Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society

Description

Paper Title: Rhizomic Ethnographies: Doing Fieldwork With Creative Networked Communities of Digital Artists Abstract: This paper presents findings from ethnographic fieldwork with creative networked communities of digital artists. The ethnographic framework was based on the key-concepts of the study, network, spatiliaty, community, creativity. Using a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995), the study looked at how creative communities form within transnational and transcultural contexts and a globalized and distributed communications environment. This ethnographic study is about a “creative land”, a process of places and people and things. The connecting commonality here is a community of bodies – people and things that make this assemblage happen. Agency and becoming are immanent within assemblages of things and people. In other words, agency and becoming are dynamic qualities, innate whenever things and people come together. In this study, creativity is understood as an emergent property of relations, of communities. What kind of methodological framework could best accommodate these insights on creativity as an emergent property of assemblages? How should fieldwork be done in a way that accorded with the dynamic and constantly shifting patterns of interconnection between the communities under study? This paper unpacks the above queries and explores concepts of serendipity, happenstance and rhizomic lines of inquiry in ethnographic fieldwork of networked communities.

Period	27 Aug 2014
Event type	Conference
Location	EdinburghShow on map