From Playing with Fire to Hungry Translations: Seeking justice through radical vulnerability.

A conversation with Professor Richa Nagar

Wednesday 21 November 3:00-4:30pm.

Murphy Building 632, Kelburn Campus

 The School of Social and Cultural Studies and the Ethnography Commons are pleased to host a conversation with Professor Richa Nagar, the Russell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Chair in Excellence Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota’s  Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. Between 2002 and 2004, eight women activists working in Sitapur District of Uttar Pradesh in North India built an alliance with Richa Nagar, a feminist scholar and creative writer. These nine sangtins, or close women companions, walked together to share the stories of their lives and to offer a critique of the ways in which the agendas of women's empowerment projects tend to become NGO-ized and compromised due to the very sociopolitical hierarchies they aimed to confront. Their journey birthed Sangtin Yatra, a book in Hindi, and then a political controversy around the validity of the truths that the women had shared about their lives in that book. This controversy led to the English version of the book, Playing with Fire: Feminist Through and Activism through Seven Lives in India (2006; also translated in Turkish, Marathi, and Bahasa Indonesia) and to the making of the Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS), a movement of small farmers and labourers in the Sitapur District. In this informal discussion, we will have an opportunity to explore with Richa the ways in which her deep collaboration with Sangtin Writers shaped her academic work after Sangtin Yatra and Playing with Fire, and to discuss such concepts as situated solidarities, radical vulnerability, politics without guarantees, and hungry translations, which she offers in her book, Muddying the Waters: Co-authoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism (2014), and develops further in her forthcoming book Hungry Translations: Relearning the World Through Radical Vulnerability (2019). Professor Nagar has provided two readings to frame the conversation. This event has limited space, please RSVP to Eli Elinoff (eli.elinoff@vuw.ac.nz) to register and to receive links to the readings.  

Ethnography Commons Roundtable: Anthropology and #HAUtalk

In this roundtable discussion we will discuss key issues arising from the recent controversy surrounding HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. The controversy unfolded in June 2018 after David Graeber issued a public apology to “anyone who has been hurt by their involvement with HAU.” This was quickly followed by a flurry of activity on social media as anthropologists either (a) sought to decipher this cryptic message or (b) breathed a digital sigh of relief that the journal’s ‘open secrets’ of precarious employment, faux-open access, academic elitism and exclusion, financial mismanagement, harrassment, bullying, and intimidation had finally come to light. While much #HAUtalk remains firmly centred on HAU and demands answers and accountability from the journal, other conversations occurring on social media, at conferences, and in the hallways of anthropology programmes globally have considered how the incident reflects range of contentious issues within contemporary anthropology and academia more broadly. #HAUtalk has raised questions relating to exploitation of graduate labour, academic precarity, power and inequality, questionable publishing practices within and beyond open access journals, citational politics and what it means to #RefuseHAU, #anthrosowhite, and the neoliberal university structures we often operate within. In this roundtable we will consider these issues and discuss what the controversy means for anthropology as a discipline and perhaps what it says about the future of academia. After an initial round of speakers’ comments, the audience will be invited to contribute their own thoughts and perspectives in what we hope will be an open, challenging, and lively conversation.

Chair: Lorena Gibson

Date: Thursday 20 September

Time: 3:10-5:00pm

Venue: TTR 106, Te Toki a Rata building, Kelburn Campus, Victoria University of Wellington

The roundtable is free but places are limited, so please email Lorena.Gibson@vuw.ac.nz to register.

In conjunction with SACS, the VUW Anthropology Programme, and VUW's Science in Society Programme, we are very pleased to welcome Professor Kim Fortun, Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and current president of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). Professor Fortun will deliver a seminar titled: 

Hosting the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography

The Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE, pronounced “peace”) is a digital research environment designed to support new forms of collaboration among researchers across time and space and new ways of drawing users into ethnographic research.  PECE’s “design logics” translate critical theoretical commitments (to perspectival multiplicity, and the work of displacement and différance, for example) into digital terms.  PECE is thus a practical project to technically support collaborative ethnography while also a experiment in counter-hegemonic social and language forms.  It is also a research project to understand the valences and possibilities of digital space for knowledge production, exploring the intellectual, social and political consequences of different language ideologies.  In this presentation, I’ll describe the ethnographic origins of PECE in studies of environmental public health then describe how PECE has become a site for exposing, testing and extending ethnographic methods and the pedagogical and political promise of ethnographic modes of inquiry.  I’ll  also provide a tour of PECE and kin projects, including The Asthma Files, The Disaster STS Research Network, and stsInfraStrucTureS.  I’lll describe PECE’s architecture, functionality, and “design logics,” and demonstrate how they work in various instances of the platform.  There will be time for questions about ways PECE could be used by new users, working on different kinds of projects. 

Bio: Kim Fortun is a Professor and Department Chair in the University of California Irvine’s Department of Anthropology.  Her research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, and on experimental ethnographic methods and research design.  Her research has examined how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health risks, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to disaster vulnerability.  Fortun’s book Advocacy After Bhopal Environmentalism, Disaster, New World Orders was awarded the 2003 Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society.  From 2005-2010, Fortun co-edited the Journal of Cultural Anthropology. Currently, Fortun is working on a book titled Late Industrialism: Making Environmental Sense, on The Asthma Files, a collaborative project to understand how air pollution and environmental public health are dealt with in different contexts, and on design of the Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), an open source/access digital platform for anthropological and historical research.  Fortun also runs the EcoEd Research Group, which turns ethnographic findings about environmental problems into curriculum delivered to young students (kindergarten-grade 12), and is helping organize both the Disaster-STS Research Network, and the Research Data Alliance’s Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group.   Fortun co-edits a book series for University of Pennsylvania Press titled Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster, designed to connect academic research to public problems and policy, reaching audiences in different regions of the world.  Currently, Fortun serve as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the international scholarly society representing the field of Science and Technology Studies.

“Dominion in Disguise: The Penumbra of Colonialism and the Ambiguities of ‘National Culture’ in Greece, Thailand, and Elsewhere”

Michael Herzfeld - Harvard University

Thursday, 26 July, 3:10 — 5:00 PM, Murphy Lecture Theater (MYLT) 101.

Please see Vic Events for up-to-date information.https://www.victoria.ac.nz/…/dominion-in-disguise-the-penum…

The extent of Western colonialism is not confined to certain patches marked on the globe. There are many countries – Thailand, Greece, Iran, Nepal, Afghanistan, China, and even Iceland among them – that were “granted” independence (or “allowed” to keep it) on condition that they followed the dictates of the Western colonial powers with regard to the establishment of secure borders containing a clearly defined national culture and society.

The consequences of this process have been painful, in varying degrees, for the countries concerned, since they have been generally unable to garner much sympathy from the post-colonies as a result of their insistence that they were “never colonized,” yet they still, in some respects, continue to look to Western sources of power and authority for approval. The speaker will describe some of the local consequences of this global phenomenon and will suggest that it illustrates the coercive power of cultural management and its role in the perpetuation of Western domination.

Michael Herzfeld is the Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where he also served as the first Director of the Asia Center’s Thai Studies Program (2014-18). He is also the International Institute for Asian Studies Extraordinary Professor of Critical Heritage Studies at Leiden University. Author of eleven books (most recently Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome, 2009, and Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok, 2016) and producer of two ethnographic films, he has served as editor of American Ethnologist (1995-98). He has conducted field research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand. His current research interests include artisanal knowledge and its transmission; gentrification, heritage politics, and the disruption of social life; the local and global effects of nationalism; and theoretical and comparative approaches to cultural intimacy, crypto-colonialism, and the concept of polity.

For more information contact: Gill Blomgren (gill.blomgren@vuw.ac.nz, 04 463 5677)

The Victoria University of Wellington's department of Religious Studies, in association with the Ethnography Commons, will host an upcoming workshop exploring Emerging Debates in the Antnthropology of Religion in Asia on July 9th. The call for papers (see below) requests that abstracts and registration for this experimental workshop be received by July 2. 

Call for Papers: 

Religion has always been a central category for anthropological inquiry, and no more so than for anthropologists working in Asia. Marked by a profuse diversity of religious formations, dispositions, rituals, practices, and identities, religion in Asia has frequently been at the cutting edge of empirical and analytical developments in anthropology. The aim of this one-day workshop is to examine new and emerging themes in the anthropological study of religion in Asia in the 21st century.

This innovative workshop will follow a distinctive and experimental design. We invite anthropologists to present brief (10-15 minute) proposals for future research trajectories, using a recent major book-length contribution to the anthropology of religion in Asia as an initial provocation. Through critical readings of the key themes, questions, frameworks, and methodologies presented in these texts, as well as by examining their limitations and short-comings, we aim to open new space for anthropological analysis. The objective of the workshop is to initiate the process of co-authoring an article-length essay that will provide an incisive and lively contribution by outlining future directions for research.

While anthropologists have tended to engage with specific contexts and field sites, the goal of this workshop is to examine the analytical potential for a regional Asian horizon in (re)conceptualising the anthropology of religion. A regional frame is not, of course, meant to suggest reified boundaries or fixed essences, but rather to facilitate questions of scale, comparison, and optics. We thereby seek to bring into conversation diverse research projects in the anthropology of religion in different parts of Asia in order to illuminate cross-cutting trends, continuities, and disjunctures.

As a consequence of placing fieldwork encounters at the centre of knowledge production in the discipline, anthropology remains intensively interested in quotidian lifeworlds of peoples around the world. Our interest in emerging themes in the anthropology of religion is therefore not only a matter of examining how anthropology itself is changing, but also a matter of assessing the contemporary Asian zeitgeist. This workshop seeks to trace contemporary themes, events, and processes around Asia that impinge on religion including, for example, new technologies, environmental challenges, and/or political movements.

Each paper will examine a common core question: What is the major contribution of your selected text to the anthropology of religion and what new lines of inquiry does it afford?

Registration and Paper Proposals

To register for attending the workshop, please email Philip by 2 July 2018. A koha on the day will help with lunch expenses. If you have any food requirements please tell Philip when you register.

To present a paper at the conference, please email both Philip and Bernardo with your paper proposal, including: (a) title; (b) reference details for your selected book (published within about the last five years); (c) short abstract of 100 words; (d) brief bio of 50 words. Papers are invited that address all topics related to the anthropology of religion in Asia. 

Convenors

Bernardo Brown

Cultural Anthropology, International Christianity University, Tokyo

E | bbernardo@icu.ac.jp

Philip Fountain

Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington

E | philip.fountain@vuw.ac.nz

Methods from the Inside, Friday May 25, from 12.30-3 in MY305

This workshop, led by Prof. Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich and myself, will encourage reflection on the inductive nature of ethnographic methods. We will consider the ways in which ethnographic methods often emerges from within scenes of research rather than proceeding according to our neatly organized research designs proposed prior to entering the field. During the workshop we will think about blockages, hunches, and intuitive methods. We will consider how we deconstruct given methods and transform them to suit our needs and the specificities of our fieldsites. We will then describe and name the sorts of methods we actually engaged in to make our research happen.

We ask that participants bring with them a piece of writing of no more than 1000 words that thickly describes an impasse, blockage, or hurdle they have encountered in their present or past research. Do not analyse the impasse, rather write about it in close detail: What was the sticking point? Where did it emerge from? What was being slowed or prevented? How did it make you feel? You might also consider the limits of an existing methodological approach—interviews, survey methods, participant observation—when your specific research pushed that practice beyond its limits.

Building from your writing, we will then break into small groups to share and discuss these scenes in the aim of using them to remap, rename, and remake our methods to suit our own needs. Our aim here is both to interrogate the methods that we actually use to produce knowledge and to generate a diverse lexicon for naming these kinds of inductive approaches to knowledge production.

In order for us to take advantage of the time we have together we ask that you come prepared with a 1000 word narrative of your methodological quandary. The writing is a necessary starting point for our conversation, but it needn’t be a final draft or perfectly thought through. Just write something down so you have a basis to begin the reflection.

So we can get a sense of the size of the workshop, please RSVP to confirm your attendance by May 22.

The first meeting of the Ethnography Commons will be held at at 11:30, on 20 April 2018 in MY 305 on the Kelburn Campus.

Over the past year, the Anthropology Programme has been thinking and writing about how bringing the figure of ‘the commons’ in relationship to the practice of ethnography might enable us to engage in new kinds of interdisciplinary conversations about research, teaching, and praxis at Victoria.  The Ethnography Commons will offer us a space to bring the diverse strands of ethnographic research being done across the university together with the aim of generating new energy, conversations, and ideas about this research methodology and its boundaries.

At this first meeting we will introduce ourselves, talk about the varied kinds of ethnography taking place at Victoria, and consider the activities and conversations we’d like to have over the next year to expand this intellectual community.

The meeting is open to academic staff and students (especially postgrads), so please forward onward to other interested parties. We are looking forward to meeting you and embarking on this project together.

This workshop focuses on composition as a method and a provocation for ethnographic research. Split into three sections, it will explore composition through representation and politics centering on cattle images (photographs/lithographs, texts, media footage and film).  Offering first a consideration the politics of representation, we will then work through a series of rural images to compose a photo-essay. In the final session, we will work with raw video footage to compose a montage on everyday movement, to consider and explore how we can best use different visual methods to create new knowledge and research encounters.

Malini Sur is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society and teaches anthropology at Western Sydney University.  Photographs from Malini's fieldwork on South Asia's borders have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Chiang Mai, Gottingen, Heidelberg, Kathmandu and Munich. Her documentary ‘Life Cycle’, about the politics of cycling in the city of Kolkata, has been screened at the City-Mojo Film Festival (Perth 2017); the Australian Anthropological Society (Sydney 2016); The 4th Peoples Film Festival (Kolkata 2016), the Centre for Studies in the Social Sciences Calcutta (Kolkata 2016) and The Substation (Singapore 2016).  

This workshop is part of a series of digital-visual workshops running in 2017 as part of the Cultural Anthropology Programme at Victoria, in conjunction with the Ethnography Commons.

Using visual methods to undertake and present collaborative research provide opportunities for considering alternative ways of doing research and creating knowledge.  This workshop offers a hands-on opportunity to experiment with a variety of visual and sound forms to explore different ways of gathering and representing fieldwork, in a collaborative approach. Throughout the session we will explore techniques that focus on a hands-on layering of information gathered throughout the day.  No prior knowledge of art or artistic skills is needed, just a cell phone and the willingness to try something different! 

  Ruth is a specialist in collaborative artistic practice as a research method and communication tool.  Her work centres around a multi-layered multi-media approach to research through the use of experimental methods; looking at how they can open spaces to explore how people experience and express their ways of knowing the world.  Her most recent research used digital animation, sculpture, soundscapes, experimental film and digital collage, to research and represent peoples experiences of chronic illness.

This workshop is part of a series of digital-visual workshops running in 2017 as part of the Cultural Anthropology Programme at Victoria, in conjunction with the Ethnography Commons.

Please join us for a public conversation between Dr Dave Wilson from Victoria University of Wellington's School of Music and Dr Lorena Gibson from VUW's Cultural Anthropology programme about Wilson's work with the CSPS Ensemble, a Macedonian jazz collective, and their new album On the Face Place. Wilson and Gibson's conversation will explore the relationship between music-making, collaboration, and ethnography.

Visual technologies offer a creative way to construct and tell stories for both researchers and their interlocuteurs.  The 3-minute ‘digital-story’ provides a means of thinking about narrative and life-story, as well as communication.  This workshop offers an opportunity to consider digital-story-telling as a research method as well as communication device.  It will include an overview of digital storytelling and the methodologies involved, as well as the opportunity to participate in a ‘story circle’ (the first stage of crafting one’s story).

Sarina Pearson is is a specialist in Southseas cinema and television, and has worked on many digital storytelling projects across the Pacific, exploring this as a means of grass-roots documentary.  She is interested in how cultural production reflects dynamics of power, affect and subjectivity.  She is currently Associate Professor in the Media, Film, and Television programme at the University of Auckland.  Find out more about Sarina’s work on digital storytelling here.

This workshop is part of a series of digital-visual workshops running in 2017 as part of the Cultural Anthropology Programme at Victoria, in conjunction with the Ethnography Commons.

COMMONING ETHNOGRAPHY PANEL
11am – 1pm, Hunter Council Chamber
Chair: Dr. Eli Elinoff
Contemporary ethnographic practices (and the political economies that drive them), raise important questions about the centres and peripheries of knowledge production and consumption. The most fundamental of these questions relates to who gets to be part of our disciplinary conversations and who is excluded. Following recent calls from within and beyond the academy to build a ‘knowledge commons’, this panel explores how the figure of the commons and practices of commoning might recraft ethnographic research for the 21st century. We ask: What might an ethnographic commons look like? What would it do? How might commoning reconfigure relationships between researchers and participants? What kinds of technologies, methods, and media might broaden the reach of our work and recompose our praxis? We invite contributors to this panel to critically consider new ways of opening up ethnography to diverse models of commoning. How can an ethnography of/for the commons engage diverse audiences, produce new modes of communication and research dissemination, reshape research relationships, and challenge the philosophical underpinnings of our discipline?

Dr. Eli Elinoff, Victoria University of Wellington
Towards an Ethnography Commons
Scholars of capitalism have noted that private property not only restructures relations with physical space and material things, but also produces new forms of social relations. Building on this insight, I explore the ways in which the boundaries of property shape our approaches to ethnographic research, writing, and teaching. I ask how challenging these boundaries with an Ethnography Commons might reconfigure both knowledge production and academic praxis for the 21st century.

Dr. Catherine Trundle, Victoria University of Wellington
Feminist Critiques and Alternative Commons
In this talk I will ask what feminist critiques of commoning projects offer our discussion of building an ethnographic commons. Examining feminist debates around the politics of care work and the body as property, as well as feminist praxis regarding collaboration, sharing and the boundaries and nature of economic life, I will argue that a feminist approach to the commons spotlights the potential inequalities and exclusions of commoning projects. Seeking metaphors for the commons in marginal spaces and outside of the polis or the public sphere, feminist critiques allows us to unsettle many assumptions about how we might constitute a shared ethnographic project.

Associate Professor Ruth Fitzgerald, University of Otago.
How might commoning serve as a new pedagogical grounds for training ethnographers?
My answer draws upon seven years of developing the OtagoANTH youtube channel. This is a collaborative public enterprise exploring representations of Dunedin societies and cultures. It is also a vehicle for teaching about the ethics and politics of representation to second year anthropology majors. The presentation of our findings through the youtube commons and via the medium of individually crafted vlogs, allows students opportunities to explore sensuous scholarships while learning how to create citizen ethnographies. These skills have then become useful to their own life projects.

Dr. Dave Wilson, New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington
The Sound of Ethnography to Come
Grounded in ethnography since the 1950s, ethnomusicology has consistently engaged in and grappled with multiple modes of knowledge production beyond the ethnographic monograph. In many cases ethnomusicologists and interlocutors participate in collaborative production of sound recordings that often enter markets as commodities in some form. I address this provocation by considering my own multi-modal ethnographic research among musicians in Macedonia and examining (1) ethnomusicological discourses of how knowledge is co-produced and/or communicated through sound, (2) varied conceptions of ownership and intellectual property across music cultures, and (3) disparate regimes of value and uneven positionality among collaborators vis-à-vis ethnographic sonic texts.

Professor Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich, Victoria University of Wellington
Commoning Data Creation
Ethnographic writing workshops are normally held to help colleagues overcome writer's block or to help postgraduate students find their ethnographic voice. This paper considers auto-ethnographic writing workshops as a mode of commoning data production and a means of redistributing ethnographic authority. Ethnographic writing workshops offer alternative modes of self-interrogation that enable participants to co-create data, contributing their voices to a common pool that explores topics of shared interest aligned with the researcher and his or her team of participating experts. Using the example of auto-ethnographic writing workshops on experiences of academic mobility, I will introduce the method as a rich alternative to interviews or free flowing conversations.

Professor Cris Shore, University of Auckland
Academic Capitalism, Anthropology and the Tragedy of the Knowledge Commons
The history of social anthropology is intimately connected to that of the university, an institution with a primarily social mission geared to public good research and teaching. Today, however, a new kind of university is emerging, one based around the imperatives of the competitive global knowledge economy and increasingly geared towards innovation, entrepreneurship and commercialisation. The public university, it seems, is being restructured to resemble a transnational business corporation. Tertiary education has been reconceptualised as a private, personal investment in one’s individual career. This provocation will examine how these new institutional constraints are impacting on the production of knowledge and on notions of ownership in the contemporary university.

Dr. Ruth Gibbons, Massey University
Creative Practice: Challenging Perceptions
Ong suggested that “Print is curiously intolerant of physical incompleteness. It can convey the impression, unintentionally and subtly, but very really that what the material in the text deals with is similarly complete or self-consistent” (2013:130). This perception of completeness is one of the points of challenge within the debates around creative practices as more alternative practices have been criticised as incomplete leaving the work open to interpretation (Cox and Wright 2012). Using my own creative practice I suggest the questions of what makes something complete or accessible is key to challenging the stature of the word in academia.

Dr. Tuhina Ganguly, University of Canterbury
The Challenges and Possibilities of Commoning Anthropology in India
This paper examines the implications of growing anti-intellectualism in India for anthropology. How can anthropologists in/of/working on India respond to the challenges of addressing popular opinions which are decidedly against critical academic analyses? ‘Who is our rightful audience’ and ‘who are we writing for’, are pertinent questions in the present context, given young, urban, middle-class Indians are some of the strongest proponents of anti-intellectual nationalism. A middle-class urban audience is influencing who has the privilege to articulate critical opinions, which topics of research are acceptable, and what kinds of knowledge production and dissemination are taboo. The language of anthropological work needs to be more mindful of its readership and the audiences’ contestation of academic authority.

Dr. Caroline Bennett, Victoria University of Wellington
A ‘Sweaty’ Praxis?
In Wilful Subjects, Sara Ahmed urges anthropologists to develop ‘sweaty concepts’ – concepts that embrace and describe bodies that are not at home in the world; that interact with the bodily discomfort of lived experience. Brexit, the US presidential elections, the pending elections in France, humanitarian catastrophes in the Middle East, deepening authoritarianism in Southeast Asia, rising fundamentalism in South Asia, and persistent low-level warfare around the globe emphasize the deeply contested nature of our geopolitical moment. In this context, ethnography becomes critical potentially joining movements, opening new spaces, and imagining shared communities and futures. If in ethnographic practice we create the worlds we communicate within, then to address the precarity of contemporary time, it is time to get sweaty. In this provocation, I want to argue that commoning is not only about new infrastructures of knowledge creation and distribution, but that it also is an imperative for an anthropological praxis that moves away from conservative encounters with knowledge, to sweaty knowledge that challenges our own comfort, incorporates dissident voices, dislocates authorial authority, and opens spaces for new knowledge to travel out of our control and into the world at large.