Keynote lecture: Creative Practice Ethnography by Professor Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University)
Creative Practice Ethnography: techniques, translation and transmission
Date: 28 January 2021
Time: 9.30 – 11.00
Location: ONLINE ZOOM, tba (link will be sent when you have registered)
Registration: Please register via website
Professor Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University)
As media becomes increasingly entangled into complex social and material worlds, we need to deploy interdisciplinary and non-traditional methods. In particular, working with communities and collaborative participants requires a commitment to research techniques, translation and (knowledge) transmission. In this talk I explore a few examples of fieldwork which required more than just ethnography as action research. I reflect upon the power of creative practice methodologies to give voice to tacit practices and to find alternative ways for adapting the research into productive synthesis, exchange and generative collaboration.
Drawing on my collaborative research with Jungnickel, Harris and Coombs, I reflect upon our conceptualization of creative practice ethnography as something more than just the coalescence of creative practice and ethnography—rather as a rubric that recognizes the complex ways we know, experience and understand the world through different storytelling techniques. We argue that creative practice ethnography can facilitate and mobilize research across the three Ts—techniques, translation and transmission.
Biography
Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth is a digital ethnographer, socially-engaged artist, and director of the Design & Creative Practice (DCP) research platform at RMIT University (see http://dcp-ecp.com). Hjorth has two decades of experience leading interdisciplinary and collaborative digital and mobile media projects that use innovative methods to understand intergenerational relationships. She has led 20 national and international research projects in locations such as Japan, South Korea, China and Australia. Hjorth has also worked extensively on how mobile media is used for grief, loss and recovery including the Fukushima disaster of 2011. Hjorth has published over 100 publications on the topic—recent publications include Haunting Hands (with Cumiskey, Oxford Uni Press), Understanding Social Media (with Hinton, 2nd Edition, Sage), Creative Practice Ethnographies (with Harris, Jungnickel and Coombs, Rowman & Little) and Ambient Play (with Richardson, MIT Press).
