ETHNOGRAPHY &amp DESIGN: MUTUAL PROVOCATIONS (CoLED Conference)

The workshop will begin with an introduction to the idea of staging ethnographic encounters in organizational and activist settings. We will share some of our past interventions and invite others to share their experiences. This will fuel a broader brainstorming process as we concoct other interventions that bring ethnography into the everyday. Depending on the number of participants, this will be done either as a large group or broken up into smaller groups. The workshop will continue with an activity that demonstrates one experimental encounter we have devised. We will invite participants to reflect on their everyday encounter with traffic--a relatively mundane phenomenon--in order to probe more deeply into what factors shape our affective and cultural landscape. We will ask participants to reflect on their own sites of pain and fear in the streets, or in other transportation-related settings. This reflection will help us to create a sense of the affective landscape created through everyday mobility. As desired, we may enact some of these settings with the goal of affective transmission.

Our hope is that through the embodied performance of traffic we might identify sites of connection, re-articulation, and potential re-imagination of these sites of structural violence. We are cognizant of the travails of exploring sites of trauma, even in as banal a setting as daily transportation. For that reason, we endeavor to foster a sense of safety within the workshop space and will consistently check in with participants, offering alternative routes in our exploration. At the conclusion of this exercise, we will invite participants to reflect again upon their initial brainstorms on ethnographic encounters. Now, we will discuss, revisions, additions, caveats, opportunities, and dangers in doing this sort of work.