that rejects hegemonic and positivist epistemologies. The subjectivities that Speed initially mentions are part of one’s embodied knowledge, but, importantly, so are emotions, traumas, and our political commitments (chapter 1). The role of embodiment is central to this volume. Embodiment gets used in a way similar to its use in feminist geography. A geographic approach is just below the surface. It is not an object of study but informs our understanding nonetheless. Movement, borders, intimacy, dispossession, bodies, and territory saturate the text. Essential to this is embodiment and embodied knowledge. Embodied knowledge is understood as a generative source of knowledge production that runs counter to objectivity and grounds itself in emotion. It is reminiscent of Standpoint Theory. The authors touch on their own embodiment when discussing positionality and lived experience. They discuss how trauma remains in [End Page 75] the body and how secondary trauma can trigger this. They value bringing these experiences and these bodily feelings to the foreground. In doing this, they ground experience in the body, in the collective, and in the land, which are always at risk of seizure and vulnerable to violence in a settler-colonial state. Emotions...
