Type of course

The course is compulsory for students admitted to the Master's programme in Visual and Multimodal Anthropology, and open to other Master's level students as an elective course.

It may also be taken as a singular course.

Course content

This is a course introducing students to Multimodal Anthropology.

It reflects recent changes in the cultural and media landscape that we engage with as anthropologists: 1) The democratisation and integration of new technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones; and 2) The shift toward engagement and collaboration in anthropological research, particularly in Indigenous contexts, and the dynamic roles of anthropologist’s vis-a-vis the public and the communities in which they work.

We emphasise that all anthropological research today has an obligation to maintain a dialogue with its "fields" about the development and dissemination of knowledge. Ethnographic action is a concept we want to discuss, to address our field collaborators’ purposes for contributing and collaborating in research projects.

The course will present and discuss various approaches to multimodal research, the use of visual material in processes of elicitation of knowledge and the study of already existing visible culture.

These are approaches which imply both challenges and possibilities for the praxis of ethnographic research and dissemination. Here students will be introduced to the anthropology of the senses and how non-verbal fields of knowledge can contribute to a broadening of communication between informant, researcher and audience, and accordingly also to an enlargement of the scope of the social sciences. Lectures will include case-studies using museum exhibitions, photographs, ethnographic video games, digital ethnographies, interactive documentaries, soundscapes drawings, and more.

It also invites for reflections on:How artifacts constitute aspects of social systems;How the relationships between visual perception and culturalorganization unfold through time;How cultural representations are embedded in/generate powerrelations; andThe potential new ways of doing so called applied research andresearch dissemination.

Objectives of the course

Students who successfully complete this course should have achieved the following learning outcomes:

Knowledge

• have knowledge on how the multimodal can be studied
• have knowledge on how multimodal approaches can be used in the discovery of social processes.
• have knowledge of the state of the art within multimodal anthropology
• have solid knowledge of how photographic and filmic representations are used in social scientific traditions

Skills

• be able to identify the culturally specific signs which are expressed in smells, tastes, sounds, objects, and gestures.
• be able to reflect critically on the role of sensorial expressions in cultural and social analysis
• be conscious of conventions in photo and film
• be able to reflect critically on the role visual representations play in concrete research projects

General competence

• be able to demonstrate how knowledge of systems of sensorial signs
• favours successful dialogues in the process of research and dissemination
• be able to reflect critically of how visual representations articulate with text in social science representations.

Language of instruction and examination

Teaching methods