Creative Practice Ethnographies


Book Description

Creative Practice Ethnographies focuses on the intersection of creative practice and ethnography and offers new ways to think about the methods, practice, and promise of research in contemporary interdisciplinary contexts. How does creative practice inform new ways of doing ethnography and vice versa? What new forms of expression and engagement are made possible as a result of these creative synergies? By addressing these questions, the authors highlight the important roles that ethnography and creative practice play in socially impactful research. This book is aimed at interdisciplinary researchers, scholars, and students of art, design, sociology, anthropology, games, media, education, and cultural studies.




A Different Kind of Ethnography


Book Description

"Produced by members of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, this collection introduces the idea of an imaginative and creative approach to anthropological inquiry, one that is collaborative, open-ended, embodied, affective, and experimental. Rather than structuring the book around traditional methods like interviewing, participant observation, and documentary research, the authors organize their thoughts around different methodologies--sensing, walking, writing, performing, and recording. As well, innovative, practical exercises are included that allow ethnographers to not just 'talk the talk', but also 'walk the walk' so they can deepen, complicate, and extend ethnographic inquiry. A list of additional resources at the end of each chapter provide rich support for those who want to pursue more imaginative and creative methodologies."--




Exploring Minecraft


Book Description

This book directs critical attention to one of the most ubiquitous and yet under-analyzed games, Minecraft. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork into mobile games in Australian homes, the authors seek to take Minecraft seriously as a cultural practice. The book examines how Minecraft players engage in a form of gameplay that is uniquely intergenerational, creative, and playful, and which moves ambivalently throughout everyday life. At the intersection of digital media, quotidian literacy, and ethnography, the book situates interdisciplinary debates around mundane play through the lens of Minecraft. Ultimately, Exploring Minecraft seeks to coalesce the discussion between formal and informal learning, fostering new forms of digital media creativity and ethnographic innovation around the analysis of games in everyday life.




Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects


Book Description

Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects is a lively investigation into anthropological practice. Richly illustrated, it invites the reader to reflect on the skills of collaboration and experimentation in fieldwork and in gallery curation, thereby expanding our modes of knowledge production. At the heart of this study are the possibilities for transdisciplinary collaborations, the opportunity to use exhibitions as research devices, and the role of experimentation in the exhibition process. Francisco Martínez increases our understanding of the relationship between contemporary art, design and anthropology, imagining creative ways to engage with the contemporary world and developing research infrastructures across disciplines. He opens up a vast field of methodological explorations, providing a language to reconsider ethnography and objecthood while producing knowledge with people of different backgrounds.




Experimental Collaborations


Book Description

In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as “fieldwork devices”—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of “experimental collaborations” to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.




Creative Activism Research, Pedagogy and Practice


Book Description

This collection explores the growing global recognition of creativity and the arts as vital to social movements and change. Bringing together diverse perspectives from leading academics and practitioners who investigate how creative activism is deployed, taught, and critically analysed, it delineates the key parameters of this emerging field.




Creative Practice Research in the Age of Neoliberal Hopelessness


Book Description

In Creative Practice Research in Film and Media, creative practitioners discuss their experiences and examine how to retain integrity during times of political and economic battles in higher education, and attempts to quantify creative work. It uses the notion of tactical compliance to evaluate whether and when creative practitioners compromise their creativity by working within the higher education system. It offers a space for reflection for both practitioners and theorists, and it presents a much-needed intervention, which will be of interest to all academics engaged with creative practice as research.




Contemporary Ethnographies


Book Description

Contemporary Ethnographies is a call to use ethnography in imaginative ways, adjusting to rapidly evolving social circumstances. It is based on a reflexive and theoretically grounded exploration of the author’s two main research projects – the study of the spiritist possession cult of María Lionza in Venezuela, and the analysis of the contemporary exhumation of Civil War (1936–1939) mass graves in contemporary Spain. Ferrándiz critically reviews the labyrinthine and continuous transforming nature of ethnographic engagement. He defends both the need for methodological rigour and the astounding flexibility of ethnography to adjust in creative ways to shifting realities in a dynamic world – a world in which research scenarios multiply, social actors are on the move (physically or digitally), acts of violence proliferate, new technologies are transforming the experience and perception of human life, and the demand, production, circulation and consumption of knowledge is greatly diversified, overshadowing former well established and more hierarchical patterns of diffusion. The book is conceived of as a historically grounded open debate, providing as many certainties as moments of unpredictability and unresolved dilemmas. It is valuable reading for students and scholars interested in ethnographic methods and anthropological theory.




Experimenting with Ethnography


Book Description

Experimenting with Ethnography collects twenty-one essays that open new paths for doing ethnographic analysis. The contributors—who come from a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions—enliven analysis by refusing to take it as an abstract, disembodied exercise. Rather, they frame it as a concrete mode of action and a creative practice. Encompassing topics ranging from language and the body to technology and modes of collaboration, the essays invite readers to focus on the imaginative work that needs to be performed prior to completing an argument. Whether exchanging objects, showing how to use drawn images as a way to analyze data, or working with smartphones, sound recordings, and social media as analytic devices, the contributors explore the deliberate processes for pursuing experimental thinking through ethnography. Practical and broad in theoretical scope, Experimenting with Ethnography is an indispensable companion for all ethnographers. Contributors. Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Andrea Ballestero, Ivan da Costa Marques, Steffen Dalsgaard, Endre Dányi, Marisol de la Cadena, Marianne de Laet, Carolina Domínguez Guzmán, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Clément Dréano, Joseph Dumit, Melanie Ford Lemus, Elaine Gan, Oliver Human, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Graham M. Jones, Trine Mygind Korsby, Justine Laurent, James Maguire, George E. Marcus, Annemarie Mol, Sarah Pink, Els Roding, Markus Rudolfi, Ulrike Scholtes, Anthony Stavrianakis, Lucy Suchman, Katie Ulrich, Helen Verran, Else Vogel, Antonia Walford, Karen Waltorp, Laura Watts, Brit Ross Winthereik




Challenges and Solutions in Ethnographic Research


Book Description

Challenges and Solutions in Ethnographic Research: Ethnography with a Twist seeks to rethink ethnography ‘outside the box’ of its previous tradition and to develop ethnographic methods by critically discussing the process, ethics, impact and knowledge production in ethnographic research. This interdisciplinary edited volume argues for a ‘twist’ that supports openness, courage, and creativity to develop and test innovative and unconventional ways of thinking and doing ethnography. ‘Ethnography with a twist’ means both an intentional aim to conduct ethnographic research with novel approaches and methods but also sensitivity to recognize and creativity to utilize different kinds of ‘twist moments’ that ethnographic research may create for the researcher. This edited volume critically evaluates new and old methodological tools and their ability to engage with questions of power difference. It proposes new collaborative methods that allow for co-production and co-creation of research material as well as shared conceptual work and wider distribution of knowledge. The book will be of use to ethnographers in humanities and social science disciplines including sociology, anthropology and communication studies.