Talking Uncertainty

In this talk, the speakers speculated upon the anti-assimilationist politics of crip cultural practices within the disability arts sector in northern Turtle Island (Canada). We discussed the ethical and practical complexities of “cripping” our research methodologies and gesturing towards decolonization while collaborating with disability community members. This talk draws on the speakers’ ongoing...

How might multimodal anthropology reconcile the use of iconic images that reinforce racist stereotypes? As a visual anthropologist, when you create a multimodal output such as a film, you often have to balance your desire to attract the stakeholders’ attention with your attempt to challenge and avoid reproducing iconic stereotypes that are perpetuated through the media. Interestingly, the medium o...

How might collaborative multimodal ethnography begin to challenge neoliberal and xenophobic media ecologies? Collaborative, multimodal ethnography can provide under/mis-represented community members with a platform to conduct open-ended, collaborative, self-reflexive, and therapeutic explorations. For example, participants of the ARTlife Film Collective use such multimodal projects to challenge th...

In this talk, members of the ARTlife Film Collective (Dr. Karen Waltorp, Nilab Totakhil, Asma Mohammadzai Safi, Sama Sadat Ben Haddou, Mursal Khosrawi and Lea Glob) discussed and unpacked their multimodal filmmaking collaborations within the context of politically charged media ecologies in Denmark. The talk highlights how the women in the collective use collaborative filmmaking and social media t...

How can data and technology help farming communities navigate uncertainty and improve their livelihoods? Farming as an activity has always been filled with uncertainty. Although farmers in Bihar have generations of experience dealing with uncertainty and transforming it into something very literally productive, the agricultural sector has recently been struggling immensely due to many factors. Com...

How do we approach the training of community members when the goal is to create sustainability? Long-term, in-depth, on-the-ground engagement can help us develop context-specific knowledge that can be turned into effective, critical interventions. For example, Samarth creates one-minute training videos highlighting the processes involved at each stage of the agricultural cycle of crops that are in...

This talk features Prabhat Kumar who has been building holistic models to establish farmer-led institutions, foster sustainable livelihoods, reduce the carbon footprint and provide nutritional security to farmers in Bihar, India. We reflect on the politics and imaginaries of these community-led programs and partnerships, in light of the 2020-2021 farmers' protests in the country. Read the talk ins...

How might participating in ethno-science fiction films create a space for activism, healing and speculating futures? In ethno-science fiction, uncertainty is put in dialogue with imagination. It is a liberatory space where you can projectively improvise and play out different versions of your everyday life. Ethno-science fiction brings personal imagination in dialogue with the predictions of scien...

How does ethno-science fiction challenge our notion of temporality? Ethno-science fiction is a co-creative genre of ethnographic film where interlocutors express their imagined future through improvisation, applied theatre and other artistic practices. This genre disrupts the ethnocentric, linear progression of time. It shows that our understanding of the future reveals the contradictions of the p...

How might ethno-science fiction reinforce and replicate dominant imaginaries and media ecologies? As seen in Sjoberg’s film “Call Me Back,” our collaborations often project scenarios that seem to replicate popular culture narratives of desire for fame, recognition, and commercial success. Although ethno-science fiction can provide a generative, healing space for speculating futures, it tends to ac...

How can we complicate the notion of collaboration and more transparently discuss the ways in which we work alongside our communities? Collaboration has become a catch-all, utopian term that is used uncritically to describe our relationships with our interlocutors. Making ethnographic films is sometimes considered an intrusion by communities, and the power differential between filmmaker and interlo...

In this special event, Dr. Johannes Sjöberg will be premiering his new ethno science fiction film ‘Call Me Back’ (2020), followed by a talk on exploring uncertain environmental futures through creative and collaborative practice. We will explore how projective improvisation in ethnographic film could contribute to the way we relate to scientific predictions of the future. Read the talk insights he...

In "Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness," Eli Claire discusses their tremoring hands and the stigmatization they experienced as a queer, disabled person with cerebral palsy, and how they and their lover reframe tremoring as desirous and pleasureful. In relation, how does mnidoo-worlding articulate an Anishinaabe "refiguring of the world" that does not create a division betwee...

What does it mean to privilege textuality and the logic of the archive over embodied knowledge systems and oral repertoires? How do we sustain oral knowledge systems that are made to disappear? The western way of being and knowing is usually so deeply ingrained in people, that indigenous voices and knowledges cannot be attended to or heard. In contrast to a physical archive, Anishnaabe embodied kn...

Dolleen Manning describes mnidoo as “the call for the future.” Similarly, in Hindu culture, one is always being toward Moksha (the ultimate union with the universal spirit) as one’s potential. How can we be attentive to - and care for - this call from the mnidoo self, while being in the (material) world? In the Anishnaabe value system, the individual is not afraid of death or of releasing their la...

How do we practice and teach mnidoo-knowing in the face of dominant western ideologies? While western phenomenologists have considered knowledge as a material wealth that you acquire on your own, Anishnaabe people view knowledge as something you become with others. For Merleau Ponty, the rational self is disembodied - it floats above the world and surveys it as if it is not immersed in it. In this...

How is the concept of mnidoo related to the Seven Generation Principle, which states that we must consider the impact of every action we take on the next seven generations? Western Enlightenment-inspired ontology (way of being and knowing the world) has established - and continues to advance - the logic and common sense of enslavement, colonial extraction of wealth, dispossession, genocide of indi...

What is mnidoo-worlding? Mnidoo-worlding is a dynamic and slippery concept. In western thought, there is a logic that things must always add up (for example: 1 + 1 = 2). In contrast, for the Anishnaabe, there is always an account of things not adding up - things are not exactly as they appear to us. There’s always a knowledge of a paradox or a mystery – that there are other ways of being, knowing...

What does a bird actually see when it is part of a large flock? During these times of radical uncertainty, continuing threats of colonialism, capitalism and climate genocide, Dr. Dolleen Manning discusses what we can learn from wading into subtle mnidoo regions to collaboratively imagine new futures and formations. Read the talk insights here . https://www.urgentemergent.org/talking-uncertain...

How can we go beyond self-reflexivity in our research and deal with our inability to directly impact the living conditions of our interlocutors? Our interlocutors often request our assistance with daily tasks and have their own agendas regarding collaboration. But in many cases, they may not want us to intervene in any public way. Therefore, we must not enforce our agendas of “social justice” and...

The absence of elders’ caregivers appears as an elephant in the room throughout Kazubowski-Houston’s dramatic storytelling. How can we put things in perspective in terms of working with imaginative ethnography and elderly care in the context of the COVID-19 reality? Elders in many countries have been socially isolated and alone for a long time, so the “COVID reality” existed for many of us even be...

A collaborative, improvisational ethnography focussing on the intimate might give the impression that our interlocutors’ world is limited, whereas they are connected to the broader society, discourses and politics. How can we juggle such an element of scale? Performance can show us how people relate to each other in terms of power. By using different modalities of ethnography, we get a parallax ef...

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, how can methods that involve fiction or social fiction help communities to channel uncertainty and reimagine their futures? COVID-19 has starkly highlighted structural inequities and realities that have always existed. The reality we knew has disappeared overnight, and other realities have appeared. Therefore, in many ways, COVID-19 is about absence, and ne...

Is a shift in reflexivity possible in the short-term ethnographic work that has been recently gaining popularity in anthropology? Ethnography is not a toolkit, and there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to collaborative research methodology. Performance ethnography can just as easily constitute a “wolf anthropology,” where the scholar forces collaboration and pushes their own agenda. In fact,...

What is the broader epistemological significance of feeling awkward for the anthropological project? Ethnography is always improvisational, and mistakes are bound to happen, but we must engage with - and write critically - about them. Performance ethnography is not collaborative by default, and collaboration between researchers and interlocutors “often involves negotiating different interests and...