Tools, Techniques, and Technologies: Doing Audio-Visual Ethnography Concretely

This volume draws together cutting-edge anthropological work on the intersection of audio-visual technologies and ethnography across a wider range of themes and contexts. Through fine-grained postcolonial ethnographic analysis, contributors address the challenges the global spread of digital technologies impose on current research by employing concrete sensorial and multidimensional tools of audio-visual practice. Even in more remote and non-industrialized parts of global north and south, anthropologists are faced with audiences and research participants who have access to the same means of digital image-making, representation, and dissemination, and who often possess similar sets of technological skills.
The uniqueness of this volume lies in the diversity of practices across different contexts, recognising the fact that we can no longer conduct research using audio-visual methods in the same manner as before, when visual anthropologists possessed the scientific authority and methodological privilege to "observe" and document "others." Instead, the authors will explore alternative and more inclusive ways of engaging with audio-visual research, reflecting the changing dynamics and power relations within the field.
The different chapters will ask what it means to practice visual anthropology in a world where the ubiquitous presence and influence of audio-visual image making has contributed to subvert power hierarchies of information, self-representation, and knowledge production. How can we concretely advance our practice in ways that are relevant to both the discipline and those who collaborate with our research? How can we make the discipline and its contribution more visible and accessible beyond the borders of academia? The advent of sensors, smartphone cameras and apps, VR goggles, trackers, drones, AI, and other technologies has provided visual anthropologists with new forms and formats to explore the world in collaboration with others and communicate their research. As we navigate the ever-changing digital landscape, we are compelled to consider how methods, theory, and ethics converge in both familiar and unconventional ways. What aspects of this convergence remain constant across time and space, and what is fundamentally reshaped? As such, the relationship between digital technologies, knowledge production, and ethics is not assumed but rather experimentally explored and investigated through meticulous ethnographic analysis. Therefore, this volume emphasizes the pressing need for a practice-oriented approach to audio-visual research methodologies and ethics in an evolving world.