03 May Mediations of Ethnography
Friday, May 3 / 10:00 AM-3:00 PM
Keynote Speaker: Tom Boellstorff (Anthropology, UC Irvine)
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
This workshop engages with the media forms that ethnographic products take (e.g., video, text) and, more broadly, mediation — its production, consumption, circulation — as part of socio-cultural life. In the morning, a UCSB faculty panel (Dave Novak, Gaye Johnson and Kum-Kum Bhavnani) will discuss both how they carry out media-focused research and activism as well as the substantive issues with which their work deals. The afternoon’s keynote presentation, entitled, “Digital Anthropology: Mediations of Method and Theory” is by Tom Boellstorff, a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. From 2007 to 2012, he was Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist; he is the author of The Gay Archipelago, A Coincidence of Desires, and Coming of Age in Second Life. He is also the co-author of Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. With Bill Maurer, he is Series Editor for The Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology (Princeton University Press).
Sponsored by the IHC’s Ethnography and Cultural Studies RFG.
Schedule:
10-12 AM Faculty Panel
• “Meditations on Discernment, Scholarship, and Social Justice” Gaye Theresa Johnson, Department of Black Studies, UCSB
• “Ethnographic Screens” Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Department of Sociology, UCSB
• “Doing Ethnography in/of Transnational Circulation” David Novak, Department of Music, UCSB
12 – 1:15 PM Lunch and Faculty/Graduate Roundtables ( speakers TBD)
1:30 – 3 PM Keynote Lecture
Digital Anthropology: Mediations of Method and Theory
Tom Boellstorff, Department of Anthropology, UC-Irvine
In this talk, Boellstorf reflects on a series of questions with regard to emerging interdisciplinary relationships between method and theory. These include: how are we to understand media in the digital era, particularly given tendencies to conflation when in fact not all that is “digital” is media and not all media are digital? What are productive ways to conceptualize new relationships between data collection, data analysis, and the presentation of research results? Specifically, what happens when we treat interdisciplinarity not just as “mining for methods,” but as engagements with conceptual frameworks and debates — so that, for instance, we consider not just ethnography but anthropology as a discipline that cannot be reduced to ethnography?
About the Workshop:
“Mediations of Ethnography,” is sponsored by the Ethnography and Cultural Studies Research Focus Group (co-convenors, Mary Hancock and David Novak). The workshop engages with the media forms that ethnographic products take (e.g., video, texts) and, more broadly, mediation — its production, consumption, circulation — as a part of socio/cultural life. In the morning, a faculty panel (Dave Novak, Gaye Johnson and Kum-Kum Bhavnani) will discuss both on how they carry out media-focused research and activism as well as the substantive issues with which that work deals. The afternoon’s keynote presentation, entitled “Digital Anthropology: Mediations of Method and Theory,” is by Tom Boellstorff, who is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. In his talk, Professor Boellstorff will reflect on a series of questions with regard to emerging interdisciplinary relationships between method and theory. These include: how are we to understand media in the digital era, particularly given tendencies to conflation when in fact not all that is “digital” is media and not all media are digital? What are productive ways to conceptualize new relationships between data collection, data analysis, and the presentation of research results? Specifically, what happens when we treat interdisciplinarity not just as “mining for methods,” but as engagements with conceptual frameworks and debates — so that, for instance, we consider not just ethnography but anthropology as a discipline that cannot be reduced to ethnography?
About the Keynote Speaker: Tom Boellstorff is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. From 2007–2012, he was Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, and he is the author of The Gay Archipelago (Princeton University Press, 2005); A Coincidence of Desires (Duke University Press, 2007); and Coming of Age in Second Life (Princeton University Press, 2008). He is also the coauthor of Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: a Handbook of Method (Princeton University Press, 2012).With Bill Maurer, he is Series Editor for the Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology (Princeton University Press)