Events

“Meet the Labs”: Explorations in Ethnographic Practice from Berlin and Quito

Join us on Wednesday, April 14, 2021 from 10:00am-12:00pm EDT for the first event in our new series, “Meet the Labs.” We will be joined by two Ethnography Labs: Stadtlabor for Multimodal Urban Anthropology in Berlin, Germany and the Kaleidos Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography in Quito, Ecuador.

In November 2020, the University of Toronto Ethnography Lab invited some of our sister labs to participate in a virtual roundtable event at the American Anthropology Associations’ “Raising our Voices” annual meeting. The event brought together members of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at University of Pennsylvania, the Center for Ethnography at UC Irvine, and the Ethnography Lab at Concordia University to reflect on the challenges and possibilities of doing ethnography under the shifting, uncertain and unstable conditions. Ethnography Labs and centers often occupy an interstitial place in the academic ecosystem as sites for collaboration, experimentation, and practice outside of departmental programs, relations of supervision, and the university itself.

Our “Meet the Labs” series is an extension of the AAA roundtable where we hope to connect and network with sister labs through a shared passion for ethnographic practice and methods. Together we will explore the possibilities of different organizational and institutional forms for the practice of ethnography. On April 14th, you can expect to hear about the projects and practices of two distinct platforms for ethnographic research taking place at the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Urban Anthropology in Berlin, Germany and the Kaleidos Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography in Quito, Ecuador.

We are excited about the opportunity to build cross-disciplinary relationships through Ethnography with our colleagues in Germany and Ecuador, and we welcome anyone interested in thinking through what Labs have to offer our universities and communities and those would are interested in the important work being conducted at each of these organizations.

Maka Suarez and Jorge Nunez from Kaleidos will present on EthnoData, a multimedia platform that combines ethnographic and statistical data, and the team’s current research—led by Jorge—on prison systems.

Tomas Criado and Ignacio Farias from Stadtlabor will presentation on their project “playing with method,” which entails talking about (a) the project/aspirations of the Stadtlabor as a platform (which already existed at their institute since the mid-2000s, but was revamped in 2018 into a multimodal space of experimentation with forms of public anthropological work together with other urban actors); and (b) why they have come to be interested, amongst other things, in games as peculiar scenographies for fieldwork and public engagement in some of our first actions.

Please register below through Eventbrite. Registrants will receive the Zoom information one day before the event.

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