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.

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.

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. 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.

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 have started to happen.

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Funding

Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab and its projects discussed here are funded by: The Canadian Funding for Innovation (CFI); the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF); the University of British Columbia, Okanagan (UBCO); the University of British Columbia (UBC) Community-University Engagement (CUES) Fund; UBC ALT-2040; and a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant.