Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

Rabinow, Paul; Marcus, George E.; Faubion, James D.; Rees, Tobias

doi:10.1215/9780822390060

Cited by 319 publications

(137 citation statements)

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“…While the number of programs and research clusters combining anthropology with art, design, and media are growing (see, for example, CAMRA at the University of Pennsylvania; the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Theory at The New School; and the University of California's system-wide Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design), most are tailored to doctoral students (Marcus 2016;Rabinow and Marcus 2008). In many ways, this makes sense.…”

Section: Developing the Unsteady In-between Designing The Curriculummentioning

confidence: 99%

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Critical Visions and the Unsteady In‐Between

Sadre-Orafai

Tate

McGrath

et al. 2018

American Anthropologist

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The students huddled around the large digital duplicator, their phones out, ready to capture on video evidence of the first print run. There were three weeks left in the semester, and we were working on a tight but staggered production schedule, based in part on the pages we could finalize and which inks and papers we had on hand. Over the previous three months, the students had conceptualized the scope, style, and tone of their publication, producing twelve substantial, individual writing and creative projects and eight collaborative, interstitial ones. The sum of this work would eventually become a 160-page, perfect bound book with an initial run of 750 copies. These were all printed and bound "in-house" by sixteen students and faculty over a three-week period. They were then distributed to friends, colleagues, and local community members as well as visual researchers, writers, and artists around the world. The CVSN Field Guide to Color was the third installment of CVSN, a now biennial student-produced publication from the Critical Visions Certificate Program at the University of Cincinnati (UC).Since 2011, the Critical Visions program has brought together students from multiple fields to teach them how to combine critical theory and social analysis with art, media, and design practices. Insistent that students "write and make from day one," the program emphasizes the inextricable relationship between form and content. As a central maxim on the certificate capstone syllabus states: "Neither the written, nor the visual components should be afterthoughts; each informs the other." The program trains students to find associative, nonlinear ways of approaching social issues so they can ask better questions and provoke nuanced discussions through considered, form-based aesthetic choices. Framed around challenging "dominant forms of seeing," the program aims to keep students off balance: to condition them to work in the unsteady in-between of disciplines.A key way the program fosters this kind of slippery engagement is through the immersive, collaborative labors required to produce CVSN. During the fifteen-week capstone studio/seminar cotaught by faculty from the School of Art and Department of Anthropology, students conceive, write, and design a stand-alone publication on a single theme. External design and editorial/production mentors weigh in at key points in the semester on macro issues (e.g., order and rhythm of the major and minor projects, cohesion and coverage of the theme, technical and aesthetic details concerning the design and genre), while an international editorial board made up of artists, activists, and academics review individual student projects at the midterm, offering feedback on writing, argumentation, and execution of visual expression.In this way, the program is in conversation with other collaborative projects that join art and social science, such as Ethnographic Terminalia, the Center for Imaginative Ethnography, and the Research Centre for Shared Incompetence (see also Schneider and Wright ...

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Section: Developing the Unsteady In-between Designing The Curriculummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It also is connected to experiments between anthropology and design (Murphy 2016;Rabinow and Marcus 2008). Finally, it shares a multimodal approach in its practice and pedagogy (Collins, Durrington, and Gill 2017), producing work that circulates within and beyond academic circuits, both in print and online.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical Visions and the Unsteady In‐Between

Sadre-Orafai

Tate

McGrath

et al. 2018

American Anthropologist

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“…Our methods draw broadly on archaeological, material and visual ethnography (see especially Gonzalez-Ruibal 2014;Meskell 2012;Pink 2009Pink , 2012Pink and Morgan 2013;Pink, Morgan and Dainty 2014), but also incorporate documentary research, creative artistic practice, ethnographic film making and creative knowledge exchanges. Here we are influenced by the work of Holmes and Marcus (2005Marcus ( , 2008Marcus 2013) and others (e.g. Rabinow et al 2008) on multisited paraethnography, in which ethnographers come together with other expert knowledge producers in the development of shared, critical insights which cut across the fields in which we work.…”

Section: The Research Programmementioning

confidence: 99%

Heritage Futures

Harrison

Bartolini

DeSilvey

et al. 2016

Archaeology International

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“…Important for our concerns are:  Rabinow, who argues that the processes of anthropological knowledge production and the ways in which categories of knowledge are brought into being need to be subject to critical scrutiny, rather than taken for granted (Rabinow 2007(Rabinow , 2011. This is a concern shared by the anthropologist Ingold (2011), who has written extensively about ways of knowing, and by some sociologists (e.g.…”

Section: Literatures Relevant To Inbetween Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond records and representations: inbetween writing in educational ethnography

Coles

Thomson

2015

Ethnography and Education

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Abstract:Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that is used to make sense of experiences in the field. We call this inbetween writing. By examining our own processes of inbetween writing, and drawing on the work of James Clifford, we have produced a nine-part heuristic of inbetween writing. We argue that the heuristic could be used in research methods education to highlight the importance of writing to ethnographic sense-making and knowledge production. While they might also carry a camera and/or a device for recording sound, the ethnographer's basic kit was something to write with and something to write on. Noone would be caught in the field without the means to write down their observations. At night, or perhaps some time later, notes taken in the field were turned into a description of the various people, places, events and conversations that had been encountered. Later still, usually back at home, the ethnographer read through all of their notes and subsequent writings, and then produced a more polished piece to communicate their experiences to a wider public.

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Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

Cited by 319 publications

References 0 publications

Critical Visions and the Unsteady In‐Between

Critical Visions and the Unsteady In‐Between

Heritage Futures

Beyond records and representations: inbetween writing in educational ethnography

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