Yes, maybe more a dream. Ethnography that seeks to engage multiple publics needs to develop a rich visual and auditory literacy. Digital multimedia is incredibly powerful tool, but using those tools will require collaborative practices with technicians, artists and digital design specialists who share a commitment to public works and public knowledge and have access to funding that can support these types of collaborative works.
Access to research, libraries, and/or journals is incredibly restricted. As I engage in research outside traditional academic pathways with other scholars in similar circumstances, I have become more attuned to these restrictions and have learned some ways to circumvent them. In my professional training in Education Research Departments, research data sharing was never discussed or raised as a possibility. In fact, data protection, data security, and data ownership were the operative practices.
My interest in research data sharing is the result of personal experience, feminist STS scholarship, and my encounters with the Fortuns who are leaders in this effort.
First, I would point out that ethnographic method is used, co-opted and reinterpreted in many disciplines outside of anthropology. I see my work as engaging in educational ethnography. I have work around issues of informal learning, youth activism, and disability studies. More recently I position myself as an ethnographer within K-12 schools conducting fieldwork on governance and teaching during the complex, conjoined disasters of COVID-19 and our nation's racial reckoning.
Early on there was a visual thesaurus (now behind a paywall) that was part dictionary, part conceptual mapping tool. I thought it had such potential for the collaborative visual mapping of ideas and practices.
The Sugar plantations, Chemical Plants, COVID-19 tour on the Disaster-STS Network as an assemblage of people, stories, engagement and artfulness is such a rich and complex collaborative exhibition. I found it stunning.
The Formosa Plastics Global Archive organized by Tim Schütz and Shan-Ya Su is also such an impressive project and so-well executed. Again, there is an artful quality inherent in this Archive, a quality I think is undervalued in academic and find so important in engaging with multiple publics.