Experimental Research
I am involved in a number of collaborative initiatives and research projects, all aiming to push the boundaries of ethnographic and anthropological research.
Digital Curatorial Collective
I am a member of the inaugural Digital Curatorial Collective of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. The DCC is comprised of an international team of anthropologists working at the cutting edge of multimodal ethnography. Over the next three years, the DCC will develop a “concept studio” to emphasize the work that the multimodal advances in the discipline. As a collaborative and conceptual space, the studio will draw together multimodal initiatives across institutions, practices and ethnographic arts as a nexus for a world of anthropologies. The concept studio is thus a meeting and mediating point between an anthropology concerned with production as a model and one that experiments with the sensorial complexities of the more-than-human world. Accessibility provides a model for reflexive, problem-based work that does not prescribe form or content.
Multimodal Appreciation
Together with Ignacio Farías and Tomás Criado, I was just awarded a grant by the Volkswagen Foundation for the project Multimodal Appreciation: Prototypes for the Evaluation and Institutionalisation of More-Than-Textual Ethnography. It is an experimental response to a stubborn impasse: How to evaluate and institutionalise more-than-textual ethnography? The project will be located at the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology and run from April 2023 - September 2024.
Infrastructures of Ethnography
Together with colleagues at the University of Toronto Ethnography Lab, I am part of a three-year SSHRC-funded experimental partnership entitled Emerge - A Matrix for Ethnographic Collaboration and Practice. It is made up of five ethnography labs that are motivated to work on the following challenges: What kinds of infrastructure can we build to meet the scale challenges of, for example, the ethnography of infrastructure? How can ethnography labs better help each other in training graduate students to practice multi-modal and collaborative forms of research? What kind of ecosystems can we create that both facilitate large-scale collaborations in ethnography and lead to its valorization in academia and beyond?