Under the auspices of the European universities united in the Aurora Alliance, the University of Innsbruck organised a completely unique Erasmus double BIP (Blended Intensive Programme) from 20 to 25 October 2024. More than 40 educators, scientists and administrative staff from Palacký University, the University of Innsbruck, the University of Duisburg-Essen, the Université Paris-Est Créteil, the University of Iceland and, last but not least, the Universitat Rovira i Virgili combined the two areas of the project. It became clear that the natural sciences, mainly represented in the Sustainable Development and Climate Change working group, and the humanities and social sciences, represented in the Culture: Diversity and Identity working group, have many common topics. Although it might seem that organic farming and manure management are not of interest to literary scholars, the opposite was the case. The point of contact in this case was ecocriticism and natural resources, both from the point of view of conservation and their embedding in literature and culture.

During the first four days, the scholars worked on multidisciplinary research projects and joint teaching activities (such as COIL – cooperative international learning), distance learning programmes or bilateral cooperation. As Dean Janette Walde noted, ‘It’s incredible how many ideas and possibilities for implementation can arise in such a short time!’ Added one of the main organisers, Prof. Barbara Buchenau from the University of Duisburg: ‘The beautiful backdrop of the Austrian mountains and the seclusion of the venue are balm for the soul, which uses the power of nature to fully develop scientific ideas.’

During the first part, students from various fields of study, from chemistry to medicine to literary history, had the opportunity to learn about the methodology of scientific work. The main focus, however, was on getting to know the so-called 3MT presentations. This is a format that was originally developed at the University of Queensland in Australia and enables a very compact presentation of scientific work, including the results. Handouts are not allowed. The authors can only modulate their voices and have only one static PowerPoint slide. Ask yourself if you could present your research in this limited space in three minutes. Isn’t that impossible? No. After a few hours of proper coaching by Suzanne Whitby and Toby Wikström, tentative first attempts turned out to be top performances in scientific mini-stories.

The absolute highlight of the entire week of events was the competition on Friday, in which the international jury evaluated the already outstanding performances of all the finalists. The evaluation was not easy, because all the participants showed enormous courage in performing in front of a multidisciplinary audience that was eagerly awaiting their presentations. In the end, the competition had three winners! The first, Marharyta Hodeieva, represented Palacky University with her lecture ‘How to heal with stories’. Another colleague, Stéphanie Chedid from the Université Paris-Est Créteil, won the audience award and impressed the jury with her lecture ‘Travel: from plants to airplanes’. The third gold medal went to Juliette Direur from the University of Paris, who talked about ‘The dangers of breathing’.

The organisation of the meeting, led by Christina Raab and Katerina Hochstaffl-Nazarova, ran like a well-oiled machine, for which they deserve a big thank you, because without their enthusiasm and patience, this successful double BIP would not have been possible. See you next year at another Aurora University.

This summer school is divided into two parts. The first part will take place online as a preparatory meeting on Friday 14 July 2023. The second will be held at Palacky University Olomouc 31 July – 4 August 2023.  It connects introductions to Open Source Research, remote sensing, interviewing, oral history, source criticism and decolonial theory.  

Description:

This summer school is intended to provide students and junior researchers with a basic toolkit in remote ethnography. It aims to enable a type of research in places of limited accessibility that can provide many of the same holistic, in-depth and detailed insights that classical ethnography does. Many of the teachers invited will be specialised in Xinjiang, China or Central Asia. Therefore, many texts and examples will concern this part of the world. Still, participation is not limited to students or researchers interested in these geographical locations and aims to provide a methodological toolkit that can be employed globally.

As an increasing number of areas in the world are becoming inaccessible or ethically untenable to do on-the-ground fieldwork, anthropologists and other researchers interested in these regions turn to remote methods. Online data and data gathering are at the center of this necessary refocus. Yet, many other types of data and material can be as important in coming to terms with realities on grounds inaccessible. This summer school presents some of these and methods of accessing them. Also, recent trends in remote research focus on isolated analyses of a disparate set of data, while the approach taught in this summer school encourages researchers to combine and triangulate these data types with each other, to let the data talk to each other. The idea of remote ethnography is that ethnography is a holistic endeavour that entails a degree of immersion and acquisition of general cultural knowledge and competencies. This means creating an analytically and methodologically sound conversation between government tenders, diaspora interviews, witness accounts, satellite images, leaked speeches, popular culture productions, propaganda and lists of detained people while embedding all of this in the long-term cultural knowledge of the region and its history, political economy, narratives, logics and languages. 

The summer school  draws on previous remote research traditions, such as those established during WW2 and the Cold War, for inspiration and to craft an epistemological framework for analysing very different data. At the same time, it seeks to critically reflect on the role of the researcher and her potential contribution to colonial-type knowledge production. Critically debating the dangers of abuse for counter-insurgency and exploitation of the weak that our research may help open up are crucial parts of a developing ethics code which the workshop seeks to introduce and discuss.

In-person and Online:

The summer school is divided into two parts. The first part will take place online as a preparatory meeting on Friday 14 July 2023. The second will be held at Palacky University Olomouc 31 July – 4 August 2023. 

The online part will be a full day preparatory meeting including three two-hour sessions. The first session consists of a short round of introductions and short introductions into Remote Ethnography as a concept, the summer school and the methods taught in it. the second session entails somewhat more elaborate informal presentations of each participant’s work, material and interest going forward as well as some of the Remote Ethnographic work already being done or in planning by some of the convenors. The third session is devoted to preparatory readings for the workshop. The students receive a list and a number of PdF texts to prepare for the in-person summer school two weeks later.

The in-person part will cover five days. Each day has a dedicated focus-topic and one person from the organising team in charge. At the end of the summer school each student leaves with the design of a small remote ethnography related research study that they will pursue in the following two months.

Topics of focus:

The in-person part is divided into the following topics with (persons in charge; and suggested invited speakers) added in parentheses. 

0) Introduction and overview, history of remote research and sources to draw from (Rune Steenberg; Robbie Barnett, …)

1) Online ethnography, discourse analysis, video analysis… (David O’Brien; Hanna Burdorf, Gene Bunin, Hacer Gonul, Vanessa Frangville, …)

2) Interview techniques and oral history (Muqeddes Mijit; Rian Thum, …)

3) Remote sensing for dummies – satellite imagery, Google Map/Google Earth/Open Street Map, etc. (Martin Lavicka; Robbie Barnett, Björn Alpermann, Nathan Ruser, …)

4) Source criticism, fact checking, triangulation & decolonial theory (Vanessa Frangville; Philipp Lottholz, Deniz Yonucu, Madina Tlostanova…)

5) Bringing it all together in an holistic Remote Ethnography – and your own data and research (Rune Steenberg; …)

Topics 0) and 5) will not cover full days, nor probably will 3) and 4). 1) may span over more than one day.

The in-person part will be held hybrid with online participants allowed to join via BBB.

Enrolling:

Interested? Please contact Martin Lavicka (martin.lavicka@upol.cz) by the end of May. 

Recording:

For those who present full lectures at the workshop, we plan to record them and to put them up online as Youtube and Podcast episodes.