Panels and Calls for Participation

2025 RAI Film Conference Panel CFP

Image by Patricia Alvarez Astacio

SUBMIT YOUR PAPER PROPOSAL HERE

Bad Habitus: Toward an Anthropology of the Multimodal
Kate Hennessy and Stephanie Takaragawa, organizers

This panel engages the discursive, material, and historical entanglements of the multimodal in anthropology by bringing together scholars and artists who are working across media and geographies to reveal what we call “Bad Habitus”: a playful engagement with Ahmed’s “bad habits” (2007) and the everyday reproduction of relations of power as habitus (Bourdieu 1977). Continuing in the trajectory to “expand beyond Eurocentric, colonialist, and ableist ways of doing what we do, with or without technology” (Chin 2017: 541), this panel builds on our article Bad Habitus (Takaragawa et. al. 2019). We seek panellists who are critically engaging the tools and technologies of the multimodal in practice or are taking a broader historical or theoretical view to mine and undermine the qualities and connections that are obscured or amplified through our practices. How might an orientation toward our bad habitus begin to define a critical anthropology of the multimodal that resists techno-determinist, capitalist, and disciplinary extractivism rather than reinforcing it? 

We invite proposals that foreground art works and/or broader historical and theoretical orientations as keywords referencing specific technologies (eg. AI, drone, cell phone, data centre, cloud), media (eg. photograph, video, 3D model); the environment (eg. water, mining, air pollution, climate) or theoretical, speculative frames that contributors identify as implicated in the multimodal (eg. time, labour, conflict, preservation, fugitivity). Selected presenters will be invited to contribute a chapter to an edited volume currently in development that will foreground the generative potential of creative practices toward a future anthropology of the multimodal. 

  • Call for Papers Opens: 1 November 2024 

  • Call for Papers Closes: 17 January 2025 

  • Registration Opens: 24 February 2025 

To Submit: All proposals must be made via an online form.  

BAD HABITUS REVISITED (AAA 2022)

Continuing in the trajectory to “expand beyond Eurocentric, colonialist, and ableist ways of doing what we do, with or without technology” (Chin 2017: 541), we seek to re-engage a conversation from half a decade ago (Takaragawa et. al. 2019) towards more substantive academic engagement. Five years ago we asked: How do technologies work, how are they produced, by whom, and under what conditions? Can multimodal anthropology address technological democracy in an era where it is largely agreed that the internet has failed to increase or produce democratic conditions? What does multimodal anthropology fail to recognize? How does the use of increasingly ubiquitous new technologies in anthropological praxis subsequently elide issues of power, resource equity, and representation?

For this panel and a companion online exhibition we invite presentations of new works and perspectives critically engaging multimodal methodologies and frameworks to expose and disrupt deeply embedded knowledge and power hierarchies while also making space for ways of knowing otherwise. As we have previously argued, although the multimodal in anthropology may challenge dominant modes of authorship, expertise, capacity, and language, there is nothing inherently liberatory about this paradigm. Following our call for an anthropology of the multimodal (Smith and Hennessy 2020) that may use research-creation––emergent and hybrid artistic-scholarly methodologies (Loveless 2015) that include art-led and practice based research––we seek participation in this session and online exhibition from artists and scholars whose works interrogate the material and discursive implications of multimodal anthropology as embedded within technoscience.  

Building on Sara Ahmed’s (2007) concept of bad habits and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1988) habitus, we identify that multimodal anthropologies run the risk of reproducing and reinforcing a problem of bad habitus. Multimodal anthropologies can just as easily reinforce existing power structures by making recourse to techno-fetishism or by dressing up neocolonial practices of extraction, inclusion, and appropriation in new language. Mobilizing the multimodal in the service of anthropology we must bear in mind its position vis-à-vis global capitalism and the reproduction of social forces that continue to reinforce cultural imperialism, neo-colonialism, and oppression. Therefore we invite submissions that investigate and represent what multimodal approaches to knowledge production privilege and what they strategically deny. Presenters in this session ask questions such as (but not limited to):

  • How are anthropologists today focusing critical attention on the socio-technical infrastructures that undergird multimodal tools and technologies being used across the discipline? 

  • How are new technologies (broadly considered) being studied and used by anthropologists and artists in practice to draw attention to their bad habitus, including relations of power within the discipline and its institutions? 

  • How can research-creation and art-led ethnographic methodologies support an emergent anthropology of the multimodal that accounts for the entanglements of new technologies in anthropology and  technoscience?

What does an anthropology of the multimodal using research-creation as a methodology look, sound, or feel like?


Organized by Kate Hennessy, Stephanie Takaragawa, and Trudi Lynn Smith

THE PANEL: Abstracts

  • Notes on Bad Habiti: An Editor's view

    As current editors of the Multimodal Anthropology section of American Anthropologist, we have witnessed patterns that reproduce the bad habiti of multimodal scholarship. These patterns suggest that multimodal anthropology’s potential is limited by the neocolonial values and structures continue to undergird and shape its potentials. We will share how we have navigated and disrupted these problematics by initiating several initiatives with our EIC - Elizabeth Chin – e.g., new critical and transparent frameworks for review; a curatorial process that showcase projects that reflexively and creatively engage with power relations; and blurring of boundaries between print and digital publication.

  • Situating hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language on Musqueam land: Geospatial Audio at UBC

    We share the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ Locative Audio app, produced in collaboration among the Musqueam Language and Culture Department, the UBC Emerging Media Lab, and CEDaR space at UBC. Augmented reality allows users at specific GPS coordinates to hear a hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ street name like stəywət, which refers to the westerly wind off the Salish Sea felt close to the shoreline. As a ‘relational technology’ the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ Locative Audio app holds ground amid algorithmic paradigms that colonize virtual worlds, and provides a model for how collaborative design, agile development, community protocols can inform our stewardship of cultural knowledge within and between embodied and digital contexts.

  • Discussant

  • A Graveyard of Bespoke Software: Reflections on Public Interest Technology

    Computing begins with an idea, a rough sketch of something possible. Then someone shares something they’ve coded and among those willing to give it a try. But what happens when this gesture of friendly experimentation shifts to something less generous—a power move that pushes technologies to scale through imposition? This talk will trace the history and tacit theory of power embedded in moves to counter Big Tech market logics with “public interest technology” toward an explicit analysis of power in computing. Using the case of building software with community healthcare workers, the presentation will map out an alternate route to building sociotechnical systems, outlining what anti-racist, queer feminist critiques can offer computing as a different path forward for the future of socially accountable tech.

  • In this presentation I think with and trouble ethnographic relations within the “AV (audio/visual) Club” of Bay Area Muslim communities through an attunement to “bad habitus” that inheres in uneven technologies, knowledges, status, and access and contradictory and aligned political and aesthetic projects. The “club” is oriented around a shared recognition that something significant has happened or is happening, while the ethical-political-spiritual aims, resources, and concerns we—a tenure-track assistant professor/filmmaker, an audiovisual coordinator at a Muslim college, and an informal videographer of an African American Muslim mosque community—each bring may differ.

  • Haiti and the Multimodal Imagination

    “Black beyond remedy,” Haiti has been sentenced to ultimate Paalterity in the US literary imaginary. Haitians have been framed as the antithesis to whiteness because their successful uprising shook the foundations of white supremacy. Although multisensory mediums have fostered inclusiveness, when considering Haiti’s bad press, multimodal products have been harmful, if not more damaging than texts due to their recorded realism. How have anthropologists staged Haiti via multimodal (mis)representations and/or interventions? After discussing portrayals of Haiti in ethnographic films, I will share how I have utilized multimodal technologies to co-produce knowledge about a prominent Haitian band.

  • Building on Sara Ahmed’s (2007) concept of bad habits and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1988) habitus, we revisit our 2018 article arguing that multimodal anthropologies run the risk of reproducing and reinforcing a problem of bad habitus. We explore ways in which multimodal anthropologies function to reinforce existing power structures by making recourse to techno-fetishism and obscuring neocolonial practices of extraction, inclusion, and appropriation. Furthering our call for an anthropology of the multimodal (Smith and Hennessy 2019) that may use research-creation––emergent and hybrid artistic-scholarly methodologies (Loveless 2015) that include art-led and practice-based research––we discuss the online exhibition curated in parallel with the panel to highlight the work of artists and scholars whose works interrogate the material and discursive implications of multimodal anthropology as embedded within technoscience.

    Panel Co-organizers and Exhibition Co-curators

BAD HABITUS (AAA 2018, San Jose CA)

Bad Habitus: Mulitmodal Anthropology in the Age of Technoscience

Presenters: Stephanie Takaragawa, Trudi Lynn Smith, Kate Hennessy, Shalini Shankar, Patrica Alvarez Astacio, Coleman Nye, Jenny Chio

How is multimodal anthropology complicit in the reification of technocentric methodologies and power? Inspired by Elizabeth Chin’s provocation for the multimodal to “expand beyond Eurocentric, colonialist, and ableist ways of doing what we do, with or without technology” (Chin 2017: 541), this panel asks how the multimodal in anthropology could and should continue to trouble and disturb the discipline while resisting the enchantment of the new.

 The recent transformation of the Visual Anthropology section in the journal American Anthropologist into Multimodal Anthropology was motivated by three perceived developments in the world of anthropology: A democratization and integration of media production, a shift toward engagement and collaboration in anthropological research, and the “dynamic roles of anthropologists vis-a-vis both the profession and the communities in which they work” (Collins, Durington and Gill, 2017). Multimodal methodologies and frameworks hold the potential to expose and disrupt deeply embedded knowledge hierarchies while also opening up ways of knowing otherwise. However, although it may challenge dominant paradigms of authorship, expertise, capacity, and language, there is nothing inherently liberatory about multimodal approaches in anthropology. 

Building on Sara Ahmed’s (2007) concept of bad habits and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1988) habitus, we identify that multimodal anthropologies run the risk of reproducing and reinforcing a problem of bad habitus. Multimodal anthropologies can just as easily reinforce existing power structures by making recourse to techno-fetishism or by dressing up neocolonial practices of extraction, inclusion, and appropriation in new language. Mobilizing the multimodal in the service of anthropology we must bear in mind its position vis-à-vis global capitalism and the reproduction of social forces that continue to reinforce cultural imperialism, neo-colonialism, and oppression. We wonder what multimodal approaches to knowledge production privilege and what do they strategically deny?

Presenters in this session envision the multimodal and its potential to support the realignment of relations of power, community-led media productions, and ethical research relationships with communities that have been excluded from participation in anthropological forms of knowledge production. Through short provocations involving key terms (e.g. malaise, marginality, technological overdeterminism, novelty, anti-capitalism), this roundtable begins by asking: How do technologies work, how are they produced, by whom, and under what conditions? Can multimodal anthropology address technological democracy in an era where it is largely agreed that the internet has failed to increase or produce democratic conditions? What might multimodal anthropology fail to recognize? Or worse, how might our own attention to technological forms, subsequently elide issues of power, resource equity, and representation?

Ahmed, Sara (2007) A Phenomenology of Whiteness. Feminist Theory. Vol 8 (2):148-168.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1988) Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgement of Taste. University of Chicago.

Chin, Elizabeth (2017) On Multimodal Anthropologies from the Space of Design: Toward Participant Making. Multimodal Anthropology Section. American Anthropologist. Volume 119, Issue 3 Sept 2017 Pages 541–543.

Collins, S; Durington, M;  and Gill, H (2017) Multimodality: An Invitation. American Anthropologist Volume 119, Issue 1 March 2017 Pages 142–146.