In November 2021, the authors and editors of a special issue of the journal Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media gathered online for a panel hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. A recording of the panel discussion is available on YouTube, and embedded below.
The issue, “Digital Selves: Embodiment and Subjectivity in New Media Cultures in Eastern Europe and Eurasia,” is available in open access at digitalicons.org. It has been a pleasure to get to know the emerging scholars who contributed to this special issue as co-editor.
Embedded YouTube video with captions, recorded Zoom panel.
Very delighted to announce that the book is now available!
Order your copy from University of Toronto Press now. And visit the companion webpage [opens in new tab] where you can find supplemental resources, watch videos of past performances of the play, and consider performing the work yourself!
My first book, I Was Never Alone or Oporniki: An Ethnographic Play on Disability in Russia, is now available for pre-order from University of Toronto Press, Amazon.com, and Amazon.ca. The book is scheduled for release in May 2020 [edited to note publisher’s delay] November 2020.
I Was Never Alone or Oporniki presents an original ethnographicstage play, based on fieldwork conducted in Russiawith adults with disabilities. The core of the work is the scriptof the play itself, which is accompanied by a description ofthe script development process, from the research in the fieldto rehearsals for public performances. In a supporting essay,the author argues that both ethnography and theatre can beunderstood as designs for being together in unusual ways,and that both practices can be deepened by recognizing thevibrant social impact of interdependency animated by vulnerability,as identified by disability theorists and activists. (more…)
Not long ago, I was in Russia, to take part in an event at European University at Saint Petersburg, DIS.ART – disability, ethnography & the arts on October 10, 2018. The event featured four creative works by a cohort of medical ethnographers working on disability at European University in Saint Petersburg.
The evening started with a screening of some research footage, which Ilya Utekhin and others filmed at Anna Klepikova’s research site, as a way of presenting Klepikova’s new book, Naverno Ia Durak, or, Probably I’m an Idiot. Out this year in Russian with European University Press, the book takes the form of a “novel” or a sort of ethnographic memoir, following Klepikova herself as she works to discover how international volunteers (from Germany, Poland, and other European countries) make meaning in their work at two state institutions for people with mental disabilities in the St Petersburg region.
With support from Ilya Utekhin, two scenes from my ethnographic play, I WAS NEVER ALONE, or OPORNIKI, were performed in a live reading by Olga Pavlova and Sergei Yakovenko, with musical accompaniment by Leonid Levin. See the video, above (in Russian). This was the first public reading of the script in Russian, and this ethnographer delighted in observing how the jokes and emotive ups and downs in the script play differently in Russia as opposed to in North America.
Finally, the evening closed with the screening of a rough cut of a new ethnographic film by Anna Altukhova, about young adults living in assisted living in a rural town in central Russia after aging out of an orphanage for children with intellectual disabilities. The film documents how this cohort imagines what it means to live independently as adults, envisioning standardized ideals of heterosexual family units in separate homes, and pondering what kinds of work might be viable. The film is shot through with an ironic depiction of an unusual practice amongst the group, the standing challenge to spend a night, or several, away from the assisted living apartments that they share in small groups, living ‘independently’ in a seemingly abandoned house (without heat aside from a wood stove). The house, local lore has it, once belonged to a pre-revolutionary Baron, and, was visited by Lenin himself.
The event and all of the presented works were in Russian. Klepikova’s book has yet to be translated to English. My playscript has also been presented in English, and will be subsequently performed in English and Russian. Althukhova’s ethnographic film will be available with English subtitles shortly.
The event leaves us with several important questions. Is there something about disability ethnography that calls for visual, performative, or multimedia modalities? Is there something about experiential differences implied by the word “disability” that exceeds the authority of text to describe experience, or that suggests nonverbal avenues of communication? Or, is multimedia ethnography just a fun technological trick for engaging non-academic audiences? What schools of disability anthropology are emerging globally, and how does this new St Petersburg school differ from the Moscow school led by Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova? Is there a characteristic ‘Russian’ approach to disability? Naturally, this event included discussion with the gathered audience, which included documentary filmmakers and disability activists as well as academics affiliated with EUSP, including a variety of disagreements about how this content should be best presented, and whose consumption it might be for. Focused on ethnography and the arts, the event did not include related work on disability justice by young arts professionals in Russia, such as artisan workshops for adults with Autism, fine art studios attached to institutions, public art projects aimed at raising awareness and interrupting ableism, and critical curatorial practices that seek to make art exhibitions more accessible.
I’m very glad that a performance of my ethnographic play will be presented this March as part of the program of the 2018 Soyuz Symposium for Postsocialist Cultural Studies, this year hosted by the Department of Anthropology and the European Studies Council at Yale.
Friday March 2nd at 7:30pm, with a talk back session at 9pm Saturday, March 3rd at 1:00pm, with a talk back session at 1:30pm
At the Yale University Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) Movement Studio, 149 York Street
with additional roles and production design by Rachel Chew, Dana Smooke, Chayton Pabich, and Yuki Hayasaka.
The staged reading is presented as part of the Soyuz Symposium for Postsocialist Cultural Studies, with support from the European Studies Council, the Department of Anthropology, Theatre Studies, Slavic Studies, and WGSS at Yale University.
Event details on the Yale Events Calendar are here.
More about this project here.
I’m pleased to announce that I will spend the 2017-2018 academic year as a postdoctoral associate and lecturer for Russian Studies in the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. I’ll also be cross-appointed in the Department of Anthropology. I will be teaching two courses, moving the ethnographic play project along, and working on my ethnographic monograph.
I am glad to be featured this week on the AnthroPod podcast, produced by the journal Cultural Anthropology. The piece is the first of three in a series on ethnography and design, featuring two other dear colleagues and my collaborators the past two years in the UC Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design, Lilly Irani and Keith Murphy. As an avid podcast listener myself, I am especially fond of the work that AnthroPod does to bring the anthropological perspective into my podcast app and earbuds (take that, Freakonomics!), and commendations are especially in order to the exceptional Tariq Rahman and Katherine Sacco, both in the PhD program at UC Irvine, who put the series together.
Over the past year, in my role as postdoctoral fellow for the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design (CoLED), it’s been my great privilege to work with an outstanding array of scholars interested in the intersections and conundrums presented by thinking about ethnography and design.
A little over a year ago, in September 2016, we launched the CoLED website, which, with guidance from co-PIs Elana Zilberg and Joe Hankins, and groundwork laid by Yelena Gluzman, I was glad to develop.
Now, based on a year of work, and thanks to a workshop grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and input from the CoLED faculty, postdocs, and graduate students across six UC institutions, we are so very excited to be presenting the fist CoLED conference, ETHNOGRAPHY & DESIGN: MUTUAL PROVOCATIONS. We are thrilled to present a conference that answers concerns brought by the scholars in our network: how can we make a conference that is about design and ethnography without reproducing a paradigm in which ethnography is constantly coopted for capital accumulation, as design enlists ethnographic techniques to work to produce value? How can we address the variety of stakes, concerns, approaches, disciplinary lenses, and arguments surrounding the ways that the words “ethnography” and “design” are circulating in our time? What would a conference program look like if the “standard” research presentation were demoted, and other “designs for ethnography” including artworks, performance, pedagogy, interactive digital interfaces, and experimental labs were offered equal footing? Who would even come to such a conference.
It has been a fascinating challenge and enthralling visioning process to work with the CoLED conference committee to bring this conference into existence. I’m personal very excited for the event, and I know that the rest of the team is as well. Please join us at UC San Diego next week, Oct 27-29th, for the event, or stay tuned for a multimedia conference publication to come.
One of the interesting challenges of conducting performance ethnography is learning anew how to document non-text-based happenings that become part of the ethnographic record. The recent staged workshop of I WAS NEVER ALONE, my ethnographic play script, produced an overwhelming barrage of moments of meaning-making and storytelling as actors, directors, lighting and set designs, and our access researcher, came together to create two performances and move the work toward a full staging (the workshop engaged professional actors and MFA theatre student designers in a very short a two week process with light tech and props, but no set. In director Joseph Megel’s hands, this stripped away aesthetic was just enough to draw the audience into the stories in the play, presented with stirring energy by the talented cast.
Regan Linton as Vera, and Vladimir Rudak as Musician, during the October 2016 staged workshop of I WAS NEVER ALONE at UC San Diego’s Shank Theatre. Photo copyright Jim Carmody, please visit his website for a full gallery and contact him for usage requests.
As an ethnographer, of course, I wanted to capture every moment of the process. What notes did the director give the actors? How did disability theatre specialist Jason Dorwart, the assistant director for the workshop, who also played the role of Rudak, differ in his interpretation of the script from our nondisabled director? What kinds of problems – embodying a role, pronouncing Russian words, working out what a Russian speaker might mean when referring to a particular political issue – arose during the rehearsal process? Most of these elements were captured by my digital audio recordings. And, with the help of Communication Department graduate student Olga Lazitski, who has a background in television news production, we were able to capture research quality video for several rehearsals and the two performances.
Finally, Jim Carmody, of the Department of Theatre & Dance at UC San Diego, brought his theatre & dance photography artistry to our final rehearsal, producing a series of stunning photos. View his gallery here: http://jimcarmody.zenfolio.com/iwasneveralone.
As performance ethnography scholar Dwight Conquergood underlined in his discussion of textocentrism, the process of knowledge production, and the kind of knowledge that is ultimately produced is curtailed if we cave to the hegemony of text-based forms of recording and knowing. Visual media like video and photography can only capture a limited glimpse of the social phenomena that live performance produces; a photo of a still moment in a performance can hardly produce the kind of communitas or social shift in emotive and interactional awareness that live performance creates. But these forms of documentation help us to understand the ways in which those performances continue to reverberate in the lives of people that the work has touched. How these images are taken up and used in the future is a question that interests me as a methodological problem: are they data, or are they objects in and of themselves? Are the publicity, interventions, illustrations, or texts? How will they be edited, read, shared, compiled, critiqued, or ignored? In an increasingly mediated world, these are questions that no longer pertain only to digital, media, or visual anthropology, or performance ethnography, but to many ethnographers whose fieldwork archives become increasingly media rich. In this way, I suspect that looking again to theatre, and understanding how our colleagues in those institutional locations have understood production photos, can be a useful pathway (as was Victor Turner’s alliance with Richard Schechter). Just some thoughts as I sort through the various media piling up in the wake of the play workshop.
I WAS NEVER ALONE (IWNA), a play script based on ethnographic fieldwork in Petrozavodsk, Russia with adults with disabilities, just keeps on moving – developing in new ways and finding collaborators and possibilities that, as a first-time documentary playwright, continue to astound and amaze me.
The February 2016 staged reading of IWNA (dir. Joseph Megel) at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill was the focus a recent video from Carolina Performing Arts. Check out a few clips from the reading, and me, trying not to not say the wrong thing, in the two-minute video feature.
Thanks to a grant from the FISP program, the play is moving forward with a more elaborated workshop that will take place in the fall at the University of California San Diego. Auditions for cast members, and meetings with prospective production team members will take place on June 2 & 3rd at UCSD (Dept of Theater & Dance, Galbraith Hall, Rm 20 on the lower level). Sign up for an audition slot here, or contact me or assistant director Jason Dorwart for more information or with access requests.
Meanwhile, script development continues on the Russian side of things, with the Russian-language version of the edited script nearing completion thanks to the collaboration of Valeriya Markina, my colleague at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, whose own project looks at disability theater in Moscow. This version of the Russian-language script will be shared with research participants, who will have the opportunity to review their own segment privately, and then, in late July, participate in a day long table reading and workshop about issues of disability representation that the script brings up. I’m looking forward to heading back to Russia for the first time since 2014 in order to conduct that workshop!
I guess the show’s subtitle, Oporniki, might have something to it — this thing really does seem to have a backbone!
