Department of Anthropology

See: Feel: Think: Know: New Ethnographies of the Visual

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How do visual experiences enable us to encounter culture and difference differently? What new possibilities for research and experimentation do digital visual technologies enable, if not demand? What scope is emerging for scholarly work that engages visual practices in the field? How might working with the visual recast questions about the politics of identity, knowledge and the ethics of representation? How can aesthetics be recast as an arena of contemporary social politics?

This one-day workshop will focus on new methodologies, epistemologies and practices in visual culture research. It will explore the intertwined practical and theoretical issues that arise when research takes the visual on its own terms. No longer simply illustrative or evidentiary—no longer secondary to the 'real' work of politics, history or culture—the visual is recognised to convey understandings and mediate encounters that are of a profoundly different order to ethnographies that emerge from processes of 'writing-up'.

By bringing a new generation of visual media ethnographers and practitioners together with senior scholars, the workshop aims to stimulate new kinds of engagements and discussions about the nature of visual research. Featuring strong audio-visual content, the presentations will demonstrate how working with visual materials and technologies not only enables alternative access to the social and the intercultural, but how such processes can actively refigure conventional understandings about the nature of—and possibilities for—ethnography and anthropology.