Ethnographic film at the crossroads

In this essay I sketch the current state of the ethnographic film production and circulation. What happens with this great number of films and to this amazing and unique body of knowledge that is being produced today? I demonstrate how the production of films has overrun the affordances of the existing platforms for its screening and circulation, and argue that this is not just a technical but also a significant ethical issue. This essay closes with some reflections on how facing this issue, particularly in the light of recent developments and affordances of digital and online infrastructures, should be a collective endeavour

A monument to dismantlement

The Palast der Republik was the parliament building of the former German Democratic Republic and an entertainment center for its people. It is currently being dismantled in a lengthy procedure that will last for a period of three years. The extended `present' of the building's removal is the focus of this article, which examines the ways in which the building is becoming a memory as it de-materializes. Throughout the text, the monumental characteristics of the dismantlement and its physiognomy as a monument to temporality are taken into consideration

Metaphors we experiment with in multimodal ethnography

In this paper, we argue for a view of analysis in multimodal ethnography as an embodied practice in which metaphors play a key role. We illustrate this claim through in-depth analysis of our own multimodal ethnographic experiences on an international study looking at the relationship between childhood and public life with children in middle childhood. Our analysis focuses on the experiences and emergent metaphors that shaped our practice during the first 18 months of fieldwork. During this time children’s play became central in our understanding of children’s communicative practices and their engagement with what moves and matters for them; play was also instructive in our own formation as multimodal ethnographers. We provide examples of the ways in which children recruited us into their play, the ways in which play taught us about what matters to children, and finally, how we took play into our own analytical practices