Multi-Modal and Multi-Sensory Ethnography
Graphic Ethnography
From the beginning, my research on worker-initiated protests and their aftermath in the late industrial Bosnian city of Tuzla has been collaborative and interested in exploring—with others—the affordances of visual and acoustic modes of research and representation. This eventually led to a collaboration with anthropologist Larisa Kurtović and Sarajevo-based graphic artist Boris Stapić on an experimental graphic ethnography, Reclaiming Dita, currently under contract with University of Toronto Press’s ethnoGRAPHIC series. In addition to presenting this collaborative work-in-progress to various audiences in Europe and North America, we have published about the project here and here. I also teach courses in visual anthropology with a focus on sequential art, which I have written about here and here.
Visual Ethnography
Another example of my experimentation with visual methods of research and representation is a photo essay which I recently published with collaborator Haris Husarić. In it we seek to contribute to a visual anthropology of postsocialist industrial worker politics, pointing to new, experimental, and risky ways that workers and their supporters confront the possibilities and limits of media publicity.
Multi-Modal Experiments
A recent experiment in multi-modal collaboration was a virtual panel I co-organized and co-produced with scholars, activists, and artists in Canada and Bosnia & Herzegovina. See this link for one example of how this could be used in teaching. And here is yet another recent experiment in short-term multi-modal collaboration I helped design at the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided to this research by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Revizor Foundation (Bihac), and funds from the University of Ottawa.