17584

Researching Communities of Practice: Fieldwork and historical methods

Lindsey Drury

Kommentar

In his book Making (2013), anthropologist Tim Ingold wrote that “what we might call ‘research’ or even ‘fieldwork’ is in truth a protracted masterclass in which the novice gradually learns to see things, and to hear and feel them too, in the ways his or her mentors do. It is, in short, to undergo […] an education of attention.” The mentorship model Ingold is describing here is fundamental to communities of practice. One rarely learns to sing, dance, knit, skateboard, or write poetry without finding others who share interest and knowledge in such activities. But how can we meaningfully incorporate a practical ‘education in attention’ within performance research or ethically introduce scholarly analysis into the spaces of practicing communities? With a particular focus on performance-oriented communities, this course is dedicated to both practicing and critically analysing approaches to working in the ‘field’ with groups of people who gather around particular practices. Within this class, we explore research methods that approach performance as a collective effort, considering processes of intergenerational knowledge sharing, collective experimentation, and approaches to archiving, preserving, and remembering that emerge through the work of community documentarians. Throughout the semester, students will focus on a particular mixed-methods fieldwork and archival project that brings them into practical and intellectual engagement with a Berlin-based community of practice. While fieldwork is the emphasis here, we will read a short series of canonical theories of practice — Bourdieu, Bishop, Bakhtin — as well as seminal writings on radical collective and community-based methods of self-directed learning and research (such as works by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Thích Nh?t H?nh). Schließen

14 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Mi, 10:00 - 12:00 14 Termine

Mi, 16.04.2025 10:00 - 12:00

Dozenten:
Lindsey Drury