Responsive Ethnography

The first case addressed in this review is EthnoData,¹ a digital infrastructure investigating the production and use of state statistics regarding violent deaths in Ecuador. EthnoData critically examines official data sets, and intervenes in public debates about violent crimes and experiments with different representational genres for quantitative data. Despite the appearance of neutrality in official statistics, the project has shown that data about violence in Ecuador is fraught with disparity, contradictions, and sometimes lacunae. The last point is particularly relevant in the case of feminicides, a type of violent death underrepresented in the official data for complex juridical reasons.² EthnoData has explored these topics problematising epistemic assumptions about the value of data by investigating its production with an ethnographic sensibility. Their work has opened space for public discussion and led the EthnoData team to engage in public activities intervening in political debates – a paradigmatic example is the official report they wrote about the penal system in Ecuador in 2021.³ Started in 2018, the project was developed by the Kaleidos Foundation in Ecuador – based at Cuenca University – and is led by anthropologists Jorge Núñez and Maka Suárez, with the participation of a large number of collaborators with different professional skills.

Conceptualised as ‘a digital infrastructure that combines ethnographic research with data analysis’ (Núñez and Suárez 2021: 83), the critical analysis of official data takes expression in two central activities. Firstly, they scrutinise the production and circulation of data to produce empirical counter-evidence that complicates official narratives. EthnoData's website offers a mapped visualisation of violent deaths (between 2010 and 2020), according to different categories (murder, homicide, feminicide, and sicariato⁴), which allows for contrasting different sources. Secondly, the project has a propositional dimension that has led them to explore forms of representation creating ‘experiments with curatorial spaces, podcasts, short documentaries, and games’ (Núñez and Suárez 2021: 83). Their ethnographic stories, for instance, offer a multilayered approach that complexifies data production, showing the limitation of quantitative data. Audio accounts of crimes are narrated in a police-report style, offering descriptions that embody and situate those crimes in sharp contrast to the abstracted data from statistics. They have produced brief audiovisual documentaries elaborated by relatives of missing persons; in this way, they can control the narratives of these terrible events. As they put it, EthnoData turns these different cases into ‘an experiment in conceptualizing and depicting critical data stories’ (Núñez and Suárez 2023: 35).

EthnoData confronts us with a fundamental possibility held by many multimodal endeavours: the exploration of non-textual representations for anthropological knowledge. This can be understood in line with the invitation to experiment with different forms of representation for anthropological knowledge made decades ago (Clifford and Marcus 1986). However, EthnoData involves more than just an experiment with anthropological knowledge representation, for it entails the production of a public infrastructure whose relational effects have allowed anthropologists to establish collaborations and partnerships with professionals from diverse disciplines (activists, web designers, civil society organisations, et cetera), social collectives concerned with the problem of violence (including incarcerated persons, their relatives, and families of those killed), and different institutions (like the national police or the attorney general's office). Many of these collaborations were not the product of a teleological design but serendipitous infrastructural effects, as Jorge Núñez and Maka Suárez describe them: ‘combining ethnography with digital platform-driven research has the capacity to generate unexpected collaborations and allow novel connections between seemingly unrelated issues’ (2023: 33).

It would, however, be insufficient to reduce EthnoData to a mere intervention in the space of representation, as its infrastructure represents a genuine and singular intervention into the forms of public presence that anthropologists may establish in our societies. Thus, EthnoData offers a clue about the convoluted and wide-reaching effects that digital public infrastructures may have on contemporary ethnographic practice, specifically in the articulation of public anthropology. It takes here a singular material expression, as it is founded upon the complex activity of designing ethnographically inflected material infrastructures to participate in public debates – or more importantly, to bring them to life. The second project, The Asthma Files, allows us to delve deeper into this issue, in this case reflecting upon a practice (analysis) usually developed only by anthropologists.

Collaborative Hermeneutics

Asthma is a complex respiratory condition, so, to undertake its investigation – and other environmental public health issues – The Asthma Files⁵ (TAF, from now on) have designed a digital infrastructure (Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography [PECE]⁶) that serves to sustain a prolonged collaboration with multiple parties – anthropologists, epidemiologists, designers, and, crucially, ethnographic interlocutors. Developed in the last two decades by Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, and a large number of collaborators, TAF's digital environment supports the sharing of data (maps, photos, reports, et cetera.) in an infrastructure that structures the process of collective analysis. TAF is conceived as a digital research environment designed for archiving and analysing ethnographic data, and as a collaborative hermeneutic (Fortun and Fortun 2023) that materialises ‘how digital tools can be used to support new research practices, new ways of expressing ethnographic analyses, and new ways of enrolling audiences in the process of ethnographic knowledges production’ (Fortun et al. 2014: 634). The initial goal of the project was to investigate how different people – from researchers to activists – understood and acted on asthma, but as time passed it grew in complexity and goals, and set the objective ‘to involve people in the ethnographic research process, such that ethnography becomes an ever-evolving space for deliberation and collective evaluation of complex conditions’ (Fortun et al. 2014: 634).

Analysis is a central practice of ethnography that is rarely discussed, very often mystified (Ballestero and Winthereik 2021), and which receives all kinds of attributions. For a start, anthropologists have tended to assume that analysis is always an ad hoc and irreducible response to the particularity of field data, so it is not possible to anticipate the process. TAF challenges these ideas by organising the workflow of data and structuring its analysis in advance without, as their authors argue, impeding the spontaneity and creativity entailed in this activity (Khandekar et al. 2021). This is a core intervention, but I would suggest that the challenging transformation that TAF entails for ethnography is of a different kind, as the structuration of analysis involves a redistribution of the responsibility over this activity as well, transforming those previously known as informants into analysts. While there is an extensive history of collaboration in anthropology with informants and interlocutors in different instances such as data gathering, writing, and more generally representation, rarely has this collaboration taken place in the process of analysis, which is usually exclusively advanced by anthropologists. TAF alters this distribution of responsibilities and creatively experiments with genres for analysis – like photo essays, timeline formats, and collage-like PECE essays – in ‘carefully structured yet underdetermined and open-ended attempts to produce new forms of ethnographic expression responsive to ever-changing situations’ (Khandekar et al. 2021: 79).

There is a second layer in the convoluted transformations of ethnographic activity, since analysis does not happen at the end of fieldwork but becomes deeply imbricated with it: anthropologists relate with their ethnographic interlocutors through their analytical collaborative infrastructure. Under these circumstances, I would suggest that TAF challenges and radically transforms traditional conceptions of the ethnographic encounter. Envisioned as a form of engagement in the everyday social contexts of interlocutors, anthropologists set the conditions (social, material, and even economic) for an ethnographic encounter that occurs in an arranged situation designed by anthropologists (Estalella 2024). Departing from conventions, TAF operates a large transformation in the forms of relationality in the empirical encounter, mode of analysis, and interpretative genres of ethnography. Interestingly enough, the digital infrastructure was not a purposeful design from the beginning, but the result of a process of trial and improvisation that evolved over time. From a shared PowerPoint document, the project jumped into a wiki infrastructure, before setting up the final design based on the Drupal technology, an open-source/free software designed for building websites and managing content. I would intimate that such an evolution highlights the inventive and improvisational nature of these experimental endeavours that challenge conventional modes of ethnographic practice. The last case under discussion bears witness (as do the two preceding cases) to such inventive activity.

Ethnographic Remediations

Ethnographic forms of experimentation, as these two previous projects demonstrate, push the limits of ethnography. The last case, Ciudad Escuela⁷ (The City as a School), overcomes traditional epistemic boundaries by erasing distinctions between investigation and intervention, writing and making, and, I would suggest, between ethnography and infrastructure. Ciudad Escuela (CE, from now on) is a pedagogical intervention and ethnographic investigation of the city-making practices of neighbours and urban residents in Madrid. My account involves a reflexive gesture, as I was part of its creative design and development. As a project based on a long-lasting anthropological collaboration with the urban architectural guerrillas Zuloark and Basurama, the different disciplinary affiliations and aspirations of our partners (and ourselves)⁸ left their mark in an endeavour sitting at the intersection of art, architecture, and anthropology.

The project began in 2012, amid the climate of urban unrest that followed the spring of the 15M movement (the Spanish version and precursor of the global Occupy movement), when all kinds of urban initiatives conceived as urban commons – such as urban community gardens and self-managed spaces – sprang up in the city. The autonomous aspiration of many of these urban initiatives faced the reality that many participants lacked the necessary skills to manage and sustain them. Ciudad Escuela was designed to respond to this situation by organising encounters in which neighbours and urban residents could learn about practices of auto-construction, digital communication, and social mediation, among other topics. The project turned the apprenticeships populating the city into its design matter, by building a digital platform, a programme that took expression in a pedagogical itinerary, and a series of learning events held in different autonomous spaces in the city. We conceived CE as an urban infrastructure dedicated to promoting (and supporting) the pedagogy of autonomous spaces.

For more than four years, we itinerated throughout the city, tracing and revealing an autonomous geography while unfolding CE's pedagogic programme (an itinerary). Each learning event responded to the particularities and necessities of autonomous initiatives, like a workshop on mediation organised in a community garden fraught with internal conflicts, and another on auto-construction held in a community garden in need of basic infrastructures. Designed as hands-on learning situations, my interlocutors and others performed their modes of engaging with the urban landscape during these occasions. They were productive encounters (Cantarella et al. 2019), where I could learn from the practices and visions of my direct ethnographic interlocutors, Zuloark and Basurama, at the same time that my ethnographic investigation was expanded to new conceptual and urban territories. In these situations, pedagogy was not just a learning method but a form of relationality for a two-sided endeavour: an urban intervention and ethnographic investigation.

Leaving traces of its activities, CE's infrastructure was spread out over the city. In this sense, CE was as much an urban infrastructure as an infrastructure for an experimental ethnography, acting as ‘platform[s] for action that are simultaneously imaginative and practical, simultaneously conceptual and technical’ (Jensen and Winthereik 2013: xv). Central to CE's design was the open-source digital platform that served as an archive to document activities for others to learn – a common practice for Zuloark and Basurama. Fully committed to the ethos and values of free software, they documented their interventions in the city. Besides an archive of learnings, the infrastructure served as a certifying system, providing public credentials of the abilities that participants had developed – the documentation of their activities was there to prove it. The latter involved using the open-source platform Mozilla Open Badges’ technology and (along with the public accounts that documented activities) substantiated our vision of Ciudad Escuela as an experiment with an open-source urban pedagogy.

Infrastructures are not just material systems; as we know, they are languages that accrue expectations (Larkin 2013), and CE is no different in this respect, for its pedagogical itinerary gives expression to its conceptual aspiration. It is the outcome of our investigation, and, at the same time, it speaks of hopes for a different city. This itinerary represents a vocabulary that functioned as a pedagogical proposition and a conceptual description of autonomous spaces where urban residents were engaged in collective experiments with the forms of urban inhabitation. I have described CE elsewhere as a gesture of remediation in which ethnography changes its form and media (Estalella 2023). The project's material arrangement is a full-fledged ethnographic infrastructure that inscribes the material and social conditions of the field encounter and offers a conceptual expression of it.

Ethnographic Experimentation

Anthropological investigations have acknowledged the relevance of infrastructures in our societies, highlighting the relational worlds entangled in these broad material systems and pointing to the poetics and imaginaries inscribed in them. The three projects in this review reveal a different kind of engagement with digital infrastructures, as these are not an object of investigation but a matter of ethnographic design. While engaged in the unusual process of devising material arrangements to conduct their ethnographic projects, anthropologists are thrown into variegated collaborations, diverse relationships, and unexpected outcomes. I would suggest that this infrastructural work invites us to explore a different conceptualisation of ethnography. Envisioned over the years as a writing activity, a process of learning, or a distinctive experiential situation, ethnography takes in these projects the form of an infrastructural endeavour that responds to the invocation that the Fortuns made years ago, when stating that ‘experimental work that brings new problems, concepts, and political possibilities into play is critical. So is the infrastructural work on which those experiments depend, and which is itself a form of experimentation’ (Fortun and Fortun 2015: 366). Epistemic implications for the discipline are wide, for in the hands of anthropologists, these material arrangements devise the conditions for turning ethnography into an experimental activity.

Ours is a discipline that has traditionally envisioned its production of knowledge in observational terms; therefore, the shift to experimentation involves an epistemological displacement with broad reverberations in different instances of the anthropological activity, as I have described – including fieldwork, analysis, representation, and conceptual expression. This ethnographic experimentation takes the form of a collective endeavour that harnesses the epistemic efforts and variegated contributions of multiple parties. These material designs reorganise the production of anthropological knowledge, redistributing responsibilities, changing temporalities, and transforming the expressive form of ethnography in this process. Those previously known as informants turn into epistemic companions, a conceptualisation pointing to a relevant epistemic transformation that pushes further established aspirations in anthropology. It is not just that anthropology can be understood as a practice that instead of investigating others, investigates with others. Here, ethnographic interlocutors become fully engaged in the ethnographic endeavour, contributing to its representational practice, analysis, and conceptualisation. Certainly, these forms of ethnographic experimentation are not representative of anthropological activity, but they constitute a significative endeavour that indicates a series of transformations and disciplinary aspirations seeking to reanimate anthropology and endow our investigations with renewed relevance.