CUSAS Roundtable with Professor Liisa Malkki (Stanford University)

CUSAS roundtable with Professor Liisa Malkki (Stanford University)Rethinking Strategies in Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Roundtable Discussion

A roundtable discussion with Liisa Malkki

This conversation will centre on the challenges and necessity of diversifying the methods, tactics, and techniques we engage during anthropological fieldwork now. Professor Malkki will share insights from her own current and past fieldwork experiences. Some of the newest insights will have been discussed at the previous week’s Senior Research Seminar. Others will be explored through the armature of a multimodal ethnography syllabus for the Creativity Practicum (“Ideologies and Practices of Creativity”) at Stanford.  This graduate seminar/practicum had as its “guiding intuition” that making is a form of thinking, as Sennett, Wittgenstein, and others have argued, and that handmaking, in particular, can be a powerful practice of knowledge production in the field. Too often, our fieldwork is guided principally by interviews, documentary/archival research, and other language-based techniques. While these are obviously valuable, mobilizing our other senses in our research practice can be extraordinarily productive.

Attendees are strongly encouraged to read Prof. Malkki’s syllabus for the Creativity Practicum, available here: https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/syllabus-archive-anthropology-and-the-making-of-arts-and-technologies  

Attendees may also be interested in reading her syllabus for “Multimodal Ethnography” and ⁠her chapter “Tradition and Improvisation in Ethnographic Field Research”, 162-188, in Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa Malkki, Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork (2007), University of Chicago Press.

Bio:

Liisa Malkki (Prof. Em., Stanford University) is the author of Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago 1995), The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism (Duke 2015), and co-author with Allaine Cerwonka of Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Research (Chicago 2007), as well as numerous articles. Her current book project examines handmaking as a form of knowledge production in ethnographic fieldwork, and also in experimental pedagogy. An integral element of this ongoing project intensive training in several different areas (silversmithing/metalwork; typography and graphic design; fibrework; and clay work).