Moments, Movements, Scores: Yelena Gluzman Reflects on a CoLED workshop

What goes on at a CoLED workshop?

Yelena Gluzman (UC San Diego) reflects on the March workshop at UC Davis in a post on the Society for Social Studies of Science website’s Backchannels blog. Recalling a segment of the workshop led by Joe Dumit, she writes:

In one exercise, each of us was instructed to secretly select two people in the group. Without revealing who they were, we had to keep the first person to our right, and the second person to our left. Following these rules instantly put the entire group into movement, first at a walk, and then accelerating (despite ourselves) to a run, with group members veering as they tried to maintain their position in relation to their chosen two.

In another exercise, the groups received a different score. Small groups were sent outside with the instruction to find an object and bring it back to present to everyone. Upon returning, workshop organizers prompted participants to write down everything we recalled about the expedition other than the object we chose.

In both cases, the scores were ways to attune to the process of observation without separating ourselves as observers from the emergent action in which we were embedded. Instead of bracketing the embodied and situated condition of participant-observation, these scores highlighted ways in which embodied experience could be available as part of a research object.

Read more – and see photos – here.

CoLED Awarded a Wenner-Gren Foundation Grant

We are pleased to announce that the UC Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design was awarded a Workshop Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation Conference Program. This grant will allow CoLED to host invited scholars from around the globe for our fall 2016 Conference, Ethnography and Design: Mutual Provocations.

The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. is a private operating foundation dedicated to the advancement of anthropology throughout the world. Located in New York City, it is one of the major funding sources for international anthropological research.

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March Workshop: Ethnography Post-Writing

Congratulations to the Davis team on putting this together.

This flyer shows an image of two people walking away on a path along the northern california marine coast - green and teal vegetation is on the right, and a grey-blue sky above; the title of the workshop and the workshop schedule are superimposed over the image.

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. (more…)

Recent Publications by CoLED Members

Our CoLED network is unique in drawing together scholars with very different research practices and topics, all of whom are concerned in various ways with the processes of knowledge production, the hows of ethnography, and the heuristic of design as a way to think about what is possible in the world.

One of the exciting things about the network is a chance to come to know other scholars working on campuses in other parts of California, or colleagues doing ethnography in other departments just across the quad.

With this in mind, CoLED sends out semi-regular email dispatches of news from our network to our listserv. Here are some recent announcements from our network that have appeared in the our email news round-ups.

Article Publications

Marisol de la Cadena’s (UC Davis) article “Uncommoning Nature” is online in recent issue of the journal e-flux.

de la Cadena also co-edited a special feature in HAU with Marianne E. Lien. The multi-authored essay is titled “Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations.”

Fernando Dominguez-Rubio (UC San Diego) has an article titled “On the discrepancy between objects and things: An ecological approach” in the Journal of Material Culture.

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Absence, Commitment, and Critique: Reflections on the Ethics of Ethnographic Design

By Katie Cox, Connie McGuire, Michael Montoya

** This is the second post in a series in which scholars and practitioners reflect on ethnography and innovation, with a particular focus on the University of California System.**

This blog post springs from a collective at UC-Irvine called the Community Knowledge Project (CKP), an initiative in the CoLED network.  CKP seeks to create collaborative spaces to reimagine the world, how to know it, and how to heal it. This post is a reflection on the CoLED workshop held at UC-Irvine in October of 2015.

As part of CoLED’s fall workshop at UC Irvine, CKP proposed an encounter between workshop participants and the UCI Farm. UCI Social Sciences founded the short-lived Farm project in 1968 as an experimental enterprise in ethnographic knowledge-making. Using a reading practice called Feminist Theory Theatre (FTT), developed by graduate students at UC San Diego, CoLEDers staged improvised performances based on texts and archival media about the Farm.

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