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 will focus on article-length writing about/from multimodal projects. This includes 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. 

How to Submit. Submit your writing project's title and abstract, a brief bio & goals for the workshop by March 15 here: https://bit.ly/CClongform 

What Happens Next. We will cluster participants into groups of 3–5 around common themes. You will receive your group assignment by March 22 and be invited to make e-introductions and circulate your full draft (up to 8,000 words) to your small group by April 15 for reading and markup. 

Workshop Structure. The April 23 workshop will be structured around both dialogues in small thematic groups and the group as a whole, facilitating focused feedback exchanges as well as serendipitous discovery in a non-hierarchical mode. Moving through different collaborative configurations, the intent is to generate constructive dialogues that aid in refining research questions, arguments, and project stakes, transcending traditional academic power dynamics and creating opportunities for mutual learning and methodological innovation.  

Key Dates

March 15 Submit paper titles and abstracts
March 22 Receive group assignment & send introductions
April 15 Submit & receive draft papers (2,000–8,000 words)
April 23 Virtual workshop 

As part of the Society for Cultural Anthropology's 2025 Biennial Restorative Relations, an un-conference to be held at Stony Point Center, New York, May 8–11, CoMMPCT will host a two-hour, in-person workshop to facilitate collaborative exchange among multimodal scholars at different career stages—senior graduate students, early career researchers, and established scholars. 

Participants will bring short written pieces/vignettes (2–5 double-spaced pages) for reading/presentation, group discussion, and collective feedback. 

These may be in any stage of conceptualization, research, enactment, and analysis; and may be associated with research in any media/mode, e.g., filmmaking, photography, audio recording, sketching, novel writing, theater, exhibition designing, teaching, and more. 

Works may include writing about a multimodal project in-progress, or may include a speculative reimagining of a project in a different modality. Submitted works need not be "polished." The aim is to create an intimate, generative space for mutually sharing, shaping, and refining research agendas and works in the making. 

The ultimate goal of the session is to build supportive networks across academic institutions and trajectories and generate a peer environment that honors the messy, emergent nature of fieldwork documentation capitalizing on media/modal diversity.

Feedback can be the most precious and crushing commodity in creative work. How can we ask for, offer, and incorporate better feedback in our multimodal projects and collaborations? What makes multimodal projects gel?

We invite participants working on more-than-writing/media practice-based projects to our third workshop on feedback and collaboration. Anchored by a conversation between Elizabeth Chin & Andrew Gilbert, this session will include opportunities to learn new tools and techniques to ask better questions and provide more useful feedback on your own and others‘ multimodal work.  

Register here. 

N.B. While no preparation is required for this workshop, we encourage participants to familiarize themselves with Multimodal Appreciation: A Kit for Evaluating Multimodal Works in Anthropology and Beyond. 

The workshop will involve dialogues and activities using Zoom. This software has auto-generated English language captions. Please email commpct@gmail.com to let us know if you have additional accessibility needs by January 23. 

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.