Photo by snowsoulmate, licensed under CC BY NC ND.

This Theorizing the Contemporary series on collaborative analytics emerged from a workshop held at the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine in May 2017. The premise of the workshop was that collaboration is a lively area of imagination, intervention, and experimentation among anthropologists and their research partners today, one that is generating both analytical and methodological ideas for how the discipline can respond to changing contexts of fieldwork and ethnographic engagement. Here, we seek to capture insights from the workshop in a form that can be shared with the readers of Cultural Anthropology.

The workshop discussed many examples of collaborative practice in anthropological research and writing, including projects of curation, publication, and podcasting as well as research projects originally designed as individual interventions that later came into collaborative alignment through shared analytics and thematics. The participants discussed the politics, promises, and perils of collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and expert communities, as well as how collaborative situations impact ethnographic authority and relations with audiences. We resisted reducing collaboration to pure method and, for this reason, sought to focus on analytics—in particular, how collaboration inflects our choice of ethnographic medium and the ensuing forms that knowledge takes. We were mindful that collaborative practices of project design, research, and writing have been present in anthropology for a very long time, even if they seem to be receiving renewed attention and vitality as of late. Yet our collective feeling was that collaboration is one of the more interesting and important zones of engagement in anthropology and the human sciences today.

Collaboration has the potential to rescale and reframe the anthropological enterprise. Its processes can inspire new insights and trajectories for research and its expression. Moreover, its incorporation of research partners beyond the role of informant highlights the potential for new kinds of anthropological knowledge-making, whether artistic or activist, institutionalized or fleeting in nature.

Posts in This Series

Introduction: Collaborative Analytics

Introduction: Collaborative Analytics

“Collaborative analytics” became a key motivating phrase of our Center for Ethnography workshop in June 2017 and a thematic for this collection of short essays ... More

Collective Hunchwork

Collective Hunchwork

Collaboration has its benefits. Working together with others toward a shared goal can make specific tasks go more quickly, for example, while introducing a rang... More

Responsibility

Responsibility

Tension 1 I feel a responsibility to not abandon anthropology. I feel a responsibility to push the boundaries of anthropology.Tension 2 I feel a responsibility ... More

Evaluation

Evaluation

A space. Two people, collaborating. A door, slightly ajar. B checks the time.B: I think it’s a good intervention, but we will have to see what they say. A: And ... More

Manual: Collaborating on the Fly (in Ten Easy Steps!)

Manual: Collaborating on the Fly (in Ten Easy Steps!)

Step One: Create the ConditionsGet someone to force you to collaborate.Dominic Boyer shares a set of “musewords” on collaboration culled from our precirculated ... More

Improvisation

Improvisation

Improvisation is often associated with comedy, but it’s not always funny. Broadly speaking, improvisation can be characterized as performative, collaborative, a... More

Failure

Failure

Fail. Fall. Frail. Flail. Flounder. Fizzle. Flop.What does it mean to fail together?In ethnographic collaboration there are lots of places to flail, fall, and f... More

Surprise

Surprise

What is it to be taken by surprise? It is to be startled and maybe shaken, to be enchanted and even made breathless. To be taken by surprise is to be accosted b... More