Ethnographic Futures Methods in the Digital Anthropocene

Type of activity: PhD Course

Title: Ethnographic Futures: Methods in the (Digital) Anthropocene

Organizer(s):
Rachel Douglas-Jones, Associate Professor

Course advertisement:
www.phdcourses.dk

Lecturer(s):
Associate Professor Catherine Trundle, La Trobe University Melbourne
Associate Professor James Maguire, IT University of Copenhagen
Associate Professor Hugo Reinert, IKOS Oslo
Associate Professor Astrid Oberborbeck Anderson, Aalborg University
Professor Ciara Kierans, Liverpool University

Date(s) of the course: (The date of the course is moved to November 2024. The exact date will be updated)

Time: 09:30-16:30

Room:
ETHOS Lab

Course description:
This course asks how climate change and environmental peril alter the ethnographic project. Its aim is to provide students with an overview of the diverse ways in which scholars are adapting, iterating, and reimaging ethnography in the Anthropocene, with particular reference to new sources of data, digital devices and digital logics. 

PhD students working ethnographically on a wide range of topics are welcome: the readings acknowledge that we are all conducting research in a time of climate change and increasing environmental instability, and must all contend with its effects, large and small. As such, places are purposefully not limited to scholars with a focus on climate change topics, multi-species research, or the socio-political life of the Anthropocene concept.

Departing from its focus on method, participants will be encouraged to consider the diverse effects of the Anthropocene across the ethnographic project, from conceptualisation to writing. How does it shape ethnographic practice from the mundane and pragmatic to the theoretical, experimental and creative? What are its effects on devising ethnographic questions and field sites, establishing research relationships, generating fieldnotes and recording experience, or writing, theorising, and collaborating for social change?

Questions we consider can include but are not limited to:

• How does an attention or orientation to the future, to the speculative, or to the predictive reshape the field, our modes of writing, and our ways of asking questions?
  
  
• Through what devices and technologies does scale operate and shift in ethnographic research, writing and theorising within/of the Anthropocene?
  
  
• What are the pragmatic and practical considerations, at an embodied and sensorial level, for conducting research within unstable, even hostile climactic conditions?
  

• How do novel digital sensors and sensing capacities reshape ethnographic relations with interlocutors, including the more-than-human?

• What technologies and techniques do we use to track forces or processes that are beyond our own or our participants’ vision, senses, experiences, imagination, or desire to know?
  

• What and who makes context, in narrative and in framing? How can digital tools can newly participate in ethnographic contextualisation?

• What types of comparisons across time, space and human experience are permissible, who gets to make such comparisons, and whose comparisons count politically?
  
  
• Who/what is an interlocutor and what does it mean practically, to listen, see, empathies, and know our diverse interlocutors?

• How do the goals of ethnography change or remain the same when faced with climate change and environmental decline? Do we get closer to or further from an ethnographic commitment to exploring the diverse ways we can be human? Who is the ‘we’?
  
• Through what devices and mechanisms do we constitute our field sites to incorporate an attention to emergent atmospheric flows, environmental cascades, resources flows and enclosures, and the movement/displacement of people, and the disjuncture between such flows?

• What is happening to the care work of fieldwork? How do we look after ourselves, our families, our friends/participants, and environment during and through ethnographic processes? What are the connections or distinctions between care work, restoration, and custodianship?

The course builds on a special issue edited by Maguire, Anderson and Douglas-Jones (2024), and furthers the Digital Anthropocene collaborative syllabus developed at ETHOS Lab in 2019.

Reading list (indicative):

Andersen, Astrid Oberborbeck, Niks Bubandt and Racher Cypher (eds). Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene: Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds. U Minnesota Press.

Blair, James J. 2022. Tracking penguins, sensing petroleum: “Data gaps and the politics of marine ecoogy in the South Atlantic. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5(1): 60-80.

Creutzig, F. et al. 2022. Digitalization and the Anthropocene. Annual Review of Environment and resources. 47 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-120920-100056

Douglas-Jones et al. 2019. Digital Anthropocene: a collaborative syllabus ETHOS Lab, Copenhagen. https://blogit.itu.dk/ethos/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2020/08/The-Digital-Anthropocene_Final-2020.pdf

Gabrys, Jennifer. 2020. Smart forests and data practices: From the Internt of Trees to planetary governance. Big Data and Society January- June 1-10.  https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720904871

Helmreich, Stefan. 2023. A Book of Waves. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Knox, Hannah. 2021. Hacking Anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27(S1): 108-126 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13483

Reinert, H. Forthcoming. “Fieldwork: Writing (on) a damaged planet” In Cultural History and the Anthropocene: Old Turns, New Encounters. Bloomsbury Press.

Maguire, J, A. O. Andersen and R. Douglas-Jones. 2024.  ‘Approaching Digital Anthropocene(s): A Double Vision’ NatureCulture 6, i-ixi.

Maguire, J., Cyrus Clarke and Monika Seyfried. 2024. Biotechnology and the Climate Emergency: Speculating with Grow Your Own Cloud. NatureCulture 6. https://www.natcult.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/maguire_etal_nc6.pdf

Mirza, Saadia. 2023. ‘Sensing in and Beyond the Digital Anthropocene’ Natureculture 6, pp. 28-47.

Rothe, Delf. 2020. Jellyfish encounters: science, technology and the Anthropocene ocean. Critical Studies on Security  DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2020.1815478

Peterson, Kristin and Valerie Olson. 2024. The Ethnographer’s Way: A Handbook for Multidimensional Research Design. Durham NC: Duke University Press. (selected excerpts)

Vera, Lourdes. 2023. Repairing the Anthropocene: Toward Civic Validity for Environmental Data Justice. NatureCulture 6: 48-79.

Vaughn, Sarah E. 2023. The Limits to Computational Growth: Digital Databases and Climate Change in the Carribean. NatureCulture 6, 1-27.

Venkat, B. 2020. Towards an Anthropology of Heat. Anthropology News  March 12.
https://www.academia.edu/download/62387982/Toward_an_Anthropology_of_Heat___Anthropology_News_-_Bharat_Venkat20200316-27030-z0tymk.pdf                                                                                                                                

Programme: October 3^rd (one day event)
09:30-10:00    Arrival and coffee

10:00-10:30    Welcome and introductions

10:30-12:00    Pecha Kucha from Trundle, Maguire, Anderson, Reinert and Kierans, with questions

12:00-12:45    Lunch

12:45-13:15     Walk and talk to generate questions for discussion

13:15-14:30     PhD student poster presentations, with responses from guests

14:30-14:45    Coffee

14:45-16:00    PhD student poster presentations, with responses from guest

16:00-16:30     Wrap up, exam preparation, farewells

Prerequisites:
Enrolment in PhD program where ethnography is a key method

Assessment:
Submission of 5 page reflection essay, connecting their PhD fieldwork to the question of the course, using course literature to reflect on changes to the ethnographic project.

Credits: 1
[According to ECTS key[1]]

As a rule of thumb, courses of 7.5 ECTS or more must be approved as MSc courses.

Number of hours the student is expected to use on the course:
Participation: 7
Preparation (reading and poster-making): 11
Exam: 10

Participants:
Maximum 12 students
ITU students based in Business IT are the primary target. Students in the Anthropology of Technology network (DFF) will be an additional target group.

How to sign up:

How to sign up:
PhD students will apply with their name, affiliation, PhD title, and 250 words about their project and its connection to the course. The deadline is September 30th, with notifications of places October 2nd. Email materials to Rachel Douglas-Jones rdoj@itu.dk with the email title "Ethnographic Futures"