Postcards & Ethnography

All started with an exhibition that was born out of transcribing interviews for my doctoral research on land('āina)-based education, land use and agricultural biotechnology on Kaua'i. I had a strong wish to create a knowledge artefact that would go beyond a mere dissertation, and so the exhibition Hawai'i beyond the Postcard, which contained postcards that I created from photographs and interview quotes, took on form and travelled to several parts of the world.

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The medium of postcards continued to captivate me, and so I wrote and distributed a Call for Postcards to see if there are other researchers using and incorporating postcards in unconventional ways. This led to a paper co-authored with Sophie Schor, whom I 'met' through this Call, on the multimodal dimensions of postcards that was published in American Anthropologist, and a special section with very seven diverse contributions.

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We were happy to host the workshop 'Hacking the Postcard' for the Ethnography Lab at the University of Toronto (virtual) in December 2020, which confirmed to me that there is a strong interest in what is commonly perceived as dusty, outdated communication medium. I also very much look forward to speaking at the museum workshop 'Potenziale der Postkarte' (Potentials of the postcard) at the Universalmuseum Joanneum (Graz, Austria) in November 2021.

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