Conference Agenda

Our symposium focuses on field relations, a classic and often discussed topic of ethnographic methodology. We explore the relationships we build as ethnographers in the field: concrete, tangible relationships with practitioners and other people in local sites. How do we initiate and form them, how do we nurture them, which meanings do we attribute to them – and which meanings do vice versa people in the field attribute to us and our projects? We also take a closer look at the notion of ‘relations’ and expand the subject beyond a narrow focus on human interaction. Ethnographers of all shades have continually stressed the importance of considering material relations, discursive relations, and power relations for producing rich and insightful ethnographies (Appadurai 1990, Marcus 1998, Desmond 2014). The ethnographic construction of scientific objects and research questions commonly relates to processes and practices, contacts and conflicts, doings and sayings (Schatzki 1996), entanglements (Haraway 2008, 20) and boundary-making, all of which occur in shifting configurations of relations.

Ethnography recognizes these shifting configurations in its field work strategies, and requests researchers to articulate the ways in which a social relation between ethnographer and participants is established. These social relations are massively formed by circulating ideologies and discourses, by materialities, technical opportunities, bodies and by non-human life present in the field. We ask: how are these processes of relationing interwoven with our research interests and the theoretical and methodological frameworks of our research? We also want to illuminate how the relationships in the field enable our insights and findings. We draw on a substantial body of work on ethnographic field work about relations and roles, and the challenges and opportunities they present. One prominent position is that of the ethnographer as a "professional stranger" (Agar 1996) whose analytical distance from the field makes the familiar strange (Delamont and Atkinson 1996), which also affects field relations and how they are shaped (Sieber Egger, Unterweger & Maeder 2019; Dennis 2010). Another position is rather represented in cultural and social anthropological ethnography, where ‘making the familiar strange’ is less an issue than truly understanding “other” forms of being in the world in their own terms (i.e. Strathern 2020).

Based on this exploration, we will discuss a series of questions that revolve around our multiple relationships in and with the field: How do we conceptualize field relationships with different field actors in terms of research interests and theoretical frameworks? How do the research interests affect our relationships with people in the field?

How pervasive and constitutive is the culture of the field – its set of possible roles, social positions, and social orders, but also its materiality, ideologies, discourses, practices – when trying to establish field relations, and how do we reflect this? What relationships could we establish and maintain in our projects, and what was their significance for the projects, but also within the diversity of other field relations? Asking questions like these we try to shed light on the complexity of the current thinking about establishing and maintaining field relations.

This presentation is based on the research project "Negotiating NatureChildhoods. An Ethnography of Relations with Nature in Kindergartens of the Anthropocene". We investigate how children build and entertain relations with their surroundings in the local common worlds of their kindergartens, how relational agency is established in interaction with the material, human and non-human world. In the traditional dichotomic western worldview, often-discussed as the nature-culture-gap (Latour 1993; Haraway 2008), younger children tend to be positioned on the side of "nature", whereby in their educational process and based on intensive contact with nature they are ultimately supposed to develop a "culture" of human responsibility towards the natural environment. Following recent developments in childhood theory with the posthumanist / neo-materialist common worlds concept (Taylor 2013, Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw 2019) though, relations of children with and within their environments are understood as profoundly shaped by materialities and "more-than-human"-connections. Accordingly, with the use of the common worlding concept, our research interest is directed more strongly towards the in-between of separations, towards the power of materiality and all connections of humans and more-than-humans which repeatedly transgress these dichotomic orders. Our talk revolves firstly around the question of how these "entanglements" (Haraway 2008) of people/children, objects, plants, animals, meanings and spaces in the process of becoming (composed) together (Latour 2011) can be captured, and how the relationship between childhood and nature can be discussed from this perspective. Secondly, following the idea of the symposium to shed light on the enactment of relationships in the field, we want to take a close look on the relationships between field participants and researchers through the lens of the common worlds concept. This means that we see these relations evolving out of a process of relationing in which, according to Marilyn Strathern (2020, 3), relations are ‘held in place by relations’. We specifically look at how materialities and people, but also ideas and non-human beings come into play when we as researchers try to form and manage our relationships with the researched. We see our task in tracing these relations, or rather webs of relations. Methodologically, we are guided by the approach as described by George Marcus (1995) in his classic text: “Follow the people / thing / metaphor / story …”, by quite literally following connections and putative relationships (Marcus 1995, 97), also within one local field, and not (as was Marcus’ concern in the 1990ies) in a multi-sited setting.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. When Species Meet. Posthumanities 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Übersetzt von Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2011. «Il n’y a pas de monde commun. Il faut le composer». Multitudes 45 (2): 38–41. Marcus, George E. 1995. «Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography». Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Strathern, Marilyn. 2020. Relations: an anthropological account. Durham: Duke University Press. Taylor, Affrica. 2013. Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Routledge. Taylor, Affrica, und Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. 2019. The Common Worlds of Children and Animals. Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives. London, New York: Routledge.

Video diaries enable ethnographers to build relationships of trust with participants, because they create empathic encounters between ethnographers and participants (Pink 2017). In our project on the professional development of teachers, video diaries created encounters with teachers and their entanglements with teaching, reflecting institutional roles, personal professional values, and the processes in which these aspects are negotiated. This paper elaborates on what we have found to be three core elements of our video diary approach (Wieser 2015): (1) Video diaries decenter participants as objects of inquiry through technological means, and create a space for self-representation in which participants can actively document their lives (Bates 2013). Video diaries can be described as “unselective inscription devices” (Pinchevski 2012), which capture streams of consciousness over time, but also tacit knowing beyond consciousness (Zundel et al. 2018). Even though researchers remain co-producers of video diaries, participants gain autonomy with respect to the focus they set in their diaries, which allows researchers to co-experience the often open, leaky, and emergent entanglements of practice. (2) Video diaries give insights into the tacit experiences of participants within the continuous flow of everyday life. While conventional fieldwork strategies such as casual conversations and interviewing give participants a vis-à-vis, video diaries create a more private space of sharing, and may provide a channel to say what cannot be said in social encounters (Cashmore et al. 2010). Video diaries thus allow insights into private spheres, and into fragments of the self that are revealed through glimpses into homes, private workspaces, or gardens, in which participants process experiences and relate their selves to professional decisions. (3) Video diaries create a way of empathizing with participants, becoming closely familiar with their point of view beyond observing and participating (Jones 2015). Empathising here refers to the generative outcome of a relationship of trust with participants that was built over time through an affective engagement with their experiences and perspectives. Video diaries create continual communication with participants, across fields, and give access to unmitigated comments on field relations and tensions, in which teachers can elaborate on their professional roles. The presentation draws on our fieldwork experiences and theoretical reflections on video diaries to initiate a conversation on the benefits and possibilities and risks of video diaries and their possible uses in educational ethnography.

Bates, Charlotte. 2013. «Video Diaries: Audio-Visual Research Methods and the Elusive Body». Visual Studies 28 (1): 29–37. Cashmore, Annette, Paul Green, und Jon Scott. 2010. «An ethnographic approach to studying the student experience: The student perspective through free form video diaries. A Practice Report». The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education 1 (1): 106–11. Jones, R.L., J. Fonseca, L. De Martin Silva, G. Davies, K. Morgan, und I. Mesquita. 2015. «The Promise and Problems of Video Diaries: Building on Current Research». Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health 7 (3): 395–410. Pinchevski, Amit. 2012. «The Audiovisual Unconscious: Media and Trauma in the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies». Critical Inquiry 39 (1): 142–66. Pink, Sarah, Shanti Sumartojo, Deborah Lupton, und Christine Heyes LaBond. 2017. «Empathetic Technologies: Digital Materiality and Video Ethnography». Visual Studies 32 (4): 371–81. Wieser, Clemens. 2015. «Technology and Ethnography – Will It Blend? Technological Possibilities for Fieldwork on Transformations of Teacher Knowledge with Videography and Video Diaries». Seminar.Net - International Journal of Media, Technology and Lifelong Learning 11 (3): 223–34. Zundel, Mike, Robert MacIntosh, und David Mackay. 2018. «The Utility of Video Diaries for Organizational Research». Organizational Research Methods 21 (2): 386–411.

Situated in the wider framework of an ethnographic research project on multilingualism in preschools in the officially trilingual region of South Tyrol (Italy), this paper focuses on the role of language(s) and multilingualism in field relations. Theoretically, it combines critical educational and sociolinguistic theories on language and power. In these theories, language is understood as “ideology and practice” (Heller 2007), and as a socially and institutionally situated practice which can (re)produce, negotiate, shift or irritate powerful relations between speakers. Methodologically, it consistently links ethnographic and sociolinguistic approaches (Blackledge/Creese 2010; Tusting 2020). In South Tyrol, there are three separate educational systems, each with one of the officially recognized languages (Italian, German, Ladin) as main language of instruction. It has been shown that educational spaces set up for the protection of a recognized linguistic minority have to strike a balance between the protection of the minority group by which they are legitimated, and the need for inclusive and equitable education for all, including speakers of the majority language and speakers of languages of migration (Heller 2011: 12). In South Tyrol, the presence of differently linguistically minoritized individuals and groups leads to a “hierarchization of educational rights of minorities” (Thoma 2022), which also plays a role in ethnographic research in general and for field relations more specifically. Not least for this reason, South Tyrol is a particularly interesting site to study how language becomes relevant both in the educational system and in ethnographic research. Since field relations, especially in multilingual migration societies, are strongly framed by language ideologies and language policies, it is crucial to understand the connections between different language policies and the language ideologies behind them. The paper combines fieldnotes and transcripts of interviews to reconstruct how language policies and ideologies impact field relations and how they are (re)produced, negotiated, or irritated in interactions. Special attention will be paid to the linguistic repertoires and language choices of the researchers (Gallego-Balsà 2020) and how they are relevant to reveal power in field relations.

Blackledge, Adrian; Creese, Angela (2010): Multilingualism: a critical perspective. London: Continuum. Gallego-Balsà Lídia (2020): Language Choice and Stance in a Multilingual Ethnographic Fieldwork. Applied Linguistics Review 11(2): 233–250. Heller, Monica (2007): Bilingualism as Ideology and Practice. In: Heller, Monica (Ed.): Bilingualism: A Social Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–22. Heller Monica (2011): Paths to post-nationalism: A critical ethnography of language and identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Knoll, Alex (2016): “Kindergarten as a Bastion. On the Discursive Construction of a Homogeneous Speech Community and National Identity.” Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung (2): 137–53. Thoma, Nadja (2022): The Hierarchization of Educational Rights of Minorities. A Critical Analysis of Discourses on Multilingualism in South Tyrolean Preschools. In: Zeitschrift für erziehungswissenschaftliche Migrationsforschung, 02/2022, 134-150. https://doi.org/10.3224/zem.v1i2.04 Tusting, Karin (2020): The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography. Milton Park: Routledge.