Experimental Methods for Ethnographic Research, Gathering, + Exchange
A Matrix for Ethnographic Collaboration + Practice
A Matrix for Ethnographic Collaboration + Practice
EMERGE is a distributed project with ethnography research spaces based in Canada and the USA, and with collaborators undertaking work around the world. The central focus is on creating new and innovative ways to collaborate, share methods, and innovate the futures of ethnographic research.
This project takes as its starting point ethnography with its roots as the traditional methodology of anthropologists, based on situated participant observation, mixed qualitative data-collection, and non-reductive forms of representation. It has recently become popular in other disciplines and outside the academy, making it a site of increasingly interdisciplinary methodological thinking. All members of the Matrix embrace how collaborative and experimental methods can advance the future of anthropology.
As an acronym, it represents a group committed to Experimental Methods for Ethnographic Research, Gathering, and Exchange. As a verb, captures the energetic and generative co-creation across five ethnography research spaces in Canada and the US with professors and both graduate and undergraduate students.
EMERGE reflects the spirit of collaboration enacted through the merging of ideas, spaces, and futures in training and practice. We are emerging into new spaces for generative ethnography today from which there is horizontal learning and a commitment to multi-modal efforts. In this effort, we EMERGE together to co-create a matrix of interdisciplinary collectiveness from which new methods, ideas, practices, and connections grow.
Learn about each of the Matrix members.
Matrix Member Land
Acknowledgements
The Concordia Ethnography Lab is located on unceded Indigenous lands. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations, and the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of its lands and waters.
The Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab respectfully acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan peoples.
The University of Toronto Ethnography Lab acknowledges the land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.
The Centre for Experimental Ethnography is gathered on the historic lands of the Lenape peoples. We honor the past, present, and futures of the Lenape, whose cultures and customs have nurtured, and continue to nurture, this land. These Americas are built on violence and erasure, and when we enter any room, we bring these histories with us.
The Ethnography Studio is located on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva and Kizh Nation - Gabrieleño people and their neighbors: (from North to South) the Chumash, Tataviam, Kitanemuk, Serrano, Cahuilla, Payomkawichum, Acjachemen, Ipai-Tipai, Kumeyaay, and Quechan peoples, whose ancestors ruled the region we now call Southern California for at least 9,000 years.
EMERGE is a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (2022-2025) originally called Infrastrutures of Ethnography.
