Conference Agenda

Ethnographic fieldwork relies substantially on participant observation (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1998). When conducting participant observation, ethnographers must navigate the vagaries of the real-life practices and meaning-making processes of participants on the ground (Emerson et al., 2001). This process often entails moments of ‘collapse’ – for example, a collapse between the researcher’s assumptions and the participants’ lived realities, or between different realities across diverse field sites. While existing methodological reflections have discussed how moments of collapse during the research design phase can uncover new findings (Schwartz, 2024), few studies address how researchers can such moments during ethnographic fieldwork, or how these experiences can inspire new methodological and conceptual insights. In this context, my paper reflects on how the moments of collapse during participant observation have shaped the research focus, researcher’s practices in the field, and the relational dynamics between researcher and participants. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of human-nature relationships at an environmental NGO in Luxembourg, I offer reflections from two perspectives:

1) How engaging in the ‘waiting field’ (Mannay & Morgan, 2015) helps the researcher navigate the collapse between her preconceived notions and participants’ lived experience in the field.

2) How the lens of ‘relational ethnography’ (Desmond, 2014) meaningfully brings together scattered field sites.

Reflecting on my experience of conducting participant observation through the conceptual lens of collapse, I find that such moments occurring across multiple layers significantly shape the research questions, process and outcomes. I argue that, rather than being viewed as crises or negative results, moments of collapse in ethnographic fieldwork can spark novel methodological insights and inductive discoveries.

In January 2025, the first iteration of an experimental speculative fiction event was run in Cambridge (UK) that brought together local water industry representatives, engineers, and religious and spiritually-motivated water activists to address a fictional – but not beyond the realm of possibility – crisis: Cambridge will run out of drinking water in one month. The participating water-focused actors came to this exercise of (fictional) structural and environmental collapse with diverse ways of being in the world and with water. Through a series of presentations, readings, and guided discussions, they worked together to consider the likely effects of the crisis across scales and realms, reflect on their own reactions to the crisis, and build plans of action. In the process, participants were confronted by others’ watery relations and experiences and often-overlooked local water conditions in ways that created slippage across the usually more or less rigid boundaries between fact and fiction, past, present, and future, geographic spaces, human and more-than-human beings, and value worlds. For water industry actors this confrontation was particularly jarring, and many left the exercise with a realization that might “with hindsight, [seem] obvious…a society’s relationship with water is not simply about the pipes and pumps” and that meaningful knowledge of and visions for water futures might lie beyond industry borders. This paper explores the various moments of collapse that occurred across this speculative fiction exercise, the techniques that drove them, and the collaborations that emerged from them. Ultimately, I suggest that those collapses were not destructive but generative, as participants were drawn to notice the ontological unruliness of water and imagine previously unimaginable collective routes forward.

Many of today’s technologies of memory are digital, fast-paced and data-heavy. Genres such as lifelogs (Heersmink, 2018) or multimedia biographies (Crete-Nishihata et al., 2012) rely on large databases or a broad range of digital data, merging lines of time, story and memory.

This paper investigates how lines of time, experience and memory, collapsed into objects and human bodies can become disentangled, identified, relived and reconnected in the process of creating a stop motion animation movie.

Inspired by work in phenomenological philosophy (Colombetti & Bogotá, 2024), I start from the assumption that the human ‘self’ is firmly anchored in its material environment and entangled with worldly objects. Hence, memory is stored as sedimented meaning (Merlot-Ponty, 1945/2012) in both, humans and objects, creating superposed layers of experience, habit, and knowledge, accumulated over the life span of an individual or of generations.

I explore how animation making – the simple, intuitive, and repetitive process of moving objects in small incremental steps and taking pictures after each move – unfolds as a human-object-co-creation, in which memory stored in human bodies and evocative objects (Turkle 2007) becomes re-distributed, interconnected, and interwoven.

I propose that such an approach has purchase for qualitative inquiry as it can expand our ‘topography of the self’ (Gonzales, 1995) through representing important relations, emotional ties, and past events in space and movement; not by accumulating heaps of new material and data, but by disentangling the already condensed, with slowness and care, peeling away layers of long-lived memory, to create resonance and expansion of and within our own selves.

In our current moment of rapid AI proliferation and incorporation, we seem to be in the midst of an epistemological shift, where generative AI is collapsing our processes of inquiry and creation from journeys of travel into instantaneous arrival of results. Ingold (2007) offers a metaphor for conceptualizing different types of journey-processes: the line that "goes out for a walk," which indexes a process of "wayfaring," and the line that goes from A to B, which indexes a process of "transport." In this paper, I argue that generative AI tools in fact represent a collapse of process, further condensing a journey of inquiry into two points that overlap nearly instantaneously: input/result. This transformation prompts a number of troubling questions: Are we moving from a paradigm of transport to one of arrival? What happens if we are constantly arriving, without the journey behind? What becomes of temporal processes like learning, writing, research, and creation in an era of incessant, consecutive arrival?

I argue that if we frame this collapse as productive— "saving time," "working smarter not harder"— we run the profound risk of negating temporality altogether and repeatedly devaluing the process of creation until making itself becomes unfamiliar. Drawing on an intersemiotic translation project conducted with a group of artists, teachers, and students in Luxembourg, I explore the notion of process as journey, time, and material endeavor that offers another way of thinking/being/making in our current moment of AI efficiency, productivity, and innovation obsession.