School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Creative Ethnography Project is a series of workshops that will explore the role creative and embodied research methods can play in illuminating ethnography. Bringing together the expertise of three of Edinburgh’s social anthropology PhD candidates, the series will focus on visual, aural, and performance-based techniques that will appeal to a wide range of practitioners seeking to integrate multi-modal methods into their ethnographic work.

Each workshop is designed to provide a supportive and experiential-based environment in which students and staff can explore creative approaches towards the ethnographic research process together. While the workshops privilege different forms of expressive outputs, no prior skills are necessary, and participants from all creative disciplines, and none, are welcome - as we seek to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives.

By focusing on co-collaborative multi-modal processes, our goal is to broaden the scope, accessibility, and relevance of anthropology to include people from a wide range of backgrounds and areas of interest.

The session themes are as follows:

1. Working with creative writing: in this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to engage with a visual medium of their choice, whether this is writing, drawing, photography, film-making, zine-making, or another visual creative practice.

2. Working with sound: this workshop invites participants to think with the potential of auditory media, including song writing, music video production, and soundscape recording.

3. Working with movement: we explore our research using our bodies in a series of dance and/or dramatic exercises.

Sessions led by Cormac Cleary, Jamie Glisson and Giorgia Kerr.


Cormac Cleary is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at The University of Edinburgh, studying the connections and tensions between Gaelic language revitalisation and nature conservation, and has background in the arts - informing teaching and research methods.

Jamie Glisson is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at The University of Edinburgh, working at the intersection of education and ethics. Jamie's research explores how experience-based education informs how students view equality, democracy, and social responsibility in local and global relationships; using multi-modal and co-creative methods, exploring the role photography, film, and music can play in illuminating ethnographic work.

Giorgia Kerr is a Wellcome Trust PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD focuses on processes of value creation and negotiation in early drug discovery research for Huntington’s disease. They are broadly interested in the social lives of medicines and other chemical substances, particularly as they relate to notions of individual, population, and planetary health.