The xcol inventory is a research platform and an infrastructure for ethnographic inquiry. The Inquiry section assembles different elements of the inventory presenting explorations into relevant topics. These varied assemblages or bundles map out distinctive modes of inquiry, pedagogic programmes and experimental endeavours in ethnography.
We aim to inventory accounts of ‘field devices’: the inventive social and material arrangements undertaken, created, made or repurposed in the course of doing fieldwork with others. What we have in mind are texts accounting for these field devices in at least two senses: (1) fleshing out the context as well as the social and material arrangements put into practice in empirical situations; and (2) hinting at the particular modes of ethnographic inquiry they enable or make emerge. Here you can check the full content of the call, as well as examples and guidelines to prepare your proposal.
How would an experimental fieldwork exercise look like? The ethnographic experimentation proposed here is a form of engagement that entails field interventions through material and spatial arrangements that enable the articulation of inventive ways of working together. A distinctive ethnographic modality for the production of anthropological knowledge, one that bear witness to an emerging sensibility that takes shape in those field encounters in which anthropologists devise the conditions to problematize the world with their counterparts.
Open formats are methodologies for thinking and doing together. Despite the relevance of the methodologies used to share knowledge, we usually resort to the most conventional formats: paper presentations, round tables, etc. This offers a collection of experiments with meeting formats as pedagogical spaces for the apprenticeship of ethnographic experimentation and encourages the need to document these ‘experiments’ so that they may travel, be learnt and reproduced elsewhere.
La antropología multimodal propone un programa a través del cual la disciplina se abre a la invención de formas de expresión y representación, de relación y producción de conocimiento a través de múltiples modos relacionales y representacionales que van más allá de lo textual. A través de ellos, los antropólogos y antropólogas exploran otros modos de indagación, se abren a nuevos lenguajes y formatos para expresar su conocimiento y son capaces de interpelar a públicos amplios y diversos.
How could games redevelop our repertoires of ethnographic representation and intervention? What vocabularies and considerations might allow us to unfold their full potential as relevant ethnographic or peri-ethnographic genres?
In anthropological training it is customary to learn to value many genres of textual production: indeed, book reviews and review articles set the grounds for empirical and conceptual discussions on a wide variety of ethnographic projects in conventional written forms.
However, multimodal projects pose singular challenges for their description. Searching to find ways to learn to appreciate these projects, this section reviews multimodal projects. In it we explore ways to accurately describe them, paying special attention to their multi-media and socio-material arrangements, as well as finding ways to discuss and value what modalities of inquiry they bring forth.
