Registration ends 07.4.2026 at 23:59 h

What might an ethnographic method grounded in aesthetic artistic practice look like? What kinds of knowledge can it produce? For several decades now, artists have increasingly experimented with ethnographic methods in their practices. Scholars have met these methodological experiments and explorations with skepticism, excitement, and even envy. Foster (1996), for example, warned of the potential harm of adopting ethnography into the arts without the critical reflexivity inherent in more scholarly approaches. Marcus and Myers (1995), on the other hand, expressed excitement—and even envy—at the real-world impact that ethnography, when employed through artistic means, has achieved, which they felt was lacking in the written forms produced by anthropologists, sociologists, and other ethnographic disciplines. They imagined a form of scholarship that could benefit from artistic modes of inquiry. Despite further explorations into how scholars might incorporate artistic and, more recently, curatorial practices (Sansi 2020) into their research and knowledge production, the use of artistic practice among ethnographers remains marginal.

This course, through methodological experimentation and a review of the literature, will explore the possibilities of artistic practice as an ethnographic method.

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