Visual Vignettes

In 2015, I followed a Call for the Wenner-Gren workshop Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison for a "Visual Essay" and submitted Making Dust come to Matter: The Scaffolding of Academia (which you can also find below). It led to several years of co-thinking with the workshop organizer Rachel Douglas-Jones on how to further develop this format. After two student workshops at the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) in Germany and the ETHOS Lab in Denmark, we created a website that has since collected creative and experimental engagements of (mostly) students with their research topics. These were also exhibited as part of "STS Infrastructures" at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4s) in New Orleans. Meanwhile, our by then not yet published chapter Visual Vignettes found its way into Nina Klimburg-Witjes' seminar at the University of Vienna, where students created and far expanded this format. They will present their works at the Making & Doing session "Sensing Visual Vignettes" at the 4s conference (online, Tkaronto/Toronto) which can also be found on our website.

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The practical work students in various places has shown us the maleable, or multimodal virtue of this format, as it questions clear distinctions between research, analysis and communication. Instead, creating a visual vignette shows how research is an ongoing, circular or uneven process between researchers, research topics, research participants, and ones audience. It also pushes academics to not only think but do work beyond written text, and ask how its relationship to images may upend the common 'labour division' between information and illustration.

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In fall 2021, I offered another workshop to graduate students at the School of Sociological and Anthropological studies at the University of Ottawa, and two guest lectures on creative research methods for the STS Program at York University, and anthropology students at the University of Manitoba.