Rethinking the role of ethnography in more-than-human participatory research and design.
Description
Authors: Liesbeth Huybrechts, Cristiano Storni
10th Ethnography and Qualitative Research International Conference. July 9 + 10-12, 2025 – University of Trento
This panel explores and discusses the role of ethnography in more-than-human participatory research and design (Grusin, 2015; Braidotti, 2016) in the context of contemporary socio-environmental research, namely research and design on, for and with non-human entities in the Anthropocene (Moore, 2016; Adams, 2020). Specifically, we aim at exploring the role of ethnography in the practice of «re-tracing». The term «retracing» is a corrective to the decolonial reflexivity of words like «discovering»: we as researchers do not discover the world, but rather engage with traces of multiple worlds (Simonsen et al., 2014). Tracing is therefore about following human and non-human ways of doing and caring for socio-environmental challenges. It is also about critically reflecting on how our traditional ways of observing, describing, and explaining are falling short for dealing with the enormity of factual information about our current socio-ecological crises, but also the affective displacement and the emotional denials that accompany our exposure to it (Todd, 2021). Most concerning of these denials is the one that we are all inextricably and persistently entangled, but we know very little about what this means for knowledge and action (e.g., design interventions) in our common world.
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