Experimental Collaborations ― Ethnography Through Fieldwork Devices

Anthropology has historically consolidated its ethnographic mode of knowledge production around participant observation: a social and epistemic situation of fieldwork involvement maintaining a certain detachment and distance. Grounded in a series of diverse ethnographic projects in Africa, America and Europe, experimental collaboration expands our ethnographic repertoire of fieldwork devices beyond participant observation: fieldwork is carried out in collaboration with our counterparts in the field, creating an ethnographic mode whose epistemic practice is experimental and whose social engagement in the field is collaborative.

Tomas Sanchez Criado, Senior Researcher at the Munich Center for Technology in Society, TU Munich, is a social anthropologist with specialization in STS, working on the material politics of personal and urban care infrastructures.