Preface

This edited collection is a result of the collaborative imaginings of the five contributors who are co-curators at the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, a research collective focusing on experimental and emergent ethnographic methodologies that integrate and fuse creative arts, digital media, and sensory ethnography, and where new ethnographic writing is encouraged in teaching, theory, and practice. Inspired by creative, artistic, and literary forms, we were drawn together by our shared interests in creating spaces where we could disrupt, question, and contest the usual anthropology, and create new installations, performances, stories, ethnographies, and theories that bridge our commitment to socially relevant, timely, rigorous scholarship about the worlds we live and work in.

We celebrate the productive tensions that emerge from collusions of art, performance, ethnography, and theory, and between activists, artists, scholars, and our interlocutors as sites of possibility and transformation. We encourage our members to engage in conversations that explore the visual, textual, urban, spatial, poetic, political, performative, improvised, embodied, reflexive, kinetic, ethnographic, emergent, creative, and imaginative in our scholarship and pedagogical practices.

At the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography website, you will find resources on sonic ethnography and the politics of sound, graphic novels and animation in anthropology, moving images and film, literary ethnography and creative non-fiction, and experiments in theatre and performance—along with details about our members. We encourage you to visit the website at www.imaginativeethngoraphy.org, and explore, share, and contribute.

Denielle Elliott
Dara Culhane