Events

cc: crits & conversation a collaborative exchange workshop for long form writing about/from multimodal projects

Anthropologists working on multimodal projects often lack peers to offer feedback and insights. In 2025, the Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators, and Teachers (CoMMPCT) will host a series of virtual and in-person collaborative exchange workshops, cc: crits & conversation, focused on long and short form writing, as well as media practice-based projects. Join us to expand your networks and spark new insights! 

Our first virtual exchange workshop will be held via Zoom on Wednesday, April 23, 10am–noon EST. It 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. It will be facilitated by CoMMPCT members Matthew Raj Webb, Sarah Franzen, and Emiko Stock. 

Archival Politics: an online conversation for multimodal anthropologists interested in reimagining ethnography through audio-visual archives

What are the possibilities and limitations of using archives in audiovisual and artistic projects? How can ethnographers and artists collaborate to imagine new lives for archives? 

Join the Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators, and Teachers (COMMPCT), a new initiative of the Society for Visual Anthropology, for our third virtual event, an online conversation for multimodal anthropologists interested in reimagining ethnography through audio-visual archives! 

5pm Mexico City, June 13 | 9am Melbourne, June 14

As decades of collaborative and intercultural work have shown, state and institutional archives are mired with colonial structures and deeply entrenched inequities that have historically disempowered and dispossessed indigenous peoples and other communities. Filmmakers, artists, and anthropologists, however, have worked to reimagine, reclaim and deploy archives in more expansive ways, emphasizing collective rights to access, intervene and recreate documents, photographs, films, objects, and other media in creative and powerful ways.

In ARCHIVAL POLITICS,  two collectives of young indigenous women from Mexico and Australia will share how they use archival materials in their audiovisual production and artistic practices. Rosalba López López  (Mazahua), Sashenka Hernández Estrada (P'urhépecha) and Orión Marín of Sembradoras Audiovisuales will be in conversation with Maya Hodge (Lardil) and Kate Ten Buuren (Taungurung) to discuss how they view the relationship between their mediamaking, archival sources, and the work they perform in transmitting knowledge to the next generation, as well as imagining new narratives and stories. Anthropologists Gabriela Zamorano (CIESAS Ciudad de México), Sabra Thorner (Mount Holyoke College), and Sandra Rozental (El Colegio de México) will guide the conversation.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Rosalba López López is originally from the Mazahua community of San Pablo Tlalchichilpa, San Felipe del Progreso, State of Mexico. She has a degree in Art History from UNAM. She has studied filmmaking in programs such as Ambulante Más Allá, Polos Audiovisuales, the Escuela Diversa de Cine Indígena and various workshops. She is co-director of the documentary short film Marku irekani / Living together (2021); co-director of the fiction short film Ixu jarhaskach'e acompañando (2022) and art director of the fiction short film Dueto Charanda (2023) now in postproduction. She is a member of the collective Sembradoras Audiovisuales, which facilitates community film workshops in different territories; and of the collective Tsi'dyoo, which promotes the creation and exhibition of films with a Mazahua perspective. She is currently cultural manager of the Laboratorio Nacional de Materiales Orales.

Sashenka Hernández Estrada is originally from the communities of Turicuaro and Sicuicho, located in the P’urépecha plateau of Michoacán. She has a degree in Psychology from the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Diploma in "Indigenous Peoples' Rights: History, Legislation and Struggle", as well as in "Political, Historical and Communal P'urhépecha Formation". Graduated in film training from Ambulante Más Allá. She is currently studying a Master's Degree in Art History at the Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores Unidad Morelia of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (ENES-UNAM). Throughout her life she has accompanied different social processes and daily struggles in different territories of Michoacán, through activism, community indigenous feminism, poetry and film. She has participated in the production of several short films in P'urhépecha territory, including "Xáni Xépika" (Este flojo!, 2008), "Marku irekani/Vivir juntos" (2021), "Ixú jarhaskach'e acompañando" (2022) and "Naná Mirinkua" (2022). She is a member of the collective Sembradoras Audiovisuales.

Orión Marín holds a degree in Environmental Sciences with a specialization in Society and Environment from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Since 2016 she collaborates with academic institutions and citizen initiatives for training, exhibition and film production in Purépecha communities in Michoacán. She is coordinator and workshop leader of the project "Miradas de tu comunidad". She participated in the film training programs Campamento Audiovisual Itinerante and Ambulante Más Allá, where she worked as editor of the documentary short film Marku irekani (Living together). In 2022 she taught the workshop "Introduction to film editing" and participated in the making of the collaborative fiction short film Ixú jarhaskach'e acompañando. She is a member of the Sembradoras Audiovisuales collective, where she co-directs the projects “Compartir la mirada: talleres de cine comunitario” and “Miradas and afectos: talleres de cine comunitario”, which she teaches to teenager girls and women from Comachuén and Turícuaro, Michoacán. She coordinates as well other workshops in the region.

Maya Hodge is a proud Lardil woman from Mildura, and is currently based on Wurundjeri Country. Maya's multidisciplinary practice explores the power of uplifting First Nations storytelling and autonomy. She is dedicated to empowering young blackfullas, believing their voices are crucial to disrupting colonial narratives. Maya is an emerging writer and curator contributing to various art projects and publications, most recently featuring in Ernabella Arts: Ceramic Warka Wiru 20 Years-Kutu (20 Years of Creating Ceramics). She co-curated the state-wide exhibition Collective Movements and is a founding member of Ensemble Dutala, Australia's first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander chamber ensemble. Maya has previously worked as an Assistant Curator at the Koorie Heritage Trust and Blak Dot Gallery. She is MARION's inaugural 2023-24 Fellow, highlighting her commitment to platforming First Peoples practices in the arts.

Kate Ten Buuren is a Taungurung artist and curator interested in contemporary visual art, film and stories. She is a founding member of First Nations arts collective this mob, and grounds her practice in self-determination, self-representation and collectivism. Kate currently works as Senior Curator at Melbourne Arts Precinct, and has previously worked in curatorial positions at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the Koorie Heritage Trust. 

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal is an anthropologist and professor-researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social CIESAS in Mexico City. She is the author of "Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia" (Nebraska, 2017). She directed the documentary film "Archivo Cordero" (2021) on one of the most important photographic archives in Bolivia. Her current research includes work on popular photographic and audiovisual archives in Michoacán, and on the rehabilitation of railroad infrastructures in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Sabra Thorner is a cultural anthropologist who has worked with Indigenous Australians for 20+ years, focusing on photography, digital technologies, and archiving as forms of cultural activism. In the last few years, her work has increasingly turned towards collaborative and decolonizing methodologies – in both research/writing and in teaching/learning – and she is especially interested in contemporary arts and cultural production, matriarchal forms of knowledge transmission, and storytelling as an expression of Indigenous sovereignty.  She’s held fellowships from Mellon, Fulbright, Wenner-Gren, the Smithsonian, the Australian Research Council, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS); and has published her work in Museum Anthropology, AnthroVision, The Journal of Material Culture, Oceania, and Visual Anthropology Review.  She is an Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke College.

Sandra Rozental is an anthropologist and professor-researcher in El Colegio de México in Mexico City. Her work focuses on the social worlds created by and around  ancient material culture and landscapes in contemporary contexts. She has collaborated with various artists and curated exhibitions on issues related to patrimony, museums, politics of display, archives, museum collections and replicas, and co-directed the feature documentary film The Absent Stone (2013). She recently edited Museum Matters:Making and Unmaking Mexico's National Collections (Arizona University Press, 2021). Her book The Absent Stone: the aftershocks of state theft is upcoming with Duke University press. 

Sound Politics: an online conversation for multimodal anthropologists about the power of sound 

The aural and sonic soundscapes through which we move provide affective knowledge about our situated experiences–even when we’re not listening!  Given that visual anthropology has favored images over sound as both object of inquiry and  method, what are the politics of centering sound in media production?  While anthropology tends to overlook the sonic register in our worlds and works, how does sound invite affective, sensorial insight into differently situated lived experiences?

Join the Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators, and Teachers (COMMPCT), a new initiative of the Society for Visual Anthropology, for our second virtual event, an online conversation about the power of sound! 

In SOUND POLITICS, two independent artists and filmmakers explore sound as a critical intervention through their experimental soundwork. Nadia Shihab and Nguyễn Trinh Thi will discuss how their work as filmmakers and sound artists finds tension, connection, and collaboration across mediums and genres anchored in the personal and the relational. Nat Nesvaderani and Emiko Stock will draw from their experience as sonic ethnographers and teachers of multimodal anthropology to guide the conversation. 

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Based in Hanoi, Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a filmmaker and artist. Traversing boundaries between film, documentary, video art, installation, and performance, her practice currently explores the potential of sound and listening, and the multiple relations between the image, sound, and space with ongoing interests in history, memory, ecology, representation, and the unknown. In 2009, Nguyen founded Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent center for documentary film and moving image in Hanoi.  Nadia Shihab is an award-winning filmmaker and artist whose work explores the personal, the relational, and the diasporic. Her first feature-length documentary JADDOLAND was awarded five festival jury awards including the Independent Spirit "Truer than Fiction" Award in 2020 and went on to broadcast for three seasons on US public television. Nat Nesvaderani (she/they) is an amateur potter, knitter, and watercolorist of misshapen fruit. Nat is an Assistant Professor of anthropology at Université Laval, where she co-directs the new Multimodal Anthropology Lab. Emiko Stock loves trying, playing, failing and starting over with new mediums to relate to one another through ethnography. She is currently attempting soundscapes and sketchnotes as a fairly valid reason to procrastinate on poetic musings or her usual pixel and analog image-making.  

The Soundscape as Feminist Homework

Organizers: Emiko Stock and Nat Nesvaderani 

This roundtable explores the ethnographic soundscape as a form of homework imperative to feminist epistemology. Our works are in conversation with feminist anthropologists and theorists who have long called for an integration of ethnography, feminist practice and knowledge production within our academic home disciplines, and beyond. We take as our points of engagement Kamala Visweswaran's notion of fieldwork/homework as an 'anthropology in reverse' anchored in the places where we are located (1994), while embracing Lynn Bolles call for 'casting a critical eye' into the offices, meetings, and classrooms of habitual academic practice (2013). We take up Sara Ahmed's method for doing 'feminist homework,' as work and practice of the everyday (2017). Here, our exploration of sonic ethnography is a practice of feminist multimodal anthropology. Anchored in the multi-positionalities of the anthropologists, activists and artists participating in this roundtable, we foreground an attentive and immersive listening to ethnographic soundscapes. Feminism, homework and fieldwork are not discrete projects. This roundtable presents sonic ethnography rooted in the multifaceted spaces and places through which artists and scholars move. Soundscapes showcased in this roundtable are in various stages of production–from works in progress to finalized pieces– in order to resist, on one hand, the content driven distraction economy and, on the other hand, the linearity of academic wring that foregrounds fieldwork as a distinct practice from homework. Our collaborative engagement in this event is, in itself, a piece of feminist homework in progress.

Works Cited: Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017. Bolles, Lynn. 2013. 'Telling the Story Straight: Black Feminist Intellectual Thought in Anthropology.' Transforming Anthropology 21 (1): 57–71. Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions Of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press. 

Mentoring/Networking Event & CoMMPCT Launch

Are you an early career researcher navigating a new institutional context, creating multimodal labs & courses without existing infrastructure? Are you looking for new collaborators or projects? Are you interested in multimodal anthropology but unsure where to start? Want to get fresh ideas, share your own, and extend your professional networks? 

Join us for bilingual (EN & FR) conversation & networking at the launch of the Collective for Multimodal Makers, Collaborators & Teachers (CoMMPCT), a new initiative of the Society for Visual Anthropology, at the 2023 AAA–CASCA Meeting! 

• Get a copy of our first zine PRINT POLITICS filled with ideas for making, publishing, collaborating, and teaching with print practices 

• Meet new colleagues (and future collaborators) from across the multimodal making and publishing spectrum in ways that go beyond your grad school connections 

• Find new ways to approach your own multimodal research and teaching 

• Learn more about our upcoming calls and programming, and how you can get  involved with our collective 

Can't wait? Sign up the CoMMPCT list-serv here: https://groups.google.com/g/commpct or reach out to us here: commpct@gmail.com 

Collective Politics and Print Practices
between Design and Anthropology

Participants: Craig Campbell, Marina Peterson, Megan Gette, Nicholas Kawa, Kathryn Mariner, and Stephanie Sadre-Orafai 

How can attention to publication design and collaborative work in print expand conversations about the transformational potential of multimodal and public anthropologies? This session draws inspiration from the zine 'What Problems Can Artist Publishers Solve?' There, seventeen independent publishers reflect on the differences in tempo, scale, audience, urgency, autonomy, process, distribution, and form that separate them from their for-profit industrial counterparts and how their unique 'knowledge, skills, and resources' (1) can address pressing socio-political, economic, and ecological problems. Contributors encourage readers to approach publishing as 'less noun, more verb' (22), publications as 'artifact[s] of a loving, process-driven ethos' (18), and for individuals and small groups to embody the role of 'author-editor-artist-designer-printer-publisher' (4) simultaneously to 'create unprofessional, yet plausible economies, alliances and systems of support and friendship' (22). As anthropologists with similar multi-hyphenate roles, relationships, and collaborative self-publishing print practices, we ask: (1) How can taking the intellectual contributions of print layout, design, composition, and craft seriously affect not only the shape and scope of our work, but also how we work with others? (2) Amidst ongoing crises both in the world and within scholarly communication itself, how can alternative print traditions provide insights for change? Focusing on questions of labor, value, and infrastructure, panelists will describe their experiences creating, editing, designing, and self-publishing zines, artist books, and chapbooks, emphasizing how their print practice informs their broader work and enables new kinds of collective politics. As panelists discuss editorial collectives and interdisciplinary collaborations; the crisis of peer review and promise of peer critique; credits and costs of collaboration; and how to cultivate audiences, networks, and other means of distribution and future collaboration, they will also invite audience participants to contribute to a rapid publication about these same topics to be produced and distributed at the meetings and online 24 hours later. 

Reference: Temporary Services & PrintRoom, editors. 2018. 'What Problems Can Artist Publishers Solve?' Chicago & Roterdam, Temporary Services & PrintRoom. 

CoMMPCT Virtual Meet-Up 

A virtual meet-up for folks interested in getting more involved with CoMMPCT! We'll share updates on planned events for the AAA–CASCA 2023 meeting, upcoming calls and workshops, and give everyone a chance to share ideas for programming and planning, and just meet other multimodal makers, publishers, collaborators, and teachers. 

Print Politics: an online conversation for multimodal anthropologists about the power of print

While multimodal anthropology tends to focus on digital, visual, and sonic registers, print is a site of dynamic and politically urgent work. How can attention to collaborative work in print expand conversations about the transformational potential of multimodal and public anthropologies? What alternative print traditions and practices can anthropologists draw on to rethink the scope, scale, and reach of their research? 

Join the Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators, and Teachers (COMMPCT), a new initiative of the Society for Visual Anthropology, for our first virtual event, an online conversation about the power of print! 

Marc Fisher (Temporary Services, Public Collectors, Half Letter Press) will discuss meal-based artist residency programs and his approach to publishing as a way to spend time with others. Anne Pasek (Trent University) will discuss DIY Methods, the “mostly screen-free, zine-full, remote-participation conference on experimental methods for research and research exchange” now in its second year. Moderators Craig Campbell (University of Texas, Austin) and Stephanie Sadre-Orafai (University of Cincinnati) will draw on their own experiences blending anthropological inquiry with artistic print practices to guide the discussion with plenty of time for audience questions! 

This event is co-sponsored with the Department of Anthropology and the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati. The webinar will be recorded and shared on CoMMPCT's website in November. The event is free but registration is required. Sign up here: http://tinyurl.com/CoMMPCT 

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Marc Fischer is a Chicago-based artist and a member of Temporary Services, a group that has produced over 100 publications and organized and participated in dozens of exhibitions, projects, and events. Fischer and Brett Bloom of Temporary Services also run the publishing imprint Half Letter Press. Anne Pasek is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of climate communication, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. She studies how carbon becomes communicable in different communities and media forms, to different political and material effects. Craig Campbell is fascinated with how making things, curating exhibitions, and organizing workshops can become social devices that complicate and enhance thought. His work is committed to experimenting with and theorizing modes of description and evocation of and through ordinary life. Stephanie Sadre-Orafai pursues interdisciplinary and collaborative projects that blend research and creative practice, resulting in public-facing video, curatorial, and experimental print design work.