Pedagogies of the Senses Multimodal Strategies for Unsettling Visual Anthropology

Abstract

Drawing from our experiences teaching the subdiscipline of visual anthropology, we coin the term pedagogies of the senses to refer to a series of teaching strategies aimed at unsettling anthropology's visual archive through sonic displacements, figure–background reversals, and redactions. We argue for an attention to how experiments with the senses in the visual anthropology classroom have the capacity to actively interrupt colonial visual regimes, disrupt universalizing assumptions regarding the nature of knowledge transmission, and, in so doing, foster opportunities for a more inclusive classroom engagement by centering affects that are often sidelined.

Co‐Creative Multimodal Storytelling on HIV: Activating Images through Reflexive Authorship

“…Important advances have emerged through forms of reflexivity that make use of sensorial and technological experimentation within the fields of visual and multimodal anthropology, in particular with collaborative and participatory methodologies (Anderson et al 2016; Chaffee et al 2016; Dattatreyan and Marrero‐Guillamón 2019, 2021; Harper and Gubrium 2017). Multimodal experiments have been central to pushing the boundaries of reflexive ethnographic practices by addressing the “centrality of media production to the everyday life of both anthropologists and interlocutors” (Collins et al 2017, 142) through different formats.…”

Multimodality: Reshaping Anthropology

“…to the noninitiated" (Dattatreyan & Marrero-Guillamón 2019, p. 224). Rather than empirical certainties, "making sense" of violent histories may require both strategies of obfuscation (Westmoreland 2013, Dattatreyan & Marrero-Guillamón 2021 and alternative sensory frameworks that challenge us to "listen to images" (Campt 2017, Shankar 2019.…”