Collaborative, Experimental, Creative Anthropology in Canada–the making of a research “lab”
Emma Varley’s reflection on CASCA Presents’ third instalment
Located at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Fiona P. McDonald’s Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab operates as a space in which ethnographers can pursue collaborative inquiry, whether in-person or virtually, through use of a diverse suite of technologically mediated tools. Key to the lab’s success is its support of stronger working relationships between scholars, students, and practitioners, whose ethnographies and activism are enriched by creative use of the lab’s many social, material, structural, and digital infrastructures. By also ensuring the lab’s overall accessibility to diverse users within and beyond the academy, the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab prises valuable space for easier and more equitable research.
In detailing the lab’s many achievements in CASCA Presents, Fiona confirms the creativities made possible by digital methodologies and techniques that were once considered ‘unconventional’ by our field. Even more, she shows how the lab and its digital apparatuses afford innumerable empirical and ethical opportunities to better ‘get at’ and convey our rich experiences of ethnography, whether these occur in real-time or virtually. These technologies hold the power to reshape and reinvigorate ethnographic inquiry, revitalize analysis and theorization, and expand anthropologists’ pedagogies and professional practices. Equally, the story of the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab’s research operations and outputs inspires reflexive and critical analysis of the complex ways anthropology keeps pace with technological progress and modalities, and benefits from them.
Fiona’s invited post serves as a call to anthropologists to explore and embrace the many opportunities afforded by multi-modal digital and analog techniques, especially those which are capable of dynamically capturing the more sensorial and experiential – sometimes even ineffable – qualities of social scientific fare.
CASCA members are invited to reflect on how the Lab’s ‘ways of working’ can be harnessed to support ethnographers’ efforts to commit more deeply and imaginatively to creative practices, and forge more fruitful collaborations and community building, within and beyond institutional spaces.
Collaborative, Experimental, Creative Anthropology in Canada–the making of a research “lab”
by Fiona P. McDonald
One approach to anthropology that excites me is finding its static boundaries and creating innovative ways to turn those boundaries into opportunities. One where creativity, collaboration, and experimentation can erupt. My journey to navigate ways past these boundaries led me to realize, as a visual anthropologist with deep theoretical and applied training in material culture, that there is potential when working in critical ways with various modes of analog media and digital tools through curation, research-creation, and arts-based ethnographies.
I began some of my first collaborative work in anthropology by co-curating exhibitions with Ethnographic Terminalia (2009-2019).1 As anthropologists, we were pushing the boundaries of our work to create innovative ways of presenting research using various media, going beyond the traditional conference paper to experiment between art and anthropology. The success of that journey led to the adoption of new conference formats, such as exhibitions and installations (both of which require considerable technical skill), becoming the norm at CASCA and the American Anthropological Association meetings. This productive, transformative shift in experimentation led me to look more deeply at what other institutional forms can be re-imagined as an opportunity. What I saw was the structure of a research lab. And I invite you, now, into my “lab.”
When I joined the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, I began creating the framework for the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab on the unceded and ancestral territory of the Syilx Okanagan people. The lab is not simply infrastructure; it is a ‘living space’; it is one of my collaborators, and I grow through the exchanges that take place with and through the lab every day.
Labs are not new to anthropology in Canada.2 Such spaces are peppered across institutions, and they vary greatly. It is important to recognize that while some labs are organized around different institutional agendas, ethnographic apparatus, or even collections, some labs are centrally funded within departments, and other labs are based around a single researcher’s funding and research program (most often funded through the Canadian Foundation for Innovation). The latter lab type captures my lab and research program on climate justice and social change. We can think of the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab and other labs across the country as vital tools by which Canadian anthropology can unlock new futures and potentialities as we tinker with digital and analog media in meaningful, collaborative, and ethical ways.
Any lab is
a journey for a researcher because building it is iterative from conception (thinking of ways to ensure it is barrier-free and inclusive), through to thinking about the layout of the physical space and selecting materials (such as sustainable equipment). Like all good research project design, the lab requires revisions, sometimes even daily, to ensure it is attuned to current concerns, shifts, and turns in anthropology and does not succumb to any fetishization of “technoscientific praxis” (Takagarawa et al. 2019: 517). I am deeply conscious of the politics entangled with “exploitative and extractivist dynamics that feed our practices of using mobile phones and other technologies for representing knowledge” (Takagarawa et al. 2019: 517). Therefore, I take a critical lens to investigate the software, digital platforms, and tools we engage with in the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab. In building the lab itself, I ensured (and continue to) it exceeded accessibility standards with acoustic treatments, flexible seating, and adaptive lighting for those who visit and work in the lab with different sensory and accessibility needs. Creating a barrier-free lab means also ensuring technologies such as interactive monitors, touch pads, or writable walls in every room can be used by all bodies.
The Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab is innovative because the apparatus of a lab has now become one of my research instruments, acting as both a prototype and a methodological provocation using people’s senses (here, I offer a respectful nod to anthropologist David Howes, who set the stage for sensory scholarship in Canada not only through his writing but with the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University). My lab furthers sensorial engagements in research through the possibility of multiple modes of working, including both digital (VR, AR, filmmaking, etc.) and analog (board games, drawing, etc.) approaches. This curiosity about the affordance of a “lab” leads me daily to think with and through my Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab as something more than brick and mortar. It is a critical part of my reflexive practice where I ask critical questions about what it means to work in an anthropology lab: for instance, there are matters of labour, data management, hospitality, inclusion, decolonizing, privilege, justice, methods, safety, risks, costs, community building, among other realities. From these interrogations, my work ebbs and flows between the lab space and the local and academic communities to create opportunities for new horizons of collaboration in anthropology, which then inform how I train graduate students. Collaborations start in many ways and the lab becomes both an imaginative and physical collaborator to support the projects both intellectually and materially. From this conjointness, the lab itself has become an ongoing research project of mine on critical research spaces, through which researchers are invited to look critically and reflexively at their methods, and also at the situatedness and distribution of the work we do in interdisciplinary ways.
The physical Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab officially became operational in the spring of 2022. As the Director, I organize and host public Events + Experiments focused on methods and practice. Because of the creation of the lab, many unexpected and organic collaborations with other labs, centres, and studios in North America (and hopefully beyond in the years to come!) have started to happen, which I discuss below. I have sensed that there is a hunger among many anthropologists in Canada who have created and direct labs to connect. This speaks to a clarion call in contemporary Canadian anthropology. When we seek new ways of connecting and advancing our methods, we are opening up to the ever-increasing joys that can be found in interdisciplinary research, not in competition, but in collaboration. Through the work of these labs, Canadian anthropology programs and universities can shift their metrics to see that the lone researcher is not the only way to do our work, train our students, and produce publications, and that there are other outputs beyond the monograph, ones where collaboration is celebrated.
Therefore, when labs connect and collaborate, innovation and shifts can happen. For example, in 2022, Kregg Hetherington (PI) and Bart Simon with the Ethnography Lab at Concordia University, Joshua Barker and Andrew Gilbert with the Ethnography Lab at the University of Toronto, Deborah Thomas and Alissa Jordan with the Centre for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania, Andrea Ballestero with the Ethnography Studio at University of Southern California, and my Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, came together with all our graduate students on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Development project. Collectively, we were motivated by an opportunity to cross-pollinate ideas, methods, and support student movement between research spaces and newly created research projects. We set out to build a synergistic network of labs.
From this partnership’s shared passion for experimental methods for ethnographic research, gathering, and exchange, we co-created EMERGE: A Matrix for Ethnographic Collaboration + Practice through which the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab has published a new qualitative method that focuses on drawing you can follow along with here at PROTOCOLS.IO. Additionally, all labs took up looking critically at a range of what we called “Curious Methods” in anthropology—the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab questioned the politics of digital mapping.