Congratulations to the Davis team on putting this together.
Schedule for Ethnography Post-Writing: A CoLED Workshop
FRIDAY, March 11th (Putah Creek Lodge; Parking Instructions)
10:00 am – 1:00 pm
I. “Theatrical devising”
(Cristiana Giordano, Department of Anthropology, UCD and Alvaro Hernández & Regina Gutiérrez, Department of Performance Studies, UCD)
This workshop is an exploration of and a cross pollination between research and narrative practices in theater and anthropology. By creating a dialogue between these disciplines in a laboratory format, we hope to pose questions and engage techniques in ways that will enrich our engagement with anthropological questions and performative productions. We will practice embodiment as a practice to slow down thinking and to create a space for new encounters with our ethnographic material. Or, rather, we will practice thinking with the body, and embodying with and through words.
How to prepare for workshop I:
- read: Favret-Saada’s About participation
- bring one page of field notes (broadly understood, e.g. fragments, documents, notes, descriptions, interviews, images), and/or an object related to their research. *This requirement is intended to be this vague.
2:30 pm – 5:30 pm
II. “Don’t know where you are going: Improvisation scores in performance, pedagogy, anthropology”
(Joe Dumit, Department of Anthropology, and Kevin O’Connor, Department of Performance Studies, UCD)
The workshop, in the form of an interactive game, will take the texts of cultural anthropology and the handbooks of theatre and improvisation, and read them as doppelgängers, as uncanny doubles of each other.
How to prepare for workshop II:
Read the first very quick and easy-to-read 60 pages of Keith Johnstone’s Impro, chapters “Notes on Myself” and “Status.” Please come with notes and questions, and be ready for movement and discussion.
SATURDAY, March 12th (Student Community Center, Room D)
9:30 am – 12:30 pm
III. “Meditation – Thought – Space – Writing”
(Alan Klima, Department of Anthropology, UCD)
This workshop focuses on the most primary of media, which thought cannot really grasp. We will direct attention to it through the words Meditation – Thought – Space – Writing, which are not it, and use related activities and resting that may make “it” more recognizable, including guided meditations, a writing exercise, and something like an empirical exploration of what thought actually is. Writing implements and curiosity required. Insatiable burning desire for freedom and truth, helpful.
How to prepare for workshop III:
For this workshop please have a firm notebook and pen (we aren’t using any desks), punctuality, and left over affects from the previous two workshops.
12:45 pm – 1:45 pm
Lunch and Update from the CoLED Conference Committee
Review the dates and preliminary information about the October 2016 conference here. The committee will give a short presentation, and then answer questions one-to-one over lunch.
2:00 pm – 4:30 pm
IV. Wrap up: ethnography post-writing
(Marisol de la Cadena, Department of Anthropology, UCD, Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Department of Communication, UCSD, and Duskin Drum, Department of Performance Studies, UCD)
Walk and talk groups to think ethnography otherwise (2:00-3:30) and open ended wrap-up (3:30-4:30).
Activities require active engagement and experimentation; they are both fun and serious. We play with forms, with modes of observation, of participation and collaboration, and of presentation. The event is open to CoLED faculty and graduate students, and to our UC Davis colleagues (limited space, please contact event organizers if you would like to attend). Please direct questions about this event to Mariel Garcia Llorens (mgarciallorens@ucdavis.edu) or Marisol de la Cadena (mdelac@ucdavis.edu).