How would an experimental fieldwork exercise look like? It’s as if the ethnographies of recent decades devoted to the study of new media, technoscience and global organisations were offering us, or even were forcing us, to reconsider the form and norm of ethnographic fieldwork. Evoking here ‘experimentation’ or ‘the experimental’ is not an act of rupture with method, but rather an attempt at renewing the descriptive vocabulary and the conceptual language of the tales of the field of our ethnographies.
Ethnographic experimentation
Inventions in this bundle
Glossary terms in this bundle
Experimental collaborations
Experimental collaboration is an ethnographic mode of collaboration (there are others ‘modes of collaboration’) that entails field interventions through material...
Experimentation
Experimentation is a figure invoked in many domains, it is not though so common in anthropology. In the xcol language...
Modes of collaboration
The idiom of collaboration has pervaded anthropology and many other social domains in recent years, capturing the imagination of a...
Intravention
Intravention refers to interventions inside our own disciplines occurring in collaboration and complicity with our ethnographic counterparts and epistemic partners....
Field devices
Field devices are the situated and relational expressions of ethnographic modes of inquiry. A field device may have the form...
Xpositions in this bundle
Note-taking: A ‘fieldwork device’ duplex
A re-description of my two-fold engagement as ethnographer-cum-documenter in the activist design collective En torno a la silla. Highlighting the importance of note-taking as a ‘fieldwork device’ for the problematizing and relating in the field.
Ethnographic experimentation: Other tales of the field
Ethnographic experimentation refers to an ethnographic modality where anthropologists venture into the collaborative production of venues for knowledge creation that turn the field into a site for the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. Invoking the trope of ethnographic experimentation we aim at describing how anthropologists creatively venture into the production of venues of knowledge creation through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration: a site for the construction of joint anthropological problematizations.
‘Devicing’ fieldwork
We would like to intimate a mode of collaboration that is neither a constitutive condition of fieldwork nor a deliberate strategy informed by political and ethical commitments: Collaboration as an epistemic figure that describes how anthropologists creatively venture into the production of venues of knowledge creation in partnership with their counterparts in the field. In these situations, the ethnographic method is re-equipped with new infrastructures, spaces of knowledge production, relationship forms and modes of representation.