Our most recent digital storytelling workshop brought together SDC people from Bhutan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe, and Switzerland to create in-depth stories on development work in inter-cultural contexts.

Digital storytelling can offer dynamic pathways for developing relationships of inquiry, learning, and knowledge production through dialogical collaboration across domains. As a co-creative practice, digital storytelling can render a nexus of domains–aesthetic, ethical, socio-political, institutional–more tangible and open to analysis. Attention to these encounters of ‘political listening’ (Arendt, 1958; Bickford, 1996; Dreher, 2009) might provide a framework for building and theorizing shared practices within proprietary contexts. To explore the collaborative and dialogical essence of digital storytelling, this talk will draw from a longitudinal (2007-2010) ethnography of media production with political asylum seekers and labor migrants in Ireland. Said research aimed to develop an exploratory and critical practice of inquiry that not only responded to the ethical complexities of research with refugees (Jackson, 2002), asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants, but also to create opportunities for research subjects–as emergent media practitioners and engaged scholars (Cammarota, 2008; Fine, et al., 2000)–to interpret, analyze, document, and publically screen their depictions of Ireland.

In this webinar, we will explore how members of the SDC, EDA are creating digital stories and employing storytelling within the agency to share knowledge, ask new questions and deepen learning. The webinar will be interactive and include opportunities for creative writing and visual storytelling about key topics of relevance to SDC members.

Beginning in February 2016, I will be teaching a new course in digital storytelling and audiovisual ethnography at the University of Bern, Department of Social Anthropology.

I will be presenting on the panel, “Familiar Stories, Strange Methods: Enchanting Knowledge and Encountering Inequality through Multi-sensory Narratives,” at the American Anthropological Association meetings, 21 Nov. 2015, in Denver, CO, USA.

I will be presenting on the panel, Mediating Precariousness: Creative Ethnographic Practices in an Age of Crisis at the Annual Conference of the Swiss Ethnological Society, Institute of Social Anthropology, Bern, Switzerland, November 12-15, 2015. This year’s theme is Global Capitalism and the Challenge of Well-Being in the World.