Workshops | Coaching
Seeing something ‘as something’ and sometimes ‘as something else’ as well
Certain video scenes that were created during a study conducted in the 1990s with Klaus Amann in a molecular biology laboratory have since become key references in the development of camera ethnography. They embody an initial experience in ethnography: Not yet being able to see what experts in the research fields are (more or less) able to see and show.
I offer media ethnographic coaching, introductory workshops on camera ethnography, and research process guidance – in Berlin (Centre for Camera Ethnography) or at the participants’ chosen location.
Request:
[email protected]
Components of a Camera Ethnography workshop
- Premise of the not (yet) visible
- Phases and situations of ethnographic research
- Media, their affordances and limits
- Practices, their choreographies and figures
- Situated methodology in practice
- Reflexive ethnography throughout the research process
- Interaction and intra-action
- Camera work and research relationships
- Filming as an attempt to locate epistemic things
- Cutting as experimentation with temporality
- Montage as experimental arranging
- “Übersichtliche Darstellung” (Wittgenstein) with a camera ethnographic twist
- Reception as research and the concept of the Blicklabor
- Cooperative research designs and publication strategies
German
- Prämisse des (noch) nicht Sichtbaren
- Phasen und Situationen ethnographischen Forschens
- Medien, ihre Affordanzen und Grenzen
- Praktiken, ihre Choreografien und Figuren
- Situierte Methodologie in der Praxis
- Reflexive Ethnographie als Forschungsprozessgestaltung
- Interaktion und Intra-aktion
- Filmen und Forschungsbeziehungen
- Filmen als Ortungsversuch epistemischer Dinge
- Zerlegen als Zeitversuch
- Montieren als Ordnung auf Probe
- „Übersichtliche Darstellung“ (Wittgenstein) kamera-ethnographisch gewendet
- Forschende Rezeption und das Konzept des Blicklabors
- Kooperative Forschungsdesigns und Publikationsstrategien
Constantly moving back and forth between images, sounds and words, encounters, experience and experimentation, resonance, difference and reflexivity while conducting research; immersing oneself in the field of the not yet, not at all, or no longer linguistic: this is the journey that camera ethnography invites you to embark upon.
Bina Elisabeth Mohn
Berlin, Dr. phil.
Ethnography is a wide-ranging, all-encompassing approach to research. For me, being an ethnographer is a fascinating way of being in the world and contributing to its diversity and its becoming in a perceptive, interactive, and performative way that involves encountering and learning from each other; creating and exchanging perspectives; experiencing and experimenting; listening, looking, feeling and reflecting; exploring differences, inventing connections, and creating something new; learning to see something ‘as something’ and sometimes ‘as something else as well’; opening up spaces of possibility; being a changing part of changing worlds.
About Bina
As a cultural anthropologist I have spent many years exploring how an ethnographic approach to using the camera can contribute to the emergence of epistemic things. This gave rise to the methodology that I call camera ethnography, which I have developed both independently and within various research collectives since the 1990s.
After studying cultural anthropology, visual anthropology, and the sociology of scientific knowledge, I wrote my PhD: an examination of the varieties of doing documentation in light of the crisis of ethnographic representation. In a range of contexts including laboratory studies, object-oriented sociological projects, ethnographic classroom research, theatre and performance studies, ethnographic childhood research and studies on digital childhood, camera ethnography has been continuously tested and further developed.
For the past 8 years (2016-2023), I directed the camera ethnography team in the research project “Early Childhood and Smartphone” within the Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Cooperation” (University of Siegen,). Now, as a freelance camera ethnographer, author, consultant, and coach I offer my services to support research teams and projects, and I give introductory and advanced-level workshops on the methodology and practice of camera ethnography.