From Experience to the Ethnographic

Abstract (English)

At some point in life, a person may experience a delightful or painful realization that they have been irrevocably uprooted by an unexpected event, after which their life and perception of the world have fundamentally changed. It is as if standing outside a new version of Plato’s cave: What comes next? This practical educational workshop explores how to approach such displacing experiences anthropologically. It provides a space for participants to share and engage in critical reflection on how to build anthropological research from unanticipated encounters and displacing situations that prompt us to question basic epistemological premises, established cosmologies, and one’s place within the geopolitics of academic knowledge production.
The workshop is divided into three parts. First, as workshop’s convener, I will interactively share skills, reflections, and methods for moving from “the experience” to “the ethnographic”, drawing on two empirical case studies. Second, participants will silently reflect upon a life-changing, liminal event as a vital resource, harnessing its impact as an imaginative impulse for drafting a preliminary research question. Finally, participants will have the opportunity to share their draft questions and reflect on how they arrived at them. This exchange will help participants to enrich and refine their drafts, so they can depart with a compelling, well-formed guiding research question.
This workshop is grounded mainly in two interlinked premises. One is that deeply personal experiences can be transformed into groundbreaking anthropological research questions that can drive strong research proposals, have social relevance, and inspire others. To do this, it is essential to have appropriate tools, for example, to re-situate and understand life-changing experiences within historical, political-economic, and socio-cultural contexts, and to connect to others who experienced similar displacements. Finally, we consider how these experiences can also serve as compasses for navigating the fog of ideological and semiotic battles that permeate contemporary life. This workshop will thus equip participants with tools to unearth their epistemological and analytical capacities, helping them conceive substantial anthropological projects by building connections to others, and enhancing the integrity of their research work.