cc: crits & conversations 

Anthropologists working on multimodal projects often lack peers to offer feedback and insights. 

In 2025 and early 2026, we will host a series of virtual and in-person collaborative exchange workshops focused on long form and short form writing, as well as workshop on giving (and receiving) good feedback on media practice-based projects.  Join us to expand your networks and spark new insights! 

Our first virtual exchange workshop focused on article-length writing about/from multimodal projects, including traditional academic articles, creative nonfiction essays, position papers, chapters, and experimental forms that have a written component in the range of 2,000–8,000 words. 

Participants submitted their project title, abstract, brief bio and goals for the workshop and then were clustered into groups of 3–5 based on common themes. Participants shared their full drafts to their small groups for reading and markup one week in advance of the workshop. The workshop included conversations in sa itself included dialogues in small thematic groups, as well as the group as a whole.  Moving through different collaborative configurations, the workshop's goal was to generate constructive dialogues to refine research questions, arguments, and project stakes, transcending traditional academic power dynamics and creating opportunities for mutual learning and methodological innovation.  

As part of the Society for Cultural Anthropology's 2025 Biennial Restorative Relations, CoMMPCT hosted a second in-person workshop focused on short form writing.Inviting work in any stage of conceptualization, research, enactment, and analysis and associated with research in any media/mode, the workshop's goal was to create an intimate, generative space that honors the messy, emergent nature of fieldwork documentation and build a supportive network across insitutions and career stages. 

See the workshop guide and prompts below. 

Our third virtual workshop focused on feedback and collaboration. Anchored by a conversation between Elizabeth Chin & Andrew Gilbert, this session included opportunities to learn new tools and techniques to ask better questions and provide more useful feedback on your own and others‘ multimodal work. Participants working on more-than-writing/media practice-based projects spent 20 minutes creating maps of their Landscape of Collaborators and Landscape of Obstructions (exercises from the  Multimodal Appreciation: A Kit for Evaluating Multimodal Works in Anthropology and Beyond) before sharing them in small groups. The session ended with a collaborative Miro board jam and group discussion of the themes that emerged.

Andrew Gilbert is a professor at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle and was up until very recently co-director of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology at Humboldt University in Berlin. In addition to two collective experimental research projects (one exploring the possibilities of networked ethnography and the other how to legitimize multimodal forms of research), he is currently working on a collaborative graphic ethnography entitled Reclaiming Dita.

Elizabeth Chin is an anthropologist and ethnographer with a varied practice that includes performative scholarship, collaborative research, vernacular electronics, and experimental writing. Her work interrogates race and racism with fieldwork in the US and in Haiti. She is currently Editor in Chief of American Anthropologist.