CCS Conference 2024: Constructing Other Worlds: Ethnography and Animation (19-21 April 2024)
Organizer: Dr Huon Wardle (University of St Andrews)
Held at the University of St Andrews
This workshop explores ethnography and animation as processes of imaginative and technical worldmaking. The workshop concerns what can be learnt by placing the constructive practices of animation and ethnographic next to each other. Animation and ethnography describe distinct methods for composing elements of experience within diverse worlds having their own special kinds of consistency. What goes in to creating animations or ethnographies that ‘hold together’? Taking a comparative approach, we will explore how the rules (including tacit ‘rules of thumb’) of ethnography and animation are built up (aesthetically and in other ways) by the ethnographers/animators with and within their communities of practice.
A key, then, is that in both cases animated and ethnographic worlds should have enough consistency (e.g. reasonability, aesthetic coherence) that they don’t ‘fall apart’ as Nelson Goodman puts it. However, we will take an interest in the other side of the coin too: both ethnography and animation are actively engaged in challenging habits of seeing and knowing. Hence, both disciplines need to put things together with enough order to challenge how we usually look at things, but they also need to show how the experiential ordering of possible worlds can be diverse and open-ended. As such, the best ethnographies and animations suggest a counter-urge or search; to demonstrate (as Gregory Bateson puts it) that they are ‘like life—a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable.’
This conference is jointly funded by CCS through the School of philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies.