Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices

In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as “fieldwork devices”―such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms―anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of “experimental collaborations” to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.

Adolfo Estalella is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology and Social Psychology, Complutense University of Madrid. His research focuses on the investigation of grassroots urbanism and digital cultures.

Tomás Sánchez Criado is Senior Researcher at the Chair of Urban Anthropology of the Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-University of Berlin. In the last few years he has worked on urban accessibility activism, and its impact in city-making and ethnographic work.