This course explores visual ethnography as both a form of ethno-methodologies for the study of everyday urban culture and its relevance in the context of research-creation, which has grown in valence in contemporary art practices.

This course has two main components: to learn how to study our everyday culture and produce knowledge about the world using visual media, and to study visual objects in our everyday life, such as photographs, movies, maps, posters, materials on YouTube, graphic design etc. to see the unique ways they tell us about the world in which we live.

A strong focus of this course rests on developing competence and critical thinking in the deployment of audio-visual tools in field studies, and the epistemological implication of these tools – how knowledge production is mediated by tools and how media representation of fieldwork findings articulates as well as shapes the way we know. Students in this course therefore embrace the multiple identities of an observer, critic and mediator, and artist.

One fourth of the course will be spent on well-known cases of artists and works that involve substantial exercises of visual ethnography --  to study how they transform field experience into artistic actions. This component will allow those students who, instead of an elaborate written report, choose to present their final work in the form of an art work.

This course discusses in depth important cultural theories, history of documentaries, creative impulses in urban studies, and research methods in anthropology. This course is project-based, individual and in groups. Students are expected to be independent learners who are ready to discover more via reading, research and creation.

The FOUR key subjects in visual ethnography that form the research-creation of this class are:
A. Deploying audio-visual media in ethnographic research;
B. Researching and collecting visual/audio objects to gain insight into culture and everyday life;
C. Ethnography and/for/in art-making: from ethnography to creative collecting and art-making; and
D. (Re-)presenting research findings as audio-visual artifacts, e.g. a documentary, an audio album.