More-than-Ethnographic Probes: On Scales, Design Anthropology and Sensory Practices Beyond-the-Human
Maxime Le Calvé Invited to Teach alongside Alice Jarry at Concordia University, Montreal
Maxime Le Calvé, Fieldwork Charité, 2022. Copyright: Maxime Le Calvé, Matters of Activity.
Cluster Member Maxime Le Calvé will travel to Montréal for a short research and teaching stay at the Milieux Biolab and the Milieux Speculative Life Cluster at Concordia University. He is invited by Prof. Alice Jarry, an assistant professor of Design and Computation Arts (Concordia University, Montréal) who holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality.
Together, they will conduct the workshop »More-Than-Ethnographic Probes.« This workshop is a fieldwork and a platform for the development of collaborative sketching, writing, and documentation methods. Exploring how to attend to more-than-human collectivities at different scales, from the built environment to cellular activity, the workshop is designed as an inventive anthropological design inquiry within the heavily mediated sense worlds of performative and situated spatial practices, bio-design, HCI, and Medical Imagery. »More-than-ethnographic Probes« will invite participants to contribute to an account of scientific cultures of microscopy and XR visualization techniques that pays respect to their embodied experience. The making process will be shaped by hands-on conversations through cultural probing: we will concoct, in short sessions, playful devices to render and further explore our observations and chats in different labs and residency spaces.
The participants will get the chance to meet and think hands-on with two other groups at Concordia: the Performative Urbanism Lab for Spatial of Social, and Scenographic Experimentation of the theater scholar Dr. Shauna Janssen and the Applied Perception Lab of the brain visualization researcher Dr. Marta Kersten-Oertel.
The workshop will be followed by a roundtable panel at the Uncommon Senses Conference at Concordia on May 4th. The panel will be chaired by anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (MIT). Moreover, Maxime will present a paper on the »Sensory Ethnography« panel at the »Uncommon Senses« conference, with the title: »Sketching a sense of presence: graphic ethnography as speculative sensorial attunement to neurosurgical practice.«