Invitation to the Workshop “Finding (new) Ways with Methods: Fieldnotes“
Organised by Alexander Schindler, Anja Klein & Maxim Le Calvé
Lab Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations (LAEHR)
May 23, 2024
9:00 to 13:00
@ Robert K. Merton Zentrum Berlin
Schönhauser Allee 10-11, 10119 Berlin
The workshop is part of the lab's summer semester program on Habitability and partly follows our workshop "Finding (new) ways with Methods: 'The' Vignette" from winter semester 2023.
With this workshop, we want to reflect collectively on the open-ended process of writing, drawing, recording, collecting, reading, rewriting, translating, editing, cleaning, accumulating, and publishing fieldnotes. We also want to ask how these practices relate to the notion of “habitability.”
In this sense, our ethnographic practices should become observable and modifiable in the context of temporality, incompleteness, collaboration, generativity, composition, and processuality. As Elliott and Wolf-Meyer put it in their recent edited volume Naked Fieldnotes: "[w]e want to consider [.] the world within which fieldnotes come to matter and what they show us in their status as extracts of specific projects, artifacts of disciplinary conventions, and experiments in form and content that are novel expressions of the technologies and ways of inhabiting the world available to an ethnographer at a particular historical moment." (2024: xii)
Registration details, the reading, and the preparation
Registration (until May 17):
Please register for this event if you want to participate. To register, please put your name in the list on the LAEHR Workshop Team’s miro-board
On the left-hand side, you will find a table in which you can enter your name and e-mail address and whether you plan to participate physically or via Zoom.
Reading(s)
- Please read the first chapter ("A Brief History of the Ethnographic Fieldnote and Its Possible Futures") of the 2024 volume Naked Fieldnotesby Elliott, Denielle, and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer (length: 12 pages). You can also take a closer look at some of the many contributions on field note practices in the book. You will find the book on our Moodle
Preparation task (until May 21)
(All the preparation happens on our lab‘s board, which makes it semi-public. Please keep this in mind while contributing to this board.)
- In the table „Your Field Notes Experiences,“ we invite you to reflect on your experiences with the practice. How were you taught, and how are you doing it now?
- In the red dotted area on the right-hand side, we invite you to share (at least) one fieldnote - could be a screenshot, photograph, digital text, and image, etc. Since we understand field notes as processual, it’s up to you which step or form of your field notes you share. Please leave a short comment (through the dedicated “comment” function or a post-it) directly on your note, adding some elements of context to it. If any personal information in the field note should not become (semi)public, please delete or cover it. (It’s also possible to share a ‘found’ field note instead of your own if you prefer to do so. In this case, please consider any copy or personal rights.)
If you have any questions, please write a short e-mail to:
alexander.schindler@uni-potsdam.de
anja.klein@hu-berlin.de
maxime.le.calve@hu-berlin.de
We wish you lots of enjoyment and success with your preparations and look forward to our workshop together!