Anthropologists working on multimodal projects often lack peers to offer feedback and insights.
In 2025, we will host a series of virtual and in-person collaborative exchange workshops focused on long form and short form writing, as well as media practice-based projects. Join us to expand your networks and spark new insights!
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
10am–noon ET
via Zoom
Facilitated by Matthew Raj Webb, Sarah Franzen, Nat Nesvaderani, Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, and Emiko Stock
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
Saturday, May 10, 2025
Morning Session
Restorative Relations
Stony Point Center, NY
Facilitated by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai
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.
November 2025
More details to come!