Multimodality offers anthropologists an inflection on the way we do research, produce scholarship, teach students, and relate to diverse publics. Advancing an expanding array of tools, practices,... Show moreMultimodality offers anthropologists an inflection on the way we do research, produce scholarship, teach students, and relate to diverse publics. Advancing an expanding array of tools, practices, and concepts, multimodality signals a change in the way we pay attention and attend to the diverse possibilities for understanding the human experience. Multimodality recognizes the way smartphones, social media, and digital software transform research dynamics in unprecedented ways, while also drawing upon long-standing practices of recording and presenting research through images, sounds, objects, and text. Rather than flatten out ethnographic participant observation into logocentric practices of people-writing, multimodal ethnographies diversify their modes of inquiry to produce more-than-textual mediations of sensorial research experiences. By emphasizing kaleidoscopic qualities that give shape to an emergent, multidimensional, and diversifying anthropology, multimodality proposes alternatives to enduring and delimiting dichotomies, particularly text/image. These new configurations invite unrealized disciplinary constellations and research collaborations to emerge, but also require overhauling the infrastructures that support training, dissemination, and assessment. Show less
The research explores what and how sound does in certain art practices; it lends an ear to so-called material-discursive events that come into expression as in/determined sonic occurrences. The... Show moreThe research explores what and how sound does in certain art practices; it lends an ear to so-called material-discursive events that come into expression as in/determined sonic occurrences. The dissertation has three main objectives. Firstly, it describes sonic art practice as experimental research and makes a case for curating such practices as a form of research; it positions this type of research as a contribution to new forms of knowledge and provides a resource for future research-creations and evaluation practices. Secondly, it brings together philosophy and art to elaborate a genuine manner of working with sonic matter (mattering); it conceptualizes and materializes novel ways of thinking, and creates a case for writing itself as practice and curating/producing art as theory; that is, it seeks to practice what it theorizes and vice versa. Thirdly, it advocates a certain transformation of self that lets us side-step ourselves, intervene and invent possible worlds or future fabulations. Practicing a process-oriented exploration complexifies as it advances; it creates resonances between theory and practice, between audience and sound art, between the written thesis – inclusive of presented artifacts – and the reader. It wants not to reduce but foster awareness of the ongoing complexity of life. Show less
