Workshop to be held from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m., Friday, October 6, 2148 Jenkins Nanovic Halls.
Workshop Abstract: What does it mean to design and implement collaborative research, particularly across the differences and inequalities inherent in complex multisited partnerships (international or otherwise)? How does collaborative writing get done in such contexts? Where do concepts of trans-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary scholarship intersect with and depart from inter-disciplinary efforts? How does collaboration intersect with a mixed-methods approach to research design? What are some of the unique possibilities and pitfalls related to language, positionality, and power dynamics that collaborative research among multiple, differently situated partners, can at once address and/or reinforce? What are some strategies that have proven useful in navigating the complexities of collaboration? This worksop will be guided by two anthropologists of the Himalaya—Sienna Craig and Sara Shneiderman— who have led and participated in a range of collaborative endeavors. This workshop invites participants to review one relevant article co-authored by each speaker, and come prepared to share their own example for discussion – in the form of a small case study, a core question, or a methodological approach.
This workshop follows the panel discussion "Mobility, Infrastructure, and Affective Worlds in and out of the Himalayas," and the link to the discussion event can be found HERE.
Recommended reading:
Aijazi, O., Amburgey, E., Limbu, B., Suji, M., Binks, J., Balaz-Munn, C., Rankin, K.
Shneiderman, S. (2021). The Ethnography of Collaboration: Navigating Power Relationships in
Joint Research. Collaborative Anthropologies 13(2), 56-99. doi:10.1353/cla.2021.0003
Childs, G., Craig, S., Dhakal, D.N., Donohue, M., & Hildebrandt, K. (2017). Narrating Disaster
through Participatory Research: Perspectives from Post-Earthquake Nepal. Collaborative
Anthropologies 10(1), 207-236. doi:10.1353/cla.2017.0009
Sienna Craig is the Orvil Dryfoos Professor of Public Affairs in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She has been conducting ethnographic and public-health oriented research with Himalayan and Tibetan communities between Nepal and North America for more than twenty-five years. A writer whose work spans multiple genres, she is the author, most recently, of The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York (University of Washington Press, 2020).
Sara Shneiderman is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and School of Public Policy & Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, where she co-leads the Himalaya Program and Disaster Resilience Research Network. She has been conducting ethnographic and policy-engaged research in the Himalaya and South Asia for over 25 years, and is the author of Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), along with many journal articles, most recently focusing on Nepal’s post-earthquake reconstruction.