xcol – experimental collaboration is an inquiry into the experimental condition of ethnography. A research project and pedagogic program that experiment with interventions and intraventions in the current forms of ethnographic practice and apprenticeship.
Experimental collaboration is a research project and pedagogic program that seeks to intervene in current forms of ethnographic practice and learning. The projec is carried out in collaboration with Tomás Sánchez Criado (TUM, Munich Center for Technology in Society). It is part of my sustained interest on the methods of anthropology and social sciences.
Anthropology has historically consolidated its ethnographic mode of knowledge production around participant observation, a practice according to which the anthropologist has to be socially involved in the setting he/she is researching while being detached enough to establish the appropriate observational conditions. Experimental collaboration proposes a displacement in the fieldwork practice; it is an ethnographic mode whose epistemic practice for knowledge production is experimental (not only observational) and whose social mode of engagement is collaborative (not only participative). We use the concept of experimental collaboration to describe particular forms of ethnographic engagement that explore modes of fieldwork beyond participant observation and propose it as a research program to design new fieldwork devices for ethnography.
More on the project’s website: ‘#xcol – Experimental Collaborations’.
Publications
Adolfo Estalella y Tomás Sánchez Criado (borrador). Acompañantes epistémicos: la invención de la colaboración etnográfica (PDF). In G. Dietz, A Colin & A. Álvarez Veinguer (Eds.), Investigaciones en movimiento: etnografías colaborativas, feministas y decoloniales. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.
Adolfo Estalella & Tomás Sánchez Criado. 2019. DIY Anthropology: Disciplinary knowledge in crisis. ANUAC. Rivista della Società Italiana di Antropologia Culturale, 8(2), 143-165. (PDF)
Adolfo Estalella & Tomás Sánchez Criado (Eds.). 2018. Experimental collaborations. Ethnography through fieldwork devices. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.
Tomás Sánchez Criado & Adolfo Estalella. 2018. Introduction. Experimental collaborations. In A. Estalella & T. S. Criado (Eds.), Experimental collaborations. Ethnography through fieldwork devices (pp. 1-30). New York, Oxford: Berghahn. (PDF)
Adolfo Estalella & Tomás Sánchez Criado. 2016. Experimentación etnográfica: infraestructuras de campo y re-aprendizajes de la antropología. Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares 71:9-30. (PDF)
Adolfo Estalella & Tomás Sánchez Criado. 2015. Experimental collaboration: An invocation for the redistribution of social research. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 21:301-305. (PDF)
Tomás Sánchez Criado & Adolfo Estalella. 2016. Antropocefa: Un kit para las colaboraciones experimentales en la práctica etnográfica. Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia, 5(1), 155-167. (PDF)
Image: Relatograma de Carla Boserman.