What happens to our praxis once we start from a place of acknowledging difference in our persons, our histories, our bodies, and our aesthetics? This text starts from a standpoint of curiosity, consideration, and mindfulness as we explore how, who and what we are, inform structures we create. The moment and place of knowing requires a certain slowness to enter into our thoughts, movements, and research, allowing for nuance and precision, for care and humility, and for an aesthetic of difference to incubate our praxis. Once we allow our work to breathe, to reflect, to sense difference, it transforms structures around it or structures created through it.^[1] The act of research becomes praxis through which critical awareness of one’s own condition and the condition of others comes into high relief. One aspect of this praxis includes bodies co-producing the work. There are intricate processes that situate us between theory and practice as praxis, which must begin to take into account the many ways in which we are identified, the modes of address, our different bodies, and varied epistemologies.

Intersectionality allows us to occupy that praxis and standpoint critically.^[2] It takes into account systems of oppression within the world that hold marginalized people in place (often at an inferior position) in multiple ways. It is not a new idea to acknowledge that our vectors of identity (race, class, ethnicity/gender/body, et cetera) inform how we experience and consider the world, but what is significant in intersectionality is that that place holding happens in different ways at different times and for different reasons. On the flip side, it also means that privilege manifests itself in similarly multifaceted forms. If, due to your body experience, you have never had to question how the world looks at your race/class/ethnicity/gender/body, or if that has never impacted the way the world identifies your research or work, you should know that that is a privileged experience. And that privilege or lack thereof, informs you and your praxis.

Learning Oneself and Others: Intersectional Praxis

The paradox of ‘defining’ something like identity, of course, is that it is not static. Even for someone who is thoughtful and self-reflexive, the ways in which one approaches oneself and others, changes with time and experience. Our ability to understand ourselves in relation to everything else is predicated upon the ability to understand and contextualize the real, tangible, sensory aspect of moving through the world as compared to conceptual, abstract notions of thinking of our bodies in the world. It is important to understand that recognizing systems of power and one’s place in them is a tool that can be utilized. These systems have an impact on our bodies and identities and continue to affect our work. This is the methodology of intersectionality as it relates to praxis. Whereas intersectionality can be defined by levels of access to privilege, a research-based model of intersectionality recognizes that in moving between the lateral and hierarchical modes of being, one must be cognizant and thoughtful about how in each context there may be differences to take into account. And it allows for care to be an intrinsic part of the recognition of difference. All practitioners must first place themselves outside of the system that maintains their work in place. In order to re-conceptualize any practice, the first moments of recognition have to do with recognizing oneself as radically other, not of this system, not of the normalized way of being. That conceptual shift allows one to consider praxis as particular to one’s embodied standpoint, – there is no way for me/you/us to step outside of my/your/our body/bodies to create anything. We may develop tools for all of us to use, methods, codes, programs to help us practice – but what gets coded or institutionalized, what gets marked as knowledge, for what type of normative body, all that should be questioned. If the body that is creating systems of knowledge employs intersectional praxis – the episteme itself knows the diversity of possible bodies it must account for rather than just assuming one norm.

A simple example might be to consider my own childhood: as a person of South Asian heritage, I was often confounded while dealing with crayons that did not have any color to represent my skin tone. I was told by teachers to color in bodies as ‘peach’ because that was the norm in the 1970s, in the United States. But my body was not peach. The disjuncture, cognitive dissonance, and alienation between what I experienced as body and what I represented was unaccounted for: the tools (i.e. crayons) and the representation could not align unless I let go of wanting to see myself represented in that image. I had to make myself into something I was not, and it very quickly became clear to me that I was not the ‘norm’ in the world of crayons. This happens even as I work in archaeology. The normative person in the past is often a body that looks and acts like a contemporary normative body – often not one that looks/feels/could be imagined as mine: normative, and yet othered through time. It is important for us to think through how we might make sense of the many different ways we might imagine past bodies, or othered bodies, or any body that is not a normative privileged body.

Thinking through an intersectional approach to the formation of knowledge then requires some time, some care, and some criticality. Such an approach allows one to look not only at the praxis, but at the pathways and research material to create something: whether that is writing a course syllabus or a book, or reconstructing a history. In effect, such an approach allows for an epistemic critique in the service of decolonization.

[excerpt]

Intersectionality as Decolonizing Research: Integrating Care

Self-recognition, knowledge, and reclamation are at the heart of how one might methodologically approach intersectionality in praxis, and this is really where care is paramount. In our contemporary moment, we have lost the ability to take time out to think, to write, to draw, to wonder, to let our curiosity dictate a research pattern. More and more we are propelled into a system that requires all labor to produce at breakneck speed, suggesting that somehow the survival-of-the-fittest model of labor capitalism is achieved with a lack of all human needs: food, sleep, air, love, et cetera. The late capitalist model has alienated the human body to such a degree that we no longer are allowed to be human to be considered successful.

One of the ways I consider intersectionality to be useful is because it forces the hand of alienation to move. It actually removes the clutches of that form of control over self and control over body and labor. In some measure that is precisely what we want, but it is a privileged position. I have been so disciplined into my subjectivity as an academic, that even when I have slowed down and allowed for care, I have produced an enormous amount of material. Perhaps even because of it: I have produced more work because I am happier working. In some sense, even though I am trying to contest and resist this system, I am actually fulfilling the goal of the late capitalist, neoliberal academic systems agenda.

The reclaiming of a self that is mired in a late capitalist lifestyle is one that requires thoughtfulness, a sense of self-care, and a commitment to time as something to give, not to spend. A radical change in praxis does not always mean a dramatic and drastic change. Sometimes the self-awareness may result in a small material or spatial shift, but it is enough to create a mindful balance: the dramatic quality of the change may be intangible but palpable. In all of my experience, however, the mode of resistance has only ever worked through collaboration, finding allies and solidarity with others. It is through different kinds of practices and alignments that one can contest some of the conditions within which we are working. This can maintain one’s livelihood and sense of self. And so through alliances and creating kin with others (human/nonhuman), we maintain and protect ourselves. And ultimately, that care for and with others is also self-care. Once we recognize ourselves, we begin to recognize our positions, and how our positions may be at the expense of others, be those others human or nonhuman. Once we recognize that we are placed in various systems in ways to keep us moving in place, we stop and then slowly realign our ways of experience, our praxis experiences radical change, one in which we might recognize decolonization as care.

[excerpt]

These are excerpts from a chapter of the same title that is in press for the volume Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, edited by Carolyn Stauss and Paula Pais. A Slow Research Lab Collaboration with Valiz. Amsterdam, Valiz Publishers.

This excerpt has been published with the approval of the editors of the volume and the Slow Research Lab.

^[1] I am borrowing the concepts of transformation from Paulo Freire’s 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum International Publishing Group.

^[2] Intersectionality, as I am using it, was first introduced in Kimberle Crenshaw’s 1989, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum. For more on race and architecture see Lesley Naa Norle Lokko’s volume, White Papers Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture. University of Minnesota Press (2000).

It was early morning in the late fall of 2014, my  friend Emily asked me if I wanted coffee, and if so, did I want her maternal or paternal grandmother’s recipe. It was about 6 AM, I had spent the entire previous day and night at a checkpoint trying to get in to Ramallah, and completely unsure of how to answer that question. She looked at my silence with pity and then announced: We will have my maternal grandmother’s coffee. I watched and listened to her as she proceeded to talk to me about how this coffee had to be made to her grandmother’s specifications. She helped me imagine the entire process and the materials used by her grandmother: the coffee grounds, the cardamom, the length of the boil, then the waiting, the number and duration of the re-boils, the bubbles, their color, and the aroma.

Earlier that month my sister snap chat an image of a cappuccino and sent it to my other sister. Waste of digital space, I told her. After 10 seconds it disappears, she retorted. This is ridiculous; I bet no one but my sisters use this silly app, I thought to myself. Turns out, I was wrong: over 60% of US 13-34-year-old smart phone users, use snap chat. Also, now snap chat keeps your image or video for up to 24 hours, allowing you a full day within which you might calibrate your own recollection time. Choosing how to recollect within a 24-hour experience seems to be positioned as a very long time in this 13-34-year-old statistic.

In my experience, how we recollect has never been something we have been able to calibrate. Over 20 years ago in Karachi, I heard a bullet go into a body and the body fall to the ground. I could smell the blood and gunshot residue. I watched as a pool of blood slowly fought its way into focus through the dust and dirt on the surface of the ground next to the car I was hiding behind. I must have been crouched behind that car for less than 10 seconds, looking at the blood pool for what felt like 500 years.  My friend and I went back to the spot less than 24 hours later in an effort to try to understand what had happened; there was a fruit vendor selling fruit at the spot in front of the cafe, and there were no visible traces left of the blood, the body, or the gun residue. We stood outside the cafe feeling slightly uncertain of ourselves, decided to order a Nescafe, got back into the car, and silently drove away.

Mamhoud Darwish starts his prose poem, Memory for Forgetfulness. August, Beirut, 1982, with dreaming and waking up to only be in a nightmare of war. As he tries to push toward dawn, he evokes the desire for coffee:

I want the aroma of coffee. I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. And I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee. The aroma of coffee so I can hold myself together, stand on my feet, and be transformed from something that crawls, into a human being. The aroma of coffee so I can stand my share of this dawn up on its feet. So that we can go together, this day and I, down into the street in search of another place.

How can I diffuse the aroma of coffee into my cells, while shells from the sea rain down on the sea-facing kitchen, spreading the stink of gunpowder and the taste of nothingness? I measure the period between two shells. One second. One second: shorter than the time between breathing in and breathing out, between two heartbeats. One second is not long enough for me to stand before the stove by the glass facade that overlooks the sea. One second is not long enough to open the water bottle or pour the water into the coffee pot. One second is not long enough to light a match. But one second is long enough for me to burn.

As Emily made me coffee that morning, and the mornings that followed, I noticed that every day I felt I was getting to know her family. The making of coffee as a form of hospitality is one that, in its process, builds relationships. Every morning I would hear stories or even just an aside, that linked her to the coffee grounds, to the practice of boiling, to the copper vessel, and to the sensory impact of the aroma of coffee.  I know how significant the everydayness of that exercise was for me in those days in order to ensure some feeling of safety and security. It was as if coffee attested to an insistence of sheer existence – as ephemeral as it may feel in a space of constant violence. Knowing you can have your coffee in the morning makes one feel normal. I began to recognize echoes of particular slivers of time in Karachi, Iraq, and Ramallah during times of violence and how they deposited in layers atop one another in my memory and recollection. I began to understand the experience of a war that I did not witness but gleaned an insight to through prose-poetry.

I want the aroma of coffee. I need five minutes. I want a five-minute truce for the sake of coffee. I have no personal wish other than to make a cup of coffee. With this madness I define my task and my aim. All my senses are on their mark, ready at the call to propel my thirst in the direction of the one and only goal: coffee.  (Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness August, Beirut, 1982)

The link between coffee and poetry in the Middle East is not a light and frothy matter. Quite the contrary: it is the root of statecraft, politics, and links to landscape. In my current work in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), I have been utilizing poetics as a way to encounter unfamiliar landscapes. The use of art, poetry, and literature to learn about a history of a place is not a usual methodology for archaeologists, but my usual training led me towards silent landscapes – and it has only been through art and poetry that the landscape has opened up to me. In Nabati Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia, Saad Abdullah Sowayan discusses the manners in which poets engage themselves in some labor or crafting to aid in composition… or they make coffee. Sowayan goes on to discuss in detail the rituals in composition of both coffee and poetry: “The way a man makes his coffee is his numas, since it reflects his nimbleness, alertness, composure, tact, and taste. A man takes as much pride in his coffee making as he does in his poetic composition.” (1985: 96) This link between masculinity and the making of coffee is something that Darwish reflects upon as well, as he describes the interstitial moments of boiling: Swelling and breaking, they’re thirsty and ready to swallow two spoonfuls of coarse sugar, which no sooner penetrates than the bubbles calm down to a quiet hiss, only to sizzle again in a cry for a substance that is none other than the coffee itself—a flashy rooster of aroma and Eastern masculinity. Masculinity is, of course, far more complicated than coffee, but these claims and links make Emily’s grandmother’s recipes all the more significant and reflective of intersectional politics within the fleeting moment of dawn.

Over 15 years ago, another dawn in a different place and pushed into a different time, I stood with my friends Praveena and Peter on the Iron Age mound at Gilund (Rajasthan, India) and they pointed to various spaces in the trench and spoke of ephemeral layers. They had called me over from my trench to talk through what an approach to excavating ephemerality might be. We stood for a while talking about how we had no idea what to do with these layers. We must have stood there a bit longer than our director liked because he walked over. He took one look at it, looked at us, and then said: document it and keep digging until you find a floor or a wall, then call me. We all nodded at his wisdom and got back to work.

I don’t remember much about what I dug up during that season (I think I was working on a wall), but I do remember the ephemerality of the Iron Age mound. It was not a trench I worked in or on, nor had I experienced its time or the effort to reconstruct human events – but in its ephemerality it left a long lasting image within layers of my memory.

I also still remember the rose in cappuccino foam.

The NGOs and Nonprofits Special Interest Group held its second biennial conference before the AAAs last week. It’s designed to give anthropologists and practitioners working in and with NGOs a chance to engage with each other in a more intimate, focused way before diving into the chaos of the AAAs. Entitled “NGOgraphies,” this year’s conference explored the dual meaning of the term, coined by Steven Sampson and Julie Hemment in 2001, which refers both to critical ethnography of NGOs in general and to analysis of the human geography of NGOs in particular. The conference attracted 112 attendees from 13 countries, and session organizers were encouraged to use alternate formats to engage participants, ranging from workshops to roundtables. Rather than a general report on the conference, this post is a reflection on some of the specific conversations and lines of thought the conference generated for me.

When I circulated the call for papers for my roundtable panel “What Is This ‘Local Knowledge’ that Development Organizations Fetishize?” to the NGOs and Nonprofits Interest Group listserv in May, I got the following email in reply:

Dear All,

I might have been interested in participating, but will likely be traveling overseas for humanitarian work at the time. I have worked for international NGOs and aid agencies for 30 years, as I do now. However, I must say that the title of the session troubles me. As a long-time member and leader of such organizations, I have never known our community to “fetishize” local knowledge. I think the term is disrespectful to my colleagues and their work and insights. This seems like some sort of construct or perception of research-based academics.

Others replied, agreeing that the term “fetishize” had judgmental connotations and suggesting that the phrase “local knowledge” is a neutral, technical term that refers to practically-oriented understandings of phenomena prevalent at the community level: “Nothing more. No denigrating overtones. No ‘elevation’ of the local understandings. Just plain knowledge from a likely different, local point of view.” Dozens of people applied to join the panel and some just as quickly withdrew, saying that they “weren’t prepared” for those kinds of conversations.

With the panel already touched by controversy, I was excited to see if the conversation this last Tuesday would bring fireworks. While the discussion was animated, it was ultimately made up of solely academic voices, and the participants shared the viewpoint that “fetishization” can be a legitimate, non-accusatory term for the ways that organizations handle their relationship to their host communities.

The speakers addressed questions of ontology (what is the nature of this object, “local knowledge”? or knowledge of what?), epistemology (how do we know what we know? Or whose knowledge?), and positionality (who can know “local knowledge”?).

The discussion ranged across a variety of examples from public health projects and gender-based violence organizations to economic empowerment projects that showed that the fetishization and devaluation of the local can be two sides of the same coin. Some of the points established were relatively obvious but worth reinforcing: the local is not homogenous. Representatives may not be so “representative.” According to Laura Jung, in international health clinics in Honduras, any Honduran and even second-generation immigrants were considered to possess knowledge of the local, even if they had never visited the particular area where the project was taking place.

Another theme that emerged was that “the local” can be temporal rather than merely spatial. Ivana Topalovic reported that post-conflict Bosnia experienced a record-breaking surge in NGO activity that has since subsided, and the post-NGO period has left residual NGO models of development in place with “local knowledge” as the default operating system. The trauma experienced by Bosnian communities has divided NGOs between those with legitimacy based in the experience of violence and those that arrived on the scene after the fact.

Several speakers in my roundtable, most particularly Kristina Baines and Kevin Ritt, pointed to the ways in which anthropologists become entangled with NGO practice. Many anthropologists who may not (initially) be focused on the anthropological study of NGOs themselves use NGOs for access to the communities they serve and work with NGOs to gather information and evaluate their programs. The similar spaces of knowledge production that ethnographers and organizational practitioners occupy can lead to conflicts, which was apparent as several speakers mentioned moments of tension or conflict as their critiques were sought but not welcomed or their input was ignored.

My personal brush with scandal in the naming of my roundtable brought home one of the main points discussed throughout the conference as a whole: that anthropologists have a complicated relationship with NGO practitioners. Work with NGOs seems to intensify the already fraught and messy task of navigating a path through fieldwork and publishing. The conversation also brought home the importance of setting the boundaries of engagement, defining limits, and setting realistic expectations for collaborations on the part of both researchers and organizations. Some researchers suggested using a formal contract to establish terms, citing the potential for a disjuncture between what we want to know and how NGOs would use us. NGOs have agendas that may not align with our agendas as researchers.

Engagement with NGOs may entail “entanglement” (with states, consultants, donors, markets, competing NGOs, social movements, civil society, and other anthropologists). Several participants noted concerns about becoming too deeply engaged with institutions, which may provide richer data but also increases the possibility of conflict and push-back from informants. Where researchers may see themselves as helpfully providing general critique to practitioners, beyond evaluation or assessment of projects, practitioners can interpret such commentary as criticism. Working with NGOs means considering the real likelihood that our research subjects will read and publicly respond to our publications. As anthropologists, we write differently for different publics, contextualizing information and providing rich nuance for other scholars and breaking down concepts and providing concrete conclusions for NGOS and the public. Presenting the same data to different audiences can force scholars to add nuance or consider our work from new angles. According to some researchers who had consulted with NGOS, the perfect report would be concise, snappy, and tell the story they want told, but anthropologists can’t always in good conscience produce the “perfect report.” Speakers questioned whether anthropologists can effectively critique NGOs that hosted them and provided them with access. They discussed their inclinations to censor themselves rather than damage relationships with NGO workers, who might also be censoring themselves in their commentary on their organizations. Anthropologists clearly need to be reflexive about our engagement with NGOs and our roles in relation to them.

The particular anxieties about NGO research arise from the overlap between our roles. As knowledge producers, anthropologists and NGOs compete for discursive space. It occurs to me that Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) notion of the “field of cultural production,” the social space in which agents struggle for the power to give meaning and value to cultural products, may be helpful in understanding how this plays out. Bourdieu theorized that objects gain social and economic value in a “field of cultural production,” in which agents struggle for the power to decide which material and symbolic products are legitimate. Agents and institutions constitute the shape of the field by staking claims to the cultural capital to create and interpret meaning. As agents of cultural production, NGOs and anthropologists are similarly concerned with creating relationships with communities and undertake agendas of “doing good.” While engaged anthropologists may seek to “do good,” at a certain point it may be imperative to upset NGOs’ received moral categories, questioning who defines what it means to “do good.” Judgements about the success of organizational or anthropological projects are tied up in moral economies. Rather than feeling betrayed, we need to ask what values are being expressed when the people we work with accept or reject our conclusions, just as we hope they approach our publications with an open mind rather than a spirit of defensiveness. The response to my use of the term “fetishize” showed me my own naïveté in assuming that anthropologists’ idiosyncratic understandings of terms and tendency to auto-criticism are universal, and taking for granted my own position of authority as a knowledge generator and word herder.

My thanks go out to everyone who participated in the email conversation, roundtable, and conference. If you didn’t get a chance to participate in this year’s conference, keep a lookout for information on the next conference in 2017!

After decades of well-documented, prominent cases of memory distortion, people whose professions put a premium on facts and truth—journalists, politicians, business leaders, judges, lawyers, and public figures—should be aware of these limits. In fact, they have a responsibility to understand the fallibility of their memories and to take steps to minimize memory mistakes. If you are relying exclusively on your own memory when saying anything of consequence, especially when someone’s reputation is at stake, you must think twice.

I especially like the point that our most vivid and frequently recalled memories may be the most subject to distortion because “each recounting has the potential to introduce new distortions.” Worth keeping in mind!

Stuart Hall’s work is notable for the way it links biography, critique from within and of the ‘Left’, and a Marxian analysis of capitalism and popular culture. Hall passed away in February 2014, and is the subject of a series of talks on his life and work ongoing here in Seattle at the University of Washington. These remembrances inspired me to think more closely about Stuart Hall’s specific contribution to research methodology. Hall uses two sense of the limit to ground his research. First, he thinks through limit cases to question a given theorization. Second, he thinks at the limit to uncover what is not yet know about a particular case. The limit as research methodology has, to my mind, a very anthropological sensibility about it, since it uses empirical cases to talk back to establish categories, and at the same time, keeps newly developed conceptualizations open-ended.

I began my return to Stuart Hall by re-reading an essay that I’ve returned to time and again: Stuart Hall’s 1996, “When Was The Post-Colonial? Thinking at the Limit”. In this essay, Hall notes that the term post-colonial is useful precisely because of its ambiguity, the way it troubles—even while acknowledging the power of—the binaries of ‘then’ and ‘now’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ (246-8). As such, its periodization, emphasizing as it does the colonial encounter, provides an alternative narrative of capitalist modernity that puts the peripheries at the center of a story normally told from the perspective of European modernization (Hall here anticipates Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theoretical moves in Provincializing Europe). “The post-colonial”, Hall writes in that piece,

“is no different from other ‘posts’. It is not only ‘after’ but ‘going beyond’ the colonial… colonialism refers to a specific historical moment … but it was always also a way of staging or narrating a history” (Hall, ‘When was the Post-Colonial Thinking at the Limit’, 253).

But re-reading Hall’s essay this time around in concert with his earlier essay from 1980, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance” made me think more concretely of Stuart Hall’s method of building concepts and of doing analysis. The essay on the post-colonial mobilizes the idea of the limit to mean an “episteme-in-formation”, denoting an emergent relationship of power, temporality, and knowledge that both carries with it colonial ‘after-effects’ as Hall calls them, and marks a shift that reconfigures those relations.

In the earlier essay, the limit appears as something else. Hall is concerned in ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structures in Dominance’ to move beyond two dominant paradigms for understanding racism, which he diagnoses as economic determinism and sociological pluralism.

The first, familiarly perhaps, reduces race to a mystifying expression of underlying class relations. The economy is the determining factor in the constitution of race. The second correctly objects to this line of thought by arguing that not all manifestations of race can be reduced to economic relationships. It however sidelines any possible relationship between economic structures and racial formations, thereby producing multiple types of racial formation without being able to link any of these to the social and historical conditions through which they are produced.

In the essay, Hall charts a methodology that will create an historically grounded framework for the analysis of race and social domination based on three principles of investigation, which he derives from a heterodox reading of Marx: First, “that the analysis of political and ideological structures must be grounded in their material conditions of existence (the materialist premise) and second, that the specific forms of these relations. . . must be made historically specific” by supplying those elements that can explain their differences (372). This latter is what Hall calls the historical premise. Finally, the third principle is that what we might today call relations of power, or in his words, ‘structures in dominance’ is followed through any given social relationship at hand. These principles are a starting point for doing work that connects questions of capitalism and capitalist formations with those of race, domination, and cultural hegemony.

If these three principles are a kind of distillation of Hall’s method of exposition, how did he get there? I think he did so by thinking in another way about the ‘limit’. In the essay ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structures in Dominance’, the limit is used in terms of thinking through the ‘limit case’ of South Africa. South Africa, a clear example of an economy organized along racial lines, presented for Hall a case that could neither be fully explained by recourse to capitalist economics, nor by reference to the racist South African state. Each without the other was a partial explanation, inadequate to the task of understanding social domination.

The importance of the limit in this sense of an empirical case that gives the lie as it were to easy theoretical positions and to political polemics seems important in much of Hall’s work. In the post-colonial essay, for instance, Latin America with its long history of colonization and early decolonization provides a limit case for the term, allowing, indeed forcing, Hall to confront what is generalizable about the term (that it inaugurates a shifted narrative about the significance of colonial relationships to the unfolding of the history of colonized and metropolitan places). And, in the wonderfully-named short piece “The Whites of their Eyes” on race and representation in media, the practice of nativist politics used by the Labor Party in Britain in the name of job protection for the working classes serves as Hall’s limit case through which to think more carefully about how the politics of class and of race are aligned and fractured under certain historically specific conditions (in Hall’s case, Thatcherite Britain).

From Hall’s deployment of the ‘limit case’ we can see the way that a given social reality generates not another type of social life, but the careful reworking of existing frames of analysis. In this way, the limit case circles back to the limit as the edge of an emergent episteme. By thinking through a limit case, the outlines of that episteme (the trace of the limit) beyond which thinking has not yet gone, begin to be discerned.

These very grounded methods for engaging in research are for me one of Hall’s most important contributions to the human sciences, enabling the insights of ethnographic ‘limit cases’ to push at and delineate the limits of what is currently known.

To facilitate MAD-P as a whole, Colleen prepared context sheets, using as a model those employed at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük. We recorded by hand and photographed or screenshot all elements of our process. We also kept an associated set of notes — perhaps the equivalent of a field diary, but logged electronically and as a combined output, weaving together observations that we’d made in dialogue with one another. Following the excavation, Colleen set about writing our archive report, a structured review of our field site, findings and interpretations, which we present here.

What is an archive report?

Following archaeological excavations, it is generally expected that the primary investigation team writes a preliminary archive report. This report details the stratigraphy of the excavation in stratigraphic order, from the earliest activity until the latest–what could be considered a “bottom-up” approach. Along with stratigraphic details, we discuss any notable finds, and provide an initial phasing for the site. By phasing, we mean that we group archaeologically-ascertained events together, such as major building events, fires, or architectural changes. When sites contain a multitude of archaeologically-identifiable events, or “contexts”, this endeavor requires a mastery of stratigraphic understanding. To hone such mastery, we typically draw upon a Harris Matrix, a graphic representation of stratigraphic relationships. In the case of the Media Archaeology Drive Project, we’ve limited the excavations of our found hard drive to an extent that the stratigraphy is simple and major phasing is unnecessary. Still, in the spirit of archaeological media archaeology, we present our excavation as a site report.

These reports are usually articulated in coded language, primarily only comprehensible to experts and written in the passive tense. There is much to be critiqued about both the style and the legacy of such reporting, and we note with some despair the lack of progress over the years in rethinking its dimensions (although a not insignificant number of scholars have commented on, and indeed, creatively experimented with it; e.g., see Beranek 2008, Mickel 2012, Praetzellis et al. 1998 in the journal Historical Archaeology) . Where site reports prove useful, we’d argue, is in instilling care for process and interpretation. They can work as a meaningful pedagogical strategy, aiding in thinking through the fit between disparate data gathered during archaeological investigation. They can be used to reflexively review intellectual processes during excavation and to reevaluate interpretations after the fact. They can provide a record for future researchers to understand what has been systematically destroyed through excavation.

MAD-P Archive Report

The Media Archaeology Drive Project centers on the excavation of the contents and material of a Samsung hard drive, produced in Korea in 2004, and subsequently bought by the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. The drive is 100mm x 150mm and 30mm in depth. It is silver, and has technical specifications and other identifying text on a white label on its exterior. As it is a portable device, other contextual information is variable, but the bulk of the excavation work was performed by Colleen Morgan and myself in my office in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York (UK). As we excavated in the confines of the office, the weather was not a factor (as is typically the case)–but it was sunny and lovely outside. As Colleen notes, she found herself wishing that she could be in the open with a shovel, instead of in an office with a dozen tiny screwdrivers. I thought the opposite.

PHASE I

At the heart of the hard drive was a circuit board (18), green (5G 4/6 on the Munsell color chart) measuring 100mm x 90mm x 5mm. It was bumpy to touch, and contained metal inclusions printed on the board. On the east side of the board was a black interface. The circuit board (18) was covered by a small piece of black (10YR 2/1) cloth (17), placed between the circuit board and the plastic body of the hard drive (16). This cloth conformed to the outline of the circuit board on the north, west, and south sides (90mm x 70mm x 1mm), and was spongy and smooth.

The black (10YR 2/1) plastic body of the hard drive (100mm x 150mm x 20mm) lay on top of the black cloth (17) and provided one of the main structural elements of the hard drive–many of the elements of the drive were attached to this body. There was a circular cut [15] in the plastic body, through which a silver metal spindle (13) interacted with the circuit board (18).

Also set into the black plastic body (16) was an actuator in the north-east corner (12), with a ribbon that allowed interaction with the reader arm in the south-east corner (11). The reader arm was sandwiched between two metal plates, at depth (14) mounted the reader arm onto the black plastic body, and (10) which kept the reader arm in place. The plates were relatively uniform, both measuring 50mm x 50mm x 2mm. A silver platter (9), 100mm x 100mm x 1mm was mounted onto the spindle to the western extent of the hard drive and kept in place by a washer and four screws. All of these contexts were secured by the silver metal case, (8).

PHASE II

The second phase explored by our MAD-P team was the user interface installed on the hard drive. This was a mistake, as there was an intervening phase that was not investigated, but this will be addressed in the discussion below.

The excavation of the user interface allows for some reconsideration of understanding the hard drive as a stratigraphic sequence. Our method, “drilling down” through the folder structure of the user interface mimics our expectations of archaeological excavation, by moving down or deeper into the folder structure. Yet at “depth” the icon that represents the goal of our excavation might be temporally older or younger than the folder that contains it; the very presence of the icon has changed the temporal signature of the folder. Further complicating this excavation was the concept of depth as applied to a user interface. To record depth, MAD-P decided to use the “doubleclick” (DC) as a unit of measurement (see below for critique of this decision). For the purposes of this investigation, we’ll sidestep this spatial and temporal snarl and treat the folder structure as a stratigraphic sequence.

At depth, a music file (7), appeared as a 150mm x 150mm window, black with a yellow line, blue button, and a small rainbow with a face. This window provided a visual representation of an auditory event, a song “Like Humans Do” from the David Byrne album “Look into the Eyeball.” Further discussion of this context (7) is appended to the stratigraphic report (below). This file was contained within a blue and white icon (6), a 15mm x 5mm x 1DC, with an eighth note (quaver) and two frames of movie reel, and the label “music.asx”. This icon was one of several contained in the My Music folder (5), which were labelled “sample.music,” “music.bmp,” and “music.wma.” These were not given context numbers in the interest of simplicity, but a further investigation would have included them within our sequence. The “My Music” folder (5) 20mm x 5mm x 1DC had a time stamp of 02/08/2010, the latest in our sequence, which could provide our terminus post quem (TPQ), date after which the hard drive had stopped being used. The My Music folder (5) was yellow, black and white, with a beamed eighth note, in contrast to the single eighth note apparent in the music.asx icon (6).

The folder structure that contained the My Music folder (5) was relatively simple, with Shared Documents, (4) a yellow 30mm x 5mm x 1DC icon contained within “All Users” (3), contained within “Documents and Settings” (2). Also contained within “Documents and Settings” were the folders “Heather” and “Michael.” These folders were password protected and we did not investigate them, as outlined in our research design ethics statement. Casual enquiry in the department did not reveal the identity of these individuals and they remain unidentified. The top level icon, Local Disk (E:) (1) was gray, 25mm x 5mm x 0DC, and appeared on the desktop of my computer.

Discussion:

The formalized strategy employed during our MAD-P excavation led to several unexpected problems and insights that may be productive for future research. Perhaps the biggest omission in the project is represented by the break in the project’s Harris Matrix. There is nothing connecting Phase I and Phase II of the excavations because we did not excavate the code that connects the hard drive with the user interface. This would have added considerable depth and complexity to our analysis, and is a priority for future investigations.

Secondly, the anchors of archaeological investigation–temporality and spatial distribution–were slippery and indistinct during the excavation. The decision to measure depth in double-clicks added some coherence to the idea of folder stratigraphy, but it is untested as a relative measure for evaluating the overall folder hierarchy and would require more investigation. As noted in discussion of our process (e.g., with @adreinhard), the legibility and longevity of the DC as a unit of measurement is debatable.

Thirdly, again with reference to measurement, and as noted by designer @iankirkpatrick, in the future icons should be measured in pixel width, rather than in actual mm.  As each screen will obviously have bigger or smaller pixels, the icon will be different in size depending on the screen & its resolution.  The only really consistent measurement of icons, then, is pixel width & height.

Forthly, formal context sheets provided an important continuity in the investigation, but would have to be modified for future research. Even so, some of the formal prompts, such as “texture” and “inclusions” and “execution” provided a welcome decentering in our excavation of the hard drive. What is the texture of a file folder?

Finally, MAD-P revealed a certain ambivalence in archaeological definitions of artifacts, contexts, sites, and sequences. During the investigation of both of the phases–the hard drive and the user interface–we moved back and forth between our understanding of how to evaluate an artifact and how to record an archaeological site. The destabilization of these definitions was an unexpected resistance to archaeological investigation from these media, and this resonates through our subsequent archaeological practice. This ambivalence can also count as one of the benefits of the investigation.

Additional benefits reinforce the utility of the archaeological method. The best example is the continued usefulness of drawing in archaeological recording. During MAD-P, we sketched each context on the back of our context sheets, and created a formal scaled drawing on permatrace. Interestingly, the sketches were very useful during the investigation of the user interface phase, while the drawings on permatrace were more useful during the hard drive phase. Sketching user interface icons was jarring, and felt silly, but became immediately compelling. Drawing the object of your research encourages a depth of involvement, forcing your attention on its complete visualization and how it interacts with the surrounding context. The formalized drawings of the hard drive on permatrace, a semi-transparent tracing paper, allowed us to overlay the drawings to understand the stratigraphy of the hard drive and the relationships of the components to each other.

Another affordance of the archaeological investigation was the formalized separation of the constitutive components of the hard drive into finds bags. This provided an interesting contrast to the relative ephemerality of the “finds” of the user interface investigation, various folders and music files, though they were contained on the platter of the hard drive. These user interface artifacts, though not as apparently present and sorted into bags, are actually more omnipresent–the best “find” during the investigation was the David Byrne song hidden under a generic label in an unremarkable folder structure. The song, Like Humans Do, was included in Windows XP to demonstrate the Windows Media Player, leading us to wonder–was it the most ubiquitous song in the world? Perhaps now eclipsed by the U2 album, Songs of Innocence recently embedded in iTunes? [As it happens, following Colleen’s presentation at Bradford’s media archaeology conference, @pbenzon has pointed out that the Nokia Tune may, in fact, be the frontrunner–a subject that’s been explored by Jeff Thompson.]

Most importantly, MAD-P was conceived as a critical, creative exploration of the intersections between media archaeology and archaeology, but it was also an incredibly fun project. Applying archaeological methods to a computer screen was the best kind of mischief–it encouraged critical play to reconfigure our approach to research. This mode of critical play is being more fully investigated in our Heritage & Play working group at the University of York, and is part of a larger series of questions that we are exploring around the relationship between doing, making, knowing, learning and the crafting of expertise. We would have liked to engage with some of these questions in more depth here on Savage Minds, but this month has flown by for us, with MAD-P rolling out alongside various other related projects, including Colleen’s recent Archaeology and Minecraft event at York. We will continue our work, then, on our own web profiles, so please stay tuned via @clmorgan and @ArchaeologistSP.

As our aim here is to model good practice, and to benefit from the collective intelligence of Savage Minds, we present below the project research design for constructive critique. In brief, we’ve excavated a found hard drive, and while in the next post we’ll document for you our process, our written and photographic records (stay tuned for a Harris Matrix), and our interpretative outputs, here we detail the nature of our field site and field method, ethical engagement with our excavation, and sustainability/access to our data.

Colleen is the principle author of this research design, and it’s important for me to say that I’ve learned much through my collaboration with her. As someone who has spent the past 10 years outside of the excavation trench, it was very meaningful for me to jump back in—using single context recording no less!—with Colleen as my guide. Here is the project whose results you’ll see reported over the next week on Savage Minds…

Media Archaeology Drive Project (MAD-P): Research Design

MAD-P Staff

• Dr Colleen Morgan
• Neil Gevaux
• Dr Sara Perry

Introduction

Hard disk drives have been used to store data of all types since their introduction by IBM in 1956. Since that time, hard disk drives have gotten progressively smaller and less expensive, thus integrating them into the daily life of most people in industrialized nations. Even as they have become pervasive in daily life, they are rarely visible until they stop functioning, sometimes resulting in a catastrophic loss of data. The term “Data Archaeology” has been created to characterize both the attempt to recover data after the failure of a hard drive and to investigate obsolete data formats. Similarly, the term “Digital Archaeology” is used to characterize the investigation of old, out of date websites, and the growing body of digital practice in archaeology. Until recently there has been relatively little overlap between these fields (Law & Morgan 2014; Pogacar 2014).

The MAD-P team has targeted the hard drive for an investigation into the connections between Foucauldian media archaeologies and archaeological practice as understood by archaeologists. From this investigation MAD-P hopes to realize the potential for an “archaeological media archaeology,” with this excavation prompting critical examination of both fields. There are several key questions that prompt the excavation of a hard drive: is an archaeological fieldwork methodology useful for understanding the contents and structure of a hard drive? Can archaeological methodology be adapted in a way that is useful for media archaeologists? What does the archaeological investigation of a hard drive tell us that a more historiographical approach cannot? Can the excavation of a hard drive build on the previous work of contemporary archaeologists that productively makes the familiar unfamiliar (Buchli and Lucas 2001)?

To address these questions we have designed a program of research that addresses a single hard drive, with the potential to expand the project into other hard drives, but also into other forms of media archaeology. In this document, we provide the background of this work, describe the history and context of our field site, detail our field methodology, and then discuss the future of MAD-P investigations.

Background

MAD-P was conceived as part of an ongoing series of collaborations between digital archaeologists at the University of York (UK). The University of York has cultivated a network of digital archaeologists through a series of initiatives. As the home institution of both Internet Archaeology, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal, and the Archaeological Data Service, which has supported archiving of archaeological data since 1996, the Department of Archaeology at the University of York has been involved in digital archaeology on an institutional level for nearly 20 years. More recently the Centre for Digital Heritage was founded in 2012 as an international collaborative venture, with an annual conference, field school, and funds for start-up initiatives.

In this context, MAD-P was conceived as a project that would explore the boundaries of digital archaeology, and test the utility of materials-based archaeological excavation for understanding media archaeology.

History and context of our field site

After consulting with Neil Gevaux, the Department of Archaeology Computer Officer, we identified several potential hard drive candidates for excavation. As we were interested in the contents of the drive, we requested a working hard drive that had been rendered redundant. We selected a 40GB Samsung Hard Drive, model SP0411C. The hard drive had been made in Korea in September of 2004, and bought by the archaeology department shortly after. At the time of purchase, 40GB was a relatively small amount of storage space as 80 and 160 GB drives were readily available, and a 500GB drive was available by 2005. The drive cost about 50 USD. It is unknown if it was bought as part of a pre-assembled computer or on its own. Since the time of purchase, the history of ownership of the hard drive has been lost.

That the history of the hard drive had been lost was ideal for us, as MAD-P wanted to approach the hard drive as an unfamiliar landscape; as Buchli and Lucas suggest, alienation from familiar objects exposes the transgressiveness of archaeology, an “almost perverse exercise in making familiar categorisations and spatial perceptions unfamiliar – a translation from an everyday perceptual language into an archaeological one” (2001, 9). The drive had been rendered obsolete after a decade and had been discarded.  Archaeologies of consumerism incorporate “all aspects of consumer societies – political, religious, educational, legal, leisure, economic, aesthetic, and so on” (Majewski and Schiffer 2001, 27). As such, these categories will be examined in our final report.

Field Methodology

The excavation of this hard drive will be modeled on the Museum of London Archaeology recording system. This recording system follows the single context planning system which records each stratigraphic “event” in sequence. Each of these events is given a context number, photographed, recorded in a standardized form, drawn by hand, and then removed to reveal the next event.

Without knowing the full extent of the data stored on the hard drive, MAD-P decided to employ a sampling strategy that involved following folder structures of the hard drive, drilling “down” through the layers and recording the contents of a single set of folders on the drive. Preliminary investigation revealed that the drive was relatively unpopulated, so we were able to select a sequence of folders that offered a greater “depth” of deposited data.

After the folder structure has been explored through this selective sample, MAD-P will commence the physical excavation of the hard drive, disassembling it piece-by-piece. As this is an irreversible process, Neil Gevaux attempted to back up the hard drive to preserve any data, yet permissions on the drive prevented the storage of some material. After consideration, MAD-P decided to follow through anyway, as this irreversible process more closely reflected the affordances of archaeological methodology as a destructive investigation.

Each component of the excavated drive will be appropriately labeled and stored for further analysis. A future repository for both the excavation material and the archive has not yet been determined, but they are currently in locked storage at the University of York.

Ethics

The investigation of this hard drive had the potential to reveal inappropriate or indiscreet information about students or colleagues in the department; even were it not so, a discussion about the ethics of research is a necessary component to an archaeological research design. Hard drives can hold vast quantities of personal information that could be used for fraudulent or hurtful activities, as well as more indirect information, not intended for public scrutiny, that could be wielded with deleterious consequences for a variety of audiences. While these are potentially interesting for archaeological enquiry, connecting these activities to individuals was not a desired outcome of this research. This marks perhaps the greatest deviation of digital archaeological practice from data archaeology, as the specific information is not necessarily as interesting as the configuration of these data.  As such, MAD-P decided to (1) avoid disclosing the identities of the drive owners if there was personal information available on the drive, (2) inform any identifiable individuals of this research, and (3) give these individuals the option to remove themselves from this research.

Future investigations

After the results from the current MAD-P investigations are fully reported, further inquiry into hard drive archaeology may involve excavations of additional hard drives. The MAD-P team would very much like to involve a more multidisciplinary team, including engineers, hard drive recovery specialists, and media archaeologists to fully investigate the social context of the hard drive. As these excavations continue to proceed, we will fully document the process and make the archive available for other researchers, and we urge that future work be made available in the same way. At this stage we will employ a Creative Commons Attribution license, to encourage the broad dissemination and re-use of this research.

There are a series of factors that I think contribute to this predicament wherein archaeology is simultaneously recognised as both highly and hardly theorised in terms of its mediation. I’ve discussed it elsewhere, but media studies tend to be relegated to the last chapter of archaeological textbooks, to little more than a single sentence of acknowledgement in other manuscripts, or to a discussion curtailed around only a few select modes of mass communication (i.e., film, television, the web). Where it does have presence, it’s often collapsed into a focus on “the public”, generating analysis that gravitates around popular culture alone.

But this situation is contradictory and fundamentally nonsensical.

Media – in the broad sense, as agents for doing/saying/sharing/conveying things – are a (if not the) primary means through which archaeologists come to enter the speciality, then learn how to do, think through, and communicate the discipline. They are the bridge not simply between academic and non-academic audiences, but also between specialists themselves. Media are often our first encounter with the field and with subsequent fieldwork output, so to consign their discussion to the conclusion (in the vein of an afterthought) or to pop culture (as if such a bounded and prejudiced category of humanity exists) guarantees that they will continue to be marginalised within the subject area.

It is no wonder, then, that media archaeologists themselves might not routinely turn to archaeology for insight. Archaeologists have often not challenged the flattened conception of their own discipline that circulates within both the archaeological and the media archaeological scholarship, and as such, there continues to be a need to robustly map out the productive, multi-stranded, impossibly entangled relationships between media and archaeology. In doing so, that map must attend to what media archaeologists are themselves scrutinising. This means asking questions about how archaeologists construct knowledge about media; how these media reverberate back into the construction of archaeological knowledge itself; how archaeological analysis can constructively contribute to media archaeologies, and how media archaeologies might themselves enable archaeologists to rethink their subjects.

Many have attempted to define ‘media archaeology’, and despite endless references to its impalpable nature (as an ‘indiscipline’ or ‘travelling discipline’ or a ‘mobile field’ or ‘variantology’, etc.), their definitions tend to rotate around what Cronin (2011) calls efforts to “excavat[e] forgotten, neglected and suppressed media-cultural phenomena, helping us to probe deeper into a culture’s canonized narratives so as to unearth: ‘discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation’ present in all historical analysis (Foucault 2002, 23).” Media archaeologists identify with a range of scholars, including not just Foucault, but Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall McLuhan among others. Their work, as Goddard (2014:3) writes, is effectively a playing around with these multiple streams of enquiry to achieve “a reading of both contemporary media and media history against the grain…a common rejection of dominant teleological accounts of media and technological history.” And, as per Parikka (2012), it often converges around four themes: modernity, cinema, Foucauldian histories of the present, and alternative/alternate/imaginary histories.

As is characteristic of all emerging fields, media archaeology has been subject to a range of critiques, generally centred upon its lack of a cohesive methodological toolkit and an intellectual eclecticism that spins it off in innumerable, often unmanageable directions. Barreneche (2013) describes it as a “rather slippery notion”, Nicoll (2013) as an enigma, Potts (2012) as loose. While many value this “anarchic status” – as praised by Shoback (2011) – suggesting that it is in such disorder that revolution and unanticipated discovery manifest themselves, others – like Goddard (2013) are clear about its faults: “it is debatable whether this in itself is enough to constitute a media archaeological project that is sufficiently systematic to warrant the term, rather than being simply particular or impressionistic.” This lack of systematisation is drawn out in various critiques, which question the methodological rigour of media archaeology and call for deeper consideration of, as Soon (2014) puts it, “what happens when the blackbox is opened.” Elsewhere, Goddard (2014:8) is necessarily critical about media archaeology’s common abandonment of linear temporality and temporal shifts, which “risks becoming only a series of eternal moments of invention…plucked out of the economic, social and technological modes of development they were embedded in and given a semi-eternal status as the great inventions of great men with an undisguised uncritical act of constructing media archaeological heroes.”

There is an irony in the fact that media archaeological work almost always validates itself through reference to its transdisciplinary nature—capitalising on the theoretical and practical toolkits of a range of subjects (e.g., see Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; Parikka in interview with Hertz 2010)—yet virtually never cites archaeology. At the same time, one does wonder if the same critiques might be applied to archaeology, particularly some of the recent archaeological studies of contemporary material culture, including contemporary media. Here we find that some of the methods are no more circumscribed than in media archaeology, and that there is often little evidence of systematisation of archaeological analysis of all media components, comprising their hardware (the material culture of the media object), their discursive content, their interfaces, and – if digital – their code.

Nevertheless, we find the void in knowledge cross-over between archaeology and media archaeology regrettable because, by our reckoning, archaeology has the capacity to flesh out many of the existing instabilities in the media archaeological framework – and vice versa. As Colleen put in it our talk last week at the media archaeologies conference, archaeologists are critically interested in context, what Marshall McLuhan terms a “galaxy or environment” — in the active processes that reshape people and technologies. Similarly, we have a range of standard tools in place to enable robust interrogation of such contexts. Moreover, archaeology’s alliance with the media archaeological framework has constructive epistemological consequences for both fields of practice. Such consequences are already hinted in the existing ‘archaeological media archaeology’ scholarship, including studies by Christine Finn, Cassie Newland, Rodney Harrison, Mark Edmonds and Chris Witmore (see Angela Piccini’s summary of these projects in the abstract for the Media Archaeology’s conference session).

One of the only literal excavations of media that we are aware of in the published archaeological literature is Moshenska’s (2014) excavation of a memory stick, brilliantly encapsulated in a self-authored comic strip (which, again, demonstrates the media-dynamic expertise of archaeologists), and documented in the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology. During routine excavations, Mosheska’s team uncovered a USB stick 30cm below ground. They sent the stick to a University College London conservator, then plugged it into the computer and went through the files, noting that it was a mix of schoolwork, porn, and music, probably belonging to a male school student. As Moshenska writes,

“I predict that in the near future we will, by necessity, look to the specialist field of digital data recovery for skills, analogies and analytical concepts to borrow, just as we have already borrowed from fields such as forensic science and performance art… Archaeologists studying the digital world will need to draw on these [librarianship, archiving] fields of expertise, as well as the experience and abilities of computer scientists and data recovery experts, if we want to even begin to make sense of this vast and intricate body of knowledge.”

I would extend his comments to suggest that we can also work productively with media archaeologists, and they with us, because – in combination – these fields are well-poised to drive forward (digital) media theorising and practice. As Colleen outlined at our conference talk, amongst many things, archaeologists bring with them:

• a rigorous methodology based in documentation, one that encourages and hones attention to detail, to mundanities, to careful, long term and systematic study of minutiae and the everyday via embodied process
• an emphasis on recording observations through such embodied process (including drawing); as archaeology is a destructive practice, preservation via record is a priority
• a focus on fieldwork, situated learning, and collaborative knowledge generation through team work, including extended periods of time over multiple seasons attending to a task via collective practice; this routine and familiarity provide a distinct depth of knowledge (sensory knowledge, historical knowledge, collective knowledge); such practice also appreciates that group participation and the valuing of multiple perspectives have greater value than independent approaches
• a well-tested, long-term focus on material culture that has generated (or incorporated) tools such as the chaîne opératoire, typological analysis, ethnographic analogy, seriation, object biographies, experimental archaeology, phenomenology, and material sciences

And, for us, media archaeology is especially notable for its:

• explicit, unapologetic concern for the interplay between past, present, future; its concern for critique, political commentary, and social change
• valuing of play, performance, exploration, messiness, chaos; its willingness to embrace, rather than dismiss or supress confusion
• overt efforts to decentre and defamiliarise common interpretations
• concern for storytelling and narrative-building about media objects and media effects/affects

What is arguably needed now is a rigorous research design and adapted methodological toolkit to pull these fields together and provide a baseline against which similar studies in the future might be built, critiqued, shaped or otherwise positioned.

Stay tuned!

On Friday my colleague, Dr Colleen Morgan, and I will be co-delivering a paper at the University of Bradford’s Archaeologies of Media and Film conference in Bradford, UK. For anyone not familiar with the still-emerging field of “media archaeology,” this is an exciting event, featuring some of its pivotal thinkers (e.g. Jussi Parikka, Thomas Elsaesser), and a diversity of researchers discussing everything from 19^th century stereoscopy to statistical diagrams and animated GIFs. As the organisers stated in their Call for Papers, the conference is a gathering of various interests, all converging on “an approach that examines or reconsiders historical media in order to illuminate, disrupt and challenge our understanding of the present and future.”

Colleen and I are talking on the last day, in the last block of parallel sessions, in a line-up of speakers who appear to be the only other archaeologists at the event. While I’ll delve into the details of “media archaeology” in a subsequent post, it is notable that archaeologists effectively never feature in this stream of enquiry. Rarely do archaeologists or heritage specialists attempt to overtly insert themselves into the media archaeological discourse (Pogacar 2014 is arguably one exception), and neither do media archaeologists typically reach out to archaeology for intellectual or methodological contributions (but see Mattern 2012, 2013; Nesselroth-Woyzbun 2013). Indeed, the media archaeological literature has explicitly distanced itself from archaeology, with the editors of one keystone volume writing:

“Media archaeology should not be confused with archaeology as a discipline. When media archaeologists claim that they are ‘excavating’ media—cultural phenomena, the word should be understood in a specific way. Industrial archaeology, for example, digs through the foundations of demolished factories, boarding-houses, and dumps, revealing clues about habits, lifestyles, economic and social stratifications, and possibly deadly diseases. Media archaeology rummages textual, visual, and auditory archives as well as collections of artifacts, emphasizing both the discursive and the material manifestations of culture. Its explorations move fluidly between disciplines…” (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011).

I’ve been curious about this trend of archaeology-free media archaeology for a while now, particularly after attending Decoding the Digital last year at the University of Rochester (see Matthew Tyler-Jones’ excellent review of the meeting in two parts: I and II). At this conference, one of the attendees with an obvious media archaeological bent lamented the difficulties of studying abandoned virtual worlds wherein direct identification of human beings was essentially impossible (for all that was left in these worlds were fleeting digital traces). The implication was that few methodologies were available to negotiate this seemingly hopeless interrogative exercise.

However, to an archaeologist, the study of abandoned worlds is an everyday affair—and an exciting and hope-filled one at that. Our work is complicated by the fact that these worlds aren’t actually abandoned, but part of complex and ongoing histories of creation, use, reuse, discard, interference, reworking and appropriation. To manage these complexities, we have accumulated massive epistemological and practical toolkits, honed over centuries in collaboration with a variety of interdisciplinary agents—both human and non-human. I wondered, and I continue to wonder, why our toolkits thus wouldn’t be the go-to points for anyone researching such issues. I am suspicious that the disconnect here lies in the narrow academic appreciation of what archaeologists do.

My curiosity about these issues is further heightened by a lot of reading that I’ve been doing lately about expertise with digital media, the future of (digital) knowledge, and what it means to nurture intellectual change and experimentation. In his recent Theses on the Epistemology of the Digital, Alan Liu, in an attempt to provide provocative points of development for the new Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge, suggests that

“digital age humanities scholars should be encouraged to complement their dominant discourse with other kinds of discourse – including challenging collaborative work, difficult and innovative acts of data collection and analysis, and research outputs…that do not sum up in a critical/interpretive monograph. The other proposition is that…scholars should not be engaging solely in discursive acts at all. Instead, it is already clear in the field of the digital humanities…that a gestalt-shift is underway that recasts acts of discourse as acts of “making” and “building.”

Earlier in these theses, Liu indicates that “A key test for the proposed Centre for Digital Knowledge…will be whether it is willing at least on occasion to accommodate non-standard forms of knowledge organization, production, presentation, exploration, and dissemination acclimated to the digital age or open to its networked ethos”, and he concludes by noting that “Whatever the program, the goal is to engage the topic of what it means to “know” in the digital age in a spirit of serious play – at once disciplined and exploratory of new paradigms.”

By my reckoning, if such propositions are truly indicative of the future of (digital) knowledge, then archaeology is already at the vanguard, as this is exactly what many archaeologists do – and have long done. Indeed, many of our York-based projects have precisely these dimensions, including the recent Heritage Jam, our Heritage and Play sessions, and our annual Heritage Practice field school and Digital Heritage summer school.

By this logic, archaeologists are the prototypical media archaeologists—studying media (in its broad conception, as discursive and material means to a plurality of different ends/processes), inventing and tinkering with media to progress such studies, and skilfully deploying other media to circulate this work. All of the archaeologists whom I consider the catalysers of meaningful change in the discipline are savvy in these multiple lines of media scrutiny and management. I would welcome other examples to add here, but prime cases include Colleen and her pioneering PhD on Emancipatory Digital Archaeology; the research and teaching of digital humanist and archaeologist Shawn Graham, which are premised upon craftwork and nurturing expert capacities to create and experiment; ‘punk archaeologists’ Andrew Reinhard (well known of late for the Atari Landfill excavations) and Bill Caraher; Katy Meyers (of Bones Don’t Lie) and Kristina Killgrove (of Powered by Osteons) whose engagements via blogging and linked social media have had profound reach and impact on a variety of publics; the quartet of archaeological specialists behind the long-needed TrowelBlazers site; Lorna Richardson, Jim Dixon and the Public Archaeology 2015 collaborative, who are collectively testing what it means simply to do archaeology, as they put it, “in ways that make meaning for others”; and Stu Eve, Guy Hunt and the L-P Archaeology team, where commercial archaeology, public knowledge exchange, digital experimentation and theoretical boundary-pushing coincide.

When media archaeologists advocate for an “archeological sensitivity” (Snickars and Vonderau 2012, 5) but without reference to the sensitivities that archaeologists themselves have refined over hundreds of years of practice, I do suspect a rather ungenerous academic rejection of (or, at least, an illiteracy in) our discipline. By the same token, when Colleen and I discussed the cross-fertilisation that could come about through knowledge sharing between archaeology and media archaeology, it became obvious that our methodologies might not be entirely legible to media archaeologists, nor amenable to certain artefacts (including many communications technologies) that should actually be standard units of study in our discipline.

Over the next few weeks on Savage Minds, in what we consider to be a style true to our conception of ‘media archaeology’ (developed in conversation between multiple people and things, focused on discursive and material enquiry into a specific media artefact, and elaborated through online mediated dialogue), Colleen and I will lay down a methodology for literally excavating media objects. We will provide further context on the nature of “media archaeology”; make clear some of the practices of archaeology that we consider to be unique to the discipline and deeply (although not unproblematically) linked to innovation and intellectual transformation; outline a research design, methodological tools, and a traceable procedure for digging into media artefacts; and then present for comment, critique, refinement and reconfiguration our preliminary efforts at the excavation of one such artefact: a discarded hard drive.

Alongside critical consideration of ethics, impact, digital labour, community, making and craft, this is a trial run at an archaeological media archaeology. We aim to complicate and elaborate our understandings of what archaeologists do, open up a conversation about the potentialities and promise that lie at the core of excavation, and invest collectively in the playful, energising, fundamentally collaborative practice that is archaeological fieldwork.

LAURA FORLANO. writer and design researcher.

WHAT I DO.

I’m an ethnographic time traveler. For much of the last 10 years, I’ve been studying the ways in which the use of communication technology enables emergent socio-cultural practices around working and living in cities. For example, I’m interested in peer-to-peer networking, bottom-up organizing, co-located online collaboration, user-driven social innovation and open source urbanism, to name just a few. I’ve watched teens use mobile phones in Tokyo, observed activists building Wi-Fi networks on rooftops in Berlin, interviewed freelancers in Starbucks cafes in New York, watched doctors use computers in operating rooms, tested iPhone applications for navigating college campuses, visited design studios in Barcelona, and hung out with hackers in Budapest.

I’m also an activist. I’m not satisfied with merely describing the lived experience of socio-technical change through writing. I’m critical of the metaphors that the mainstream media uses to frame discussions about the interplay between technology, culture, and cities. For example, “Smart Cities” are often described as productive, efficient, and innovative, a continuation of neo-liberal discourses around technology and the economy. I’m concerned about the kinds of values that we embed in socio-technical systems, the opportunities that we bring to life, but also the possibilities that we take away by making these choices.

And I’m a maker. Most often, I’m making something that involves people. A workshop, a research salon, a lecture series. I think that part of my learning to work as a design researcher is related to learning how to facilitate face-to-face, hands-on workshops. I’ve run at least seven design workshops in the past year in order to bring together different communities of scholars, practitioners, activists, and makers. For example, in one workshop for a health-focused summer program in Brooklyn, four small groups of teens created stakeholder maps, discussed the values associated with a specific health topic (e.g.,obesity or HIV), and prototyped ideas for new platforms, products, and services. One group wrote the lyrics to a song about future technologies that they might use at the dentist, another wrote the script for a play about HIV, another created a Lego model of community health services and, finally, another created a series of iPad wireframes for a new application.

Luckily, design is a field in which all of these identities–scholar, activist and maker–can coexist. In fact, I believe that all of these are necessary in order to combine a reflective and critical social science perspective with a future-oriented generative process that results in some kind of change in the world. This can sometimes be mistaken for a kind of technological determinism. Yet if you are asking critical questions along the way and have a keen sense of the values trade-offs that you are making, I am hopeful that it is possible to create new ways of knowing things, doing things, and making things that can contribute to the world.

ANTHROPOLOGY + DESIGN.

Anthropology and design have been in dialogue for several decades, but one of the most obvious examples is in the human-centered (or user-centered) design research tradition. This tradition is based on empathy and primary research through field studies and qualitative interviews as a fundamental starting point for a design research project. Design, in this case, is not about the aesthetic qualities of a particular logo, product, service, or system but about its ability to serve user needs and develop solutions.

The shift toward a human-centered approach has been an important one for many companies attempting to innovate through the creation of new products and services. This approach was pioneered by anthropologists and sociologists working in the Bay Area at companies, such as Xerox PARC and IBM, in the 80s and 90s to design computer interfaces. More recently, companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and Yahoo! continue to employ social scientists, designers, as well as people with hybrid skill sets, such as interaction design, in order to conduct user research. Over the past two decades, many design consulting firms that originally focused on industrial design such as IDEO, frog design, and Smart Design have promoted the use of a human-centered approach based on design research. One of the main professional conferences that bring together practitioners and academics working in the field of user research is EPIC, now in its 10th year.

One thing that I think anthropologists might learn from design is the idea of creating a more generative form of critique that makes the project better. In design, a critique is not a peer review, it is a collaboration. I recently got peer review comments back from a design journal and was surprised at the level of engagement with the work in a very deep, helpful, generative and productive manner. Often, in my experience, peer review in the social sciences is more about defining a field by policing insiders and outsiders. A more generative conversation, starting with “Yes, and” rather than “But” could help all of us do better work. Also, in the model of a design critique, it is possible to guide the conversation to focus only on certain aspects of the work such as the style or the content or the process. Adopting and/or developing a design critique model in anthropology might be a productive and interesting direction.

Another thing that I think anthropologists might draw from design is experimentation with more collaborative ways of working in teams, from graduate school though faculty positions and professional practice. In graduate school, I did very few team projects for courses and, at the time, there were not any opportunities to participate in collaborative research projects in my department. In addition, there is a lot of emphasis on doing your own project, collecting your own data and writing it up on your own. Since becoming a faculty member in a design school, I’ve seen the many ways in which student teams collaborate successfully and, sometimes, unsuccessfully. It is always exciting to see students working together to achieve a common goal.

Designers would benefit from a more rigorous incorporation of theories of culture as well as a more in-depth understanding of ethnographic research methods. Finally, while anthropologists are skilled storytellers through text, photography, and film, designers are trained in visual storytelling that includes images, charts, graphs, and artifacts. Greater collaboration across literary and visual traditions would result in better storytelling in both fields.

WHY NOW.

The human-centered design tradition is already built considerably on anthropology through the appropriation of field research and ethnographic methods (to the dismay of many anthropologists!). But a deeper engagement between design and anthropology might allow anthropologists to explore broader implications of their work beyond the academy through exhibits, artifacts, and workshops that engage different communities.

Human “needs” have been the focus of design work for far too long and we are beginning to see the planetary limits of our unevenly distributed needs. It is important to go beyond the human-centered focus and towards a perspective in which it is possible to empathize with and see the world through the lens of other kinds of entities (e.g., objects, artifacts, animals, nature, and the environment). While there are many design frameworks that break up the world into discrete categories for observation, it is time that we consider hybrid categories as new ways of seeing. For example, what of the human-object and the animal-technology? I’ve tried to do this by introducing new terms by which to understand these hybrid categories. For example, in one project, after studying Wi-Fi networks, community activists and mobile workers in a range of settings were struggling with ways to describe socio-technical and spatial phenomenon. I created the term codescapes as a way of referring to technological and spatial things simultaneously.

HOW I SHARE.

I use design to engage with broader and different audiences beyond academic journals. One of the things that I learned from the Breakout! project is how difficult it is to engage the public on the streets of New York in spontaneous collaborative activities. The project was unique in that it was the only project in the The Architecture League of New York’s Towards the Sentient City exhibition that was specifically about people’s behavior and emergent forms of collaboration. The other projects were about the display of specific artifacts in the built or natural environment (e.g., garbage, plants, fish, street furniture).

In the codesign project about urban technology, my collaborator and I, along with the help of several graduate students at the Institute of Design, produced a visual “Designing Policy” toolkit. We introduced participants to the intersection of urban technology, values in design, and co-design methods. The toolkit was a prototype, a visual artifact that contains a theoretical argument and a methodological approach, as my colleague Stan Ruecker and his coauthor Alan Galey have argued here.

Since the social sciences are still primarily focused on the book or the journal article as the primary mode of dissemination, recognition, and publication, I have found that design offers a wide range of more visual modes such as exhibitions, artifacts, and workshops through which to engage communities. Lastly, I have found short articles and blog posts on scholarly blogs like Savage Minds, Culture Digitally, and Ethnography Matters to be an engaging and fast way of disseminating ideas and learning about relevant communities of practice.

METHODOLOGY.

It is difficult to be critical and descriptive as a scholar while at the same time generative and future-oriented as a maker, all along maintaining a strong sense of core values as an activist. Yet this is exactly what is needed in order to develop a methodology that more deeply combines design and anthropology. In many ways, these three different mindsets are at odds with one another: the analytical mind of a social scientist, the exploratory mind of an artist, and the action-oriented mind of an activist.

Our institutions, academic or otherwise, do not allow use to cross these boundaries easily. I think that designers could benefit from a deeper and more rigorous engagement in the context of their projects, but this does not necessarily need to be through conducting fieldwork with ethnographic observations and interviews. What is more important is that designers know how to combine different methodologies in order to answer their research questions. For example, they need to know how to use secondary data, how to understand broader shifts in society, how to derive design principles from a range of sources. That is important.

I draw a lot of inspiration from generative, future-oriented methods such as design fiction, critical design, and speculative design. These methods were pioneered by London-based designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Royal College of Art in the 1990s. (For examples, see their new book Speculative Everything). These methods draw on critical traditions from art and architecture over the last century, such as surrealism and situationism, to use design as a means to ask questions, seek out alternative possible futures, and intervene in society through the creation of material artifacts.

While critical design has been criticized as elitist and apolitical, the purpose of these methods is to pose questions about alternative future possibilities, often in the form of dystopias. When you encounter critical design projects, your first reaction might be to laugh but you quickly encounter a sense of wonder, surprise, horror, or fear about the state of the human condition.

PEDAGOGY.

In my teaching, I encourage students to conduct fieldwork but I also believe that they can draw on their own experiences and still create very interesting work. By conducting ethnographic observations, they can become the creators and owners of their own data rather than believe that experts are the only people that can create knowledge.

But, overall, I’m more interested in fostering discussions of theory that allow my students to develop a more critical view of the world around them in order to inform their process of documenting, analyzing, and making. In order to design in and for a world of emerging technologies, it is necessary to be both skeptical and optimistic. By remaining skeptical, designers can be more aware of the ways in which sociopolitical values are embedded in design.

In my teaching, I encourage students to create artifacts that raise important questions around emerging technologies, such as cultured meat and networked objects. Some examples include a dynamic lighting system such as Philips Hue or a thermostat like Nest that is controlled by an iPhone application, commonly referred to as the ‘internet of things’ type projects. For the cultured meat project, my students created an event called “Meat Up: A Cultured Evening” that included a mini-exhibition of a series of artifacts where they asked participants to document their reactions in a small booklet and hosted a dinner party in order to spur conversation about cultured meat.

ME.

Laura Forlano is a writer, design researcher, and founder of Mobile Atelier. She is an Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Previously, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2012-2013. Her research is focused on the intersection between emerging technologies, material practices, and the future of cities. She is co-editor with Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement (MIT Press 2011). Forlano’s research and writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals including First Monday, The Information Society, Journal of Community Informatics, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Design Issues and Science and Public Policy. She has published chapters for books including editor Mark Shepard’s Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space (MIT Press 2011) and The Architecture League of New York’s Situated Technologies pamphlet series and is a regular contributor to their Urban Omnibus blog. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

RESOURCES.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Digital Fabrication and Hybrid Materialities. Culture Digitally. December.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design? Ethnography Matters. September.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Making Waves: Wireless Technology and the Coproduction of Place. First Monday, Special Issue on “Media and the City.”

Foth, M. and Laura Forlano, Martin Gibbs and Christine Satchell. 2011. From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Forlano, Laura. 2009. WiFi Geographies: When Code Meets Place. The Information Society 25:1-9.

Forlano, Laura. 2009. Work and the Open Source City. Urban Omnibus, The Architecture League of New York. New York, NY. June.

Conferences are of a very limited utility but a utility nonetheless. You should still go but only to select, useful, and economically fair events. Let’s break it down. There are three economic types of conferences:

1) The first is the “extortion conference” illustrated by research society wide events with hundreds or more participants. The fees are high and the locations are the most expensive in the world. Most graduate students and assistant professors cannot afford these conferences. With limited university support they can attend one of these a year, if that. My call is to cease participation in these types of conferences. They are of a very limited use on the CV, for networking, or experience.

2) The second is the “free conference” with no fee, where you can attend and participate but you are required to pay your travel and lodging. With limited university support you can almost pay for all of the travel and lodging. Attend these conferences only if they provide valuable networking and publishing experience. I only go to these if they are small, defined by less than 40 people and/or have a plan for post-conference publication of a book or special journal edition. Then it is useful for you and you don’t have to pay the extortion conference fee. These conference organizers have done their work finding university patronage to pay for space rental and didn’t pass the cost onto you.

3) Thirdly, there is  the “all expenses conference.” Here the conference organizers will pay travel, lodging, and conference fees. These are rare but if you are patient and continue in academia you can find 1-2 of these a year–which is about all the conferences you need a year. They are small and rewarding and free. It may take them a month to pay you back based on receipts and therefore they leave you with £1000 less for a month, which can be difficult, but the money will return.

The extortion conference system is like publishing in the physical sciences–they will publish your personally subsidized work at a profit only after you pay them. In the social sciences, we rarely encounter a journal requiring payment (except see American Ethnologist) but the system is the same. The extortion conference system, like the proprietary closed door publishing system, thrives on personal economic subsidization and relies upon a now-absent university patronage. Both systems negate open sharing of information. Proprietary academic publishing puts our research behind gates and firewalls and extortion conferences make it economically impossible to share our work in their closed and cold hotel basements. Both systems are economically classed: proprietary publishing and extortion conferences both reward those who can pay to play.

We must break the back of this free labor system. Stop paying conference fees.

Over the past year, I’ve had to carefully consider the meaning of “selling out”.

Of my blogger colleagues, I’m probably the farthest removed from academia – or, at least I’m moving in that general direction. This certainly does not mean I’m abandoning research, quite the opposite in fact. It does, however, mean that I’ve all but given up on the idea of staying in academia and searching out a tenure-track position. For the time being, anyway. Instead, I’m looking to transition into the corporate world, but ideally in a way which would allow me to still do interesting ethnographic research. But, before I get ahead of myself, let me explain a little bit about my background and current position.

In 2011, I wrapped up my doctoral degree in STS – the first to graduate from my program under the soft four-year deadline slowly hardening under increasing institutional pressures. For years, I had labored, perhaps delusionally, under the hopes that if I was working on a “hot” and highly visible topic a job would simply materialize by the time I reached the end of the doctoral plank. For me, that topic was youth Internet safety. I developed my dissertation research with jobs beyond academia in mind, and deliberately built into the project opportunities to meet with school administrators across New York, in the hopes of expanding my contact network for eventual consulting work. I envisioned possibilites in state government, doing technology policy work. I thought I could even keep writing, given the two freelance books already under my belt.

The imagined job never really materialized. Between the economic downturn and my failure to anticipate what I’ve come to describe and recognize in others as post-dissertation slump, things simply stalled out. My dissertation research panned out in a way that made consulting difficult – schools want someone to come in and talk to kids about cyberbullying, not so much someone to tell them that the idea of cyberbullying is fundamentally problematic. State positions dried up during budget cutbacks, and I never really figured out how to get into a position that would allow me to write policy briefings. In terms of more writing, merely considering the idea of returning to Internet safety issues after almost a decade of research on the topic made me nauseous.

Thankfully, the unofficial departmental safety net sprung into action, and I was hired on as an adjunct to teach two courses per semester. Deepa mentioned that adjuncting “ain’t no fun at all,” but my experience was a little different, despite the fact that I dreaded the idea of teaching from the start. Once I got over the neurotic terror – “What the hell am I going to talk about for 4 hours a week?!?” – things went really well. Sure, the pay was terrible and I was excluded from faculty governance, but I also had reduced responsibility and a level of insulation. I could focus on teaching, and engage with departmental politics more or less on my terms. After the first semester, I managed to garner something of a student fan base, and I was offered the opportunity to develop and teach a class based on my dissertation (Youth and Teens Online). I had a great time, was tremendously lucky, and the students loved the course. For me, it offered not only an easy return to my work, but also numerous opportunities to see it from new perspectives and to reflect on my own ethnographic practices – a topic I’ll return to in later posts.

But, my time as an adjunct came at a cost. I find myself in a position where only one thing really matters – a stable and livable paycheck. Despite the fact that the department wants to keep me around as an adjunct, I simply can’t afford to stay, particularly when faced with newly activated student loan costs, rising costs of living, and the realities of adjunct salaries. While pay is the issue that keeps me up at night, I also find myself frequently considering my social status as an adjunct. I can critique gender roles and class status all day, and my wife, family and friends are all tremendously supportive, but none of that allows me to simply ignore the tropes/positions of “deadbeat husband” and “professional student.”

Obviously, I’m on the job market, if a very small one. My wife and I purchased a home here in Upstate NY when I started my doctoral work, she is doing her own doctoral work (and working full time) locally, and our families live nearby. In other words, the price of moving for an academic position is simply too high, particularly when considered against often temporary, contract or low-paying jobs. As teaching locally full-time (or sustainably part-time) ceases to be a possibility, I have increasingly positioned myself as what my former committee member Kim Fortun described as a “methods man.” Qualitative and quantitative research methods skills are in demand, particularly in a corporate world increasingly focused on data mining, niche marketing, and forecasting. Market research firms, strategic consulting firms, and various media industries all need researchers, and typically offer salaries which are far beyond what can be found in entry-level tenure track positions.

In some ways, I find the range of opportunities available to me to be liberating. There are genuinely interesting ethnographic research projects to be had out there, and while I don’t want to over idealize, I’m willing to bet that corporate research has a slightly higher chance of actually being used for business and policy decisions. I’m even finding calls for positions – both in the corporate and non-profit realms – which are looking specifically for Internet safety experts. That said, there’s still something a little unsettling about considering a corporate position.

So, this is where I’m going to focus the posts that follow – what ethnographic research is coming to mean to me as an individual in a state of employment limbo, between the academic and corporate worlds. Because I’m not really actively doing research at the moment, my discussion will focus a little more on my experiences with the job search and the anxieties that come with considering research outside of traditional academic channels and support networks. Next up, a return to selling out, from Goldman Sachs to Human Terrain…

Nathan Fisk is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Science and Technology Studies department at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he teaches Sociology, and Youth and Teens Online. His research has focused primarily on issues of youth Internet safety, although he has been occasionally been known to make vaguely interesting statements concerning video games, childhood, digital democracy, and hacking. He is the author of two books, “Understanding Online Piracy,” and “Digital Piracy.”

In this discussion by and about anthropologists working at the boundaries of academia, a reasonable place to start is with a statement of academic situatedness.  But in academia today—and especially on its sidelines—talking about situatedness can be tricky business.  In the traditional U.S. academic trajectory with a tenured academic position as the ultimate goal, a simple name, rank, and affiliation answer was sufficient and expected. Moreover, that small piece of information could offer a good amount of information about one’s intellectual pedigree and leanings, relative degree of success, and likely fields of expertise. For so many today, though,  both within academia in contingent positions and those working outside of academia, describing one’s institutional situadedness requires qualifiying language of  temporality, multiplicity, and fluidity. These qualifications we make, offered apologetically or not, stem, I believe, from the gap between the reality of academic careers in the U.S. today and the ideal(ized) traditional tenure-track career trajectory, which we still hold as the norm.  This despite the fact that those with tenure and on the tenure-track comprise a distinct minority of faculty in U.S. colleges and universities. Recent statistics and studies indicate that somewhere between 65% and 75% of all faculty in U.S. colleges and universities are in part-time or adjunct positions while only 25%-30% are tenured or on the tenure track. And these numbers do not account for those who went into academe aspring to careers that looked like those of their own professors and mentors, but who now work fully or partly outside of academia. The next few weeks will take up these issues as they pertain to the field of anthropology and the practice of ethnography, and in doing so will offer ideas about centers and margins, success and failure, and tradition and innovation.

First, though, a quick look to my academic and professional trajectory, offered as a kind of case study.  After getting an undergraduate degree in anthropology (with a big dose of dance thrown in), I decided to work for a year or two before going for my doctorate in anthropology.  At the encouragement of an esteemed professor, I applied to work in the Dance Program at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), attracted by the possibility of immersion in a completely different world. Months went by with no word from the NEA. I took that as a sign that I’d better get on with the grad school plan without the detours,  so I applied to doctoral programs in anthropology.  Mere days before replies were to go out from graduate programs and almost a year after applying to the NEA, I was called down to Washington, D.C. for a job interview.  I was offered and accepted the job, deferred my acceptance into Rice University’s Cultural Anthropology Ph.D. program, and stayed at the NEA for a year and a half. It was the right move—not only did I learn about arts funding, concert dance in the U.S., and how to work outside of an academic environment, I also gathered information for my eventual doctoral disseration, a multi-site ethnography on contemporary dance in the U.S. which included the NEA as one of the field sites.  (The other field sites were dance organizations and communities of dancers in New York City, where I moved to do fieldwork  in 1997 and have never left.)

So, finally, my qualified, contingent answer about professional situatedness: right now, I’m an adjunct assistant professor at New York University; a humanities scholar with The Paul Taylor Dance Company; a freelance academic editor; and a consultant/collaborator with various choreographers and visual artists.  At other times, I’ve also worked as a market research ethnographer (more on this next week); an adjunct professor at two other New York City colleges; and, for three years, as a post-doctoral teaching fellow at NYU’s John Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought.

With all of these multiple and contingent roles, what and where are the constants? How and where do I (and we all) locate ourselves from moment to moment and from gig to gig? For me, rootedness in a particular place has been one part of the answer, and a clear antidote to vocational precariousness.  To wit, all of these various undertakings took place in the city I moved to over a decade ago to do fieldwork on the professionalization of contemporary U.S. choreographers. In addition to spatial rootedness, my own intellectual training and projects are what orients and guides me, a fact that I would venture holds true for most of us, on the academic sidelines or not.  For me, ethnographic ways of seeing and knowing serve as an internalized intellectual compass. Similarly, ongoing fieldwork with choreographers–including sustained conversations, the questions we ask of one another, and what we learn from one another—serves as a constant (albeit evolving) practice.  These elements—my training and my own work—are what I carry with me on my peregrinations through academic, corporate and non-profit arts worlds, even when I am not hired to do or teach ethnography per se.

In the weeks that follow, I’ll say more about working as an anthropologist and ethnographer outside of academic contexts and as a contingent worker within academia, and will offer concrete examples of how ethnography gets shaped and deployed in these contexts.  Next week, I’ll talk about my work as an ethnographic market researcher and examine how ethnography was understood and practiced in this context.  In the third week, I’ll talk more about my original research with contemporary choreographers, focusing on the parallels and divergences in how deprofessionalization occurs in academia and in the experiences of the choreographers I study.  Here I’ll also discuss the neoliberal jargon of flexibility and free agency and suggest ways in which seeing professionals (whether dancers or anthropologists) as “bodies for hire” may affect the nature and quality of the art and knowledge produced. In the final week, I loop back to academia and discuss how  I teach fieldwork methods and workplace anthropology to undergraduates doing unpaid internships in for-profit companies as well as in non-profit and in governmental organizations.  I’ll consider not only how to supply students with ethnographic  tools and methods, but also how to help them orient themselves ethically and intellectually within a work environment.  Finally, I also briefly interrogate the role of the internship in undergraduate study in the U.S. and argue that it is of a piece with the general environment of precarity and deprofessionalization in which knowledge workers exist today.

Laurel George is an adjunct assistant professor in New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Gallatin Division, as well as a humanities scholar with The Paul Taylor Dance Company. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Rice University in 2002.

Note: Updated on 7/27/2012 with links to all posts contributed as part of this series; please see below. With thanks to Savage Minds admins and readers for a fantastic four weeks.

The idea for this group guest blog on Savage Minds began serendipitously, as I suppose many projects do, with random conversations in hallways or after talks—this time, after a talk I’d just delivered at Rice University’s Department of Anthropology. I’d been asked for material by which to introduce me anew in the place where I grew (professionally) up, to the new students and faculty who had joined after I’d left. I offered the following bits, alongside my CV: after 10 years as tenure-track and then tenured faculty at UH-Clear Lake, I relocated to India in 2008; I continue to work for the University of Houston, however: I teach as an adjunct online and I serve as UH’s liaison in India in an administrative/ counseling/ recruitment-oriented role; I look increasingly to collaborations as the means to make ethnographic research viable, from where I now am situated. A series of conversations with friends and colleagues ensued, face-to-face and virtual, each considering situations such as my own as raising important and increasingly relevant questions about the production of ethnography in the intellectual spaces that line the margins of the academy.

Humph, I remember thinking, but of course. I’d been so immersed in making this relocation to India work as smoothly as it would with a husband still in Houston and a family to care for on my own in India, suddenly a single parent of a sort keeping my professional connections alive and my own research going—so much a participant in this process had I been, I’d neglected any observation/ reflection on what sort of intellectual space it was that I was now occupying, even myself creating, and within which I was attempting to (re-)create “ethnography.” And not just me, but so many colleagues and friends, people I knew and those I’d heard about, who’d left the academy but kept tethers to it, or who’d finished graduate studies and were struggling to get back in on firmer, more independent footing. What might a wider conversation on the precarities of the discipline look like—particularly when we think about just what sorts of intellectual spaces of production are produced as a result? What would ethnography produced from such spaces come to look like?

And so was born, longer story cut short, the conversation to unfold on Savage Minds all July.

Each of our six participants in this guest group blog will offer a take on the relationship between precarity and the production of ethnography in the coming weeks, working our way from the dilemmas of institutional situatedness, through those of fieldwork and writing, to discussing what “ethnography” happens from these sorts of spaces. Our own conversation has developed on email over the past few months, and the narrative unfolding here naturally reflects this behind-the-scenes progression. We agreed on four prompts (copied below) to order discussion–though in the end we stuck to them as much as we used them as springboards to explore other directions. What has emerged, what will appear in the coming weeks on Savage Minds, is a somewhat serialized commentary that is at once self-sufficient and waiting for resolution in subsequent posts. The catalogs of experience and example we compile will not be exhaustive by any means. But it is our hope that they will spur much wider discussions of these on-the-sidelines conditions and how ethnography happens in/from these spaces.

Prompts:

1, Institutional situatedness: Briefly describe your training, career trajectory, and present academic context (funding, access to resources, constraints, advantages etc.). What sort of institutional spaces do temporary/ adjunct/ 1-year positions typically occupy in the academy? How does institutional situatedness generate both a sense of precarity and a space of production?

2, How do the conditions described in (1) affect the conceptualization of your ethnographic projects? Has fieldwork approximated the classic models of lengthy cultural immersion—to what extent does such a model remain viable? How is it changing? What are the disciplinary or structural frameworks (limitations, parameters) that have generated your research questions and defined your methodological design?

3, What would you say is the relationship of form to content—your particular conditions, within or at a remove from the academy, the nature of prevailing constraints/anxieties/freedoms, to the “ethnographies” that you generate? What sorts of analyses become possible or are cordoned off, what sorts of experimentation, and what theory? What sorts of partnerships or collaborations do you (necessarily) then seek? Are the possibilities for ethnographic/methodological/theoretical innovation broadened or constricted?

4, Finally, the question driving this initiative: is it possible that academic precarity or marginality of one sort or other generates new intellectual possibilities precisely because there is pressing need to make virtue out of necessity?  What sorts of virtues are made of these necessities, and what happens to “ethnography” (as method and as analytical approach) as a result?

Participants & Posts:

• Lane DeNicola, University College, London (UK)

Dude, Where’s my Fieldsite? │News from Lloyd Park │Minding the Gap│Attention Deficit Ethnography

• Nathan Fisk, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA)

Selling Out │ Going Rogue? │ Fighting Back │ Making Do

• Laurel George, New York University (USA)

Fluidity, Multiplicity, Contingency: The Shifting Sands of Knowledge Work │ The Anthropology of Snacks, Widgets, and Pills: What I Learned from Ethnographic Consumer Research │ Dance Lessons: A Comparison of Precarity and Contingency in Contemporary U.S. Choreography and Ethnography │ Workplace Ethnography 101—Interrogating the Unpaid Internship

• Ali Kenner, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA) & Managing Editor, Cultural Anthropology

Caring for Our Sidelines │ Making Ethnography Work │ Ethnography’s Sense │ Writing Space for Ethnography

• Aalok Khandekar, Maastricht University (The Netherlands)

Transnationalism, Interdisciplinarity, Collaboration (Or, A Few First Words on Ethnography On/From the Sidelines) │ The Allure of the Transnational? │ Annual Identity Crisis

• Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston-Clear Lake (USA)

Going Adjunct │ Anthropologists for Hire │ Going Native │ Decentering Writing

Deepa S. Reddy is Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She blogs on food, culture, and gastronomical life on Pâticheri: Ethno.graphic.Food