Encounters between Arts, Ethnography and Pedagogy

The course intends to provide students with experience and training in undertaking innovative and critical research that approaches site-specificity from multiple angles, such as site-specific and social art practices, participatory or experimental ethnography, and critical pedagogy.

For further details, please see the course description on UiA’s web page here , as well as the reflections under "Practical information" below.

Course description

The course is held in English, but the instructors may also offer supervision in other languages, depending on participation.

Please also see the formal course description.

Applicants must have completed a bachelor's (undergraduate) degree in a relevant field, such as visual and performing arts, music, anthropology, sociology, education / pedagogy, geography or related fields.

We wish to recruit highly motivated and self-driven students for this course, and the number of participants is limited. Applicants are required to include a letter of motivation with their application (see details below).

Please submit your application by 1 May.

The application has the following steps;

1: Apply through the link to the right to enter UiA’s formal student enrolment system. Select language, and then mode of login (Norwegian students use one of the first two options, international students the third: "Login International applicant").
Then select 'Other courses' on the bottom of the course list, and the name of the course: 8316 Encounters between arts, ethnography and pedagogy.

The 'Apply' button takes you to UiA’s formal student enrolment system.

Select language (upper right corner), and then mode of login (Norwegian students use one of the first two options, international students the third: "Login International applicant"). Then select 'Other courses' on the bottom of the course list, and the name of the course:
8316 Encounters between arts, ethnography and pedagogy

2: Please upload the required documentation in the application portal:

1. Documentation of relevant graduate study programme enrolment and/or relevant background (completed BA programme, or documentation that it will be completed this spring).
2. A letter of motivation (no more than 700 words) outlining some of the ideas and approaches the applicant hopes to explore in hteir encounters with Lesvos and how these build on the applicants prior artistic, educational or research practice(s).

In Lesvos, students will work in groups and also collaborate with their mentors to develop and carry out their explorative projects. The projects are encouraged to address and collaborate with local sites, institutions, people and narratives of the island, and the course will suggest local contacts as a starting point for the exploratory work.

Before and after the stay in Lesvos, there will be online course activities with presentations, supervision and assignments. Students will also share their evolving collective and individual work and reflections in a closed blog on a project website (to be announced).

The exam is a digital documentation or presentation of the student’s response to their encounters in Lesvos, such as documenting and reflecting on an exhibition, an action or a renewed practice. See course description for exam details. Students will be offered a digital solution to present their work.

Economy

The students will cover their travel to and from Lesvos, plus a small tuition / semester registration fee to UiA (NoK 685, ca 60 Eur). Teaching, supervision, accommodation and meals on the course site in Lesvos will be provided for free for participating students. The students may also need to cover some local transportation costs in Lesvos, and expenses for own choice of artistic materials or documentation, depending on the nature of the projects that evolve.

Travel

Students make their own travel arrangements and arrive in Metochi in the afternoon / evening of Sunday 28 July, and depart Sunday 11 August before noon. The course leaders and Metochi can help organize taxis from / to the airport in Mytilene if requested.

EU students might be able apply to their home institutions for an Erasmus travel grant. There might be additional grants available. We will update this announcement with details when this is clarified.

Accommodation

Students and staff will stay at the Metochi study centre, Kalloni. Most students will be accommodated in double rooms. Please see other practical information on Metochi’s website.

Course dates and timeline

More on contents and background

Foundation

We imagine the two weeks in Lesvos as a period of fieldwork, encounters with local people, artistic production, mentoring, discussions, lectures and workshops, as the groups of students develop different types of site-related work that demonstrate the potentiality of the combined practices of art, research and pedagogy, while also dealing respectfully with the contexts that one encounters.

From the approach of artistic practice, we are considering Miwon Kwon’s (2002) categorisation of what ‘site’ may represent in site-specific art, from the phenomenological (such as places, buildings, landscapes, sounds), to the social and institutional (events, places to meet, social practice, performance) and the discursive (stories, media events, ideas). Hosting such a course in Lesvos will, we envision, open up for all these dimensions.

In recent years Lesvos has become a major transitional route for refugees coming to Europe and has mainly been represented in the media as linked to the refugee crisis, and is, as such, already saturated in images from the global media. Through our encounters with Lesvos we aim to develop alternative approaches to representation, participation and outcome of ethnographic research, and to explore how these approaches may enable different ways of (re)presenting others, that is, enter new conversations about the site itself – through the everyday of people, institutions and places.

We encourage student research to be experimental also in terms of output and dissemination, such as producing films, podcasts, soundscapes, performative or artistic works, webpages, public scholarship or social action. We are also interested in how methodological encounters between different practices – such as art, ethnography (and other forms of site-specific research) and pedagogy – can be used as a vehicle to present complex issues of representation to audiences outside the walls of academia.

Instructors

The instructors in the course will include:

• Tormod W. Anundsen, University of Agder (Practice-based research methodologies; ethnographic, educational & artistic research) 
• Elmedin Zunic, University of Agder (Contemporary art, art theory and artistic research) 

Foundation

We imagine the two weeks in Lesvos as a period of fieldwork, encounters with local people, artistic production, mentoring, discussions, lectures and workshops, as the groups of students develop different types of site-related work that demonstrate the potentiality of the combined practices of art, research and pedagogy, while also dealing respectfully with the contexts that one encounters.

From the approach of artistic practice, we are considering Miwon Kwon’s (2002) categorisation of what ‘site’ may represent in site-specific art, from the phenomenological (such as places, buildings, landscapes, sounds), to the social and institutional (events, places to meet, social practice, performance) and the discursive (stories, media events, ideas). Hosting such a course in Lesvos will, we envision, open up for all these dimensions.

In recent years Lesvos has become a major transitional route for refugees coming to Europe and has mainly been represented in the media as linked to the refugee crisis, and is, as such, already saturated in images from the global media. In Encounters we aim to develop alternative approaches to representation, participation and outcome of ethnographic research, and to explore how these approaches may enable different ways of (re)presenting others, that is, enter new conversations about the site itself – through the everyday of people, institutions and places.

We encourage student research to be experimental also in terms of output and dissemination, such as producing films, podcasts, soundscapes, performative or artistic works, webpages, public scholarship or social action. We are also interested in how methodological encounters between the practices of art, ethnography and pedagogy can be used as a vehicle to present complex issues of representation to audiences outside the walls of academia.