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.