After Trash

Temperament of Penicillium Societies

1_Introduction This _Perspective examines the Penicillium family as a case study to explore the interaction between life and the environment. As one of the oldest ethnic communities, the Penicillium family has existed for 3.5 billion years. The study used ethnography as a form of qualitative inquiry to track the migration, kinship, and living habits of Penicillium community residents. Here, sensory ethnography and go-along interviews provide the method that allows delving into intimate social and personal aspects of the Penicillium family. Ethnography serves as an effective approach to creating a productive connection between biology, the human material body, social practices, and the social sciences. [1] According to Foucault, the biopolitics concerned with the human species or human populations means managing reproduction, births and deaths, behavior, and health and sanitation. [2] Haraway extends this scope to hybrid entities that involve multiple species’ boundaries. She emphasizes interspecies relationships, where humans become human through interactions with environmental materials and companion species. [3] Along with the burgeoning of technoscience, more beings (are able to) become embroiled in this entanglement. The concept of trans-biopolitics highlights the power dynamics involving both human and nonhuman populations, as well as their flesh, organs, tissues, and cells. [4] One of the ways to respond to those power relationships is to add those actors into the social analysis. Therefore, the shifting of the right to interpret, the knowledge production in different situations, and the method of non-human translation by crossing disciplines are important. This piece of writing is an experiment in translating the microbes’ language. The stories I collected from Garbageland and Continent B reveal the territorial occupation, survival strategies, and emotional entanglements of the Penicillium family history. Analyzing the fieldwork enables rethinking the boundaries of life as a form and its definition. 2_Methods In past decades, the debate about the binary opposition of human and nature has become increasingly nuanced and complex, interweaving various perspectives on their interdependence. The term ‘Anthropocene’ identifies the significant impact of human behavior on the planet. To investigate other living beings, I conducted fieldwork on the planet Garbageland, which is one of the most biodiverse places in the universe. The vast expanse of ground is home to billions of species (of creatures), many of which have yet to be discovered and documented by science. It is a complicated environment for me; I am surrounded by birth and death as the creatures living in this land…

Making the ‘Other’ Visible in Ethnographic Research

Reflections through the Lens of Caste and Gender, from a Non-Metropolitan City in West Bengal, India

1_ Introduction This paper is an attempt to find some possible contextual answers to the ethico-political concerns that surround the question of methodology in feminist ethnography. My larger research project sought to understand the forced migration induced by the Partition of British India (1947) in my hometown, Asansol in West Bengal, India. [16] In doing so, I took as my protagonists women from the Dalit/Bahujan families, [17] who had hitherto been invisibilized in the narrativization of the Partition. I understand invisibilization as a political act through which dominant groups reduce heterogenous experiences of an event, such as that of the Partition, to a homogenous ‘master narrative.’ This master narrative in the case of the Partition in India, and in West Bengal specifically, was told largely from an upper-caste point of view and comprised of multiple cultural productions—films, autobiographies, memoirs—and was crucial for the ways in which the upper-caste population negotiated with state in seeking and achieving rehabilitation. In the process, the differential experiences of the Partition and rehabilitation as well as the caste-based injustices therein were erased. Consequently, both in its academic and popular culture versions, Dalit/Bahujan women and their specific experiences were not thematized. Even the feminist counter-narratives had erased the specificities of caste and its impact on the experiences of refugeehood. [18] In contrast, my doctoral research aimed to understand through an ethnographic approach how Dalit/Bahujan women experienced the Partition and its aftermath, especially in the long-durée, in the context of Asansol, a non-metropolitan city in West Bengal, where the refugees from government camps, largely from Dalit/Bahujan backgrounds had been rehabilitated to provide cheap labor for the industrial development in the area. I began my doctoral research in 2017, seeking to rethink the Partition-migration in West Bengal India, through the intersecting frameworks of caste, gender and region. In the process of this ethnographic research, as a cis-het, upper-caste woman and a third-generation member of a Partition-migrant family, my established notions of ‘feminist’ ethics and politics were continuously put to test. I constantly battled the insider and outsider status throughout the course of my research: Being part of a migrant family on my mother’s side, I had been exposed to milieus similar to the research context since my birth. [19] In fact, some of the respondents of the study were acquaintances of my mother’s whom she had lived and grown up with. Her class background was similar to that…

Design and Modeling as Processes of Creating Culture

In the framework of the investigation into “Research as Art” by research area ‘Visual and Material Culture,’ Prof. Claudia Mareis (Basel) and Dr. Reinhard Wendler (Florence) hosted a two-day workshop on “Designing Models, Modelling Design” (February 3–4, 2016). In the workshop, the concepts of ‘design’ and ‘model’ served as semantic vehicles for a discussion on the temporal and material character of meaning-making. As ideas, both can foster an interdisciplinary analysis of emerging cultural phenomena, transcending disciplinary boundaries in academia as well as those between different fields of cultural reflection, social planning, and material production (such as architecture or engineering). The workshop revolved around the central notion that the creation of objects and images during modeling and design processes can fulfill a multitude of different functions: as means of representation, ideation, planning, or communicating ideas, they shape historically specific emergences of cultural phenomena. …

Shake Those Methods!

The Art of Doing Research

In the winter term 2015/16, the GCSC research area ‘Visual and Material Culture’ held a number of meetings on the application of the research methodology while conducting research in the study of culture. As the immediacy of practical application of the research methods leaves a strong imprint on the ideas and knowledge that appear in academia, we wanted to report on our discussions in the light of the theoretical concept of ‘emergence.’ …

Research Design

The explorative potential of research-planning processes in visual and material culture

The first session of the Creative Emergence of a Research Method series was dedicated to thinking about research processes and their design. The non-planned potential knowledge, emerging during those processes (also while reflecting on the research design process itself) became a central topic. It was a provocative session in which we took the abstract notion of ‘design’ as the ‘rituals of creativity’ and compared research design to object- or service-design processes. …