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<aside> ✔️ Presentation Formats

• Oral presentations should be 20 mins followed by 20 mins for questions.
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<aside> ℹ️ What to expect from this event:

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Tormod Wallem Anundsen Senior Researcher, University of Agder

"Don’t make a project!" – Experiences from trying to develop non-representative forms of student research

Key words: ethnography, crisis, power, non-representational

The paper presents and discusses experiences from an educational project that aimed to "… find ways of engaging with local communities, agents and situations in a non-representative way, which means not just representing local cultures, but to explore the practices of arts, research and education as ways of engaging 'with' rather than making a study ‘of’. ” (Erasmus+ application text, 2019: Encounters through art, ethnography and pedagogy).

Research question

How can researchers and student-researchers develop ethnography and site-specific artistic methodologies as non-representative research?

Theoretical Frame

This paper, and the Encounters project it draws on, takes outset in the crisis of representation in ethnographic research (Clifford, 1988; Smith, 1999). It explores how forms of 'non-representational' approaches (Vannini, 2015) and 'dialogical editing' (Feld, 1990) may develop new ways of doing site-specific participatory research, or enable new relations between researchers, the people they collaborate with, and their exploratory work, whether this exploration is called ‘research’, ‘artistic practice’ or ‘education’.

Methods

The paper presents a type of action-based research, where researchers and students together explored ideas and questions of non-representational site-specific research through a summer course in Lesvos in 2022. It is thus a hands-on action approach to developing the questions & methodologies explored.

Results

With the slogan to ‘not make a project (when you are making a project)’ as a paradoxical point of departure, the results from the investigations contain both a set of student works that exemplify and articulate attempts at developing these methodologies. Furthermore, reflections from teachers/researchers and students highlight how the course itself, as a student-researcher community, becomes part of the response to the methodological problems explored.

Conclusions, applications, or implications

The implications of this research are new models for student-researcher collaboration through and beyond education, as well as proposed models for transparency and collaboration in site-specific creative research.

References

• Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture: Twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Harvard University Press.
• Feld, S. (1990). Sound and sentiment: Birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression. University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books.
• Vannini, P. (2015). Non-representational methodologies: Re-envisioning research. Routledge.

About Tormod

Tormod Wallem Anundsen (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Musicology and Music Education at University of Agder, Norway, where he is also a founding member of the Art and social relations research group. Anundsen has a particular interest in the use of ethnographic methodologies across disciplines, developed through his PhD research on African immigrant musical performers in Norway (2014). Anundsen has headed a transdisciplinary Master’s programme in Arts (music, theatre, visual arts) at UiA from 2011 to 2018, and his current work explores interactions between the practices of arts, research and education.