Rethinking Transnational, Multisited Ethnography With Matter: General Ecologies of Making in Place

• In Event: 35.067 - Rethinking Ethnography in the Posthuman Turn

Abstract

Objectives
This paper responds to the framing proposition that ethnographic methods are well positioned to trace relations between human and non-human intensities. We map such relations in fieldwork with children and disadvantaged communities, and rethink multi-site ethnography in relation to an emergent concept of post-human space-times, through a new materialist (Coole & Frost, 2010) approach that attunes to the ways that belonging and social values are articulated relationally through the “material-discursive” (Barad, 2003) in cultures.

Perspectives and argument
Drawing on Haraway (1992, 1997), Barad (2003), Braidotti (2013) and others, we emphasise making, materiality, and the temporality of labour in the making process, to shift what ethnography might be, and move the subject of ethnography from the human to the material. New Materialism forces a reframing of ethnographic subjectivities and knowledge, reconstituting an expanded ethnographic field as a general ecology of making schools and communities. We see knowledge as co-produced between people (researcher/subjects) and matter in ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2003), and as communicated materially, visually and discursively. We ask: what do schools and communities make? What is the agency of time and matter in these places?

Methods
An ethics and politics of a post-human general ecology attends to the labours of space, time and matter in processes of worlding. Our research practices orient to the material world, time and space, to children, communities, the physical conditions in which they live, and also to the impact our presence has on these spaces and systems of value. We present ethnographic vignettes that experiment with a new materialist approach to 'thick description' (Geertz, 1973), or an embedded account of material expression and experience, written in the first person but with a focus on the non human.

Data sources
The data derive from a large ethnographic study involving children and parents across the UK and Australia. We discuss here examples that detail the agency of place performed by children refusing to join in set fieldwork activities. The attachment to particular geographies is central to the research methodology, as the children’s desire to occupy particular places is central to how they express themselves. The project design features arts workshops for children and focus groups for their parents, one-on-one interviews, and embedded engagement with school and community culture. In the arts workshops, materials and the temporality of materials have agency.

Results
On a micro level, our attunement to matter, place and temporality illustrates failure as source of methodological richness, and the children’s place attachments become part of a larger research-assemblage. On a macro level we offer an onto-responsive praxis for multi-sited, trans-national new materialist ethnography as a general ecology of matter, place and time in school and community spaces.

Significance
This is the first new materialist engagement with trans-national, multi-sited ethnography. It also offers a material feminist reframing of the concept of global imagination (Burawoy et al, 2000). We propose agency as a longitudinal project in which schools are interpolated in significant ways, but ways that extend beyond the role of the teacher.

Authors

• Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody, RMIT University

• Joanna Dennis, Manchester Metropolitan University