Abstract

This talk explores collaboration and the affordances of the graphic or comics form of representation for “engaged anthropology” or “militant research,” in which anthropologists aim to both investigate and contribute to social struggles. I draw upon my ongoing collaborative efforts to produce an experimental graphic ethnography focused on the struggle of industrial workers in the Bosnian city of Tuzla. These workers have long recognized the politics of representation surrounding their struggle and lamented that the existing formats available to them—mostly traditional mass news media—are limited in what they can communicate.  Taking this as our starting point, my collaborators and I consider graphic ethnography not only as a form of knowledge that can capture and communicate the workers struggle, but which also might catalyze future action through representations that open up new horizons of political imagination.  The talk will also examine the predicaments and possibilities created by the collaborations that constituted the workers’ struggle alongside those that constituted our ethnographic fieldwork.  In particular we are interested in what the former tells us about political change and what the latter tells us about how collaborative research forms might be uniquely suited to identify and document that change.

About the Speaker

Andrew Gilbert is a Visiting Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology Department as the Graduate Institute. He is a broadly trained sociocultural anthropologist with twenty years research experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Recently, he has investigated the conditions that create openings and closures to political experimentation and social transformation, focusing on a series of worker-initiated protests and their aftermath in the late industrial Bosnian city of Tuzla. This has led to a growing research interest in collaboration and in the political and ethnographic potential of diverse media, such as graphic forms of ethnography.