TU#01 Insight - Performance, ethnographic intimacy and political context

Talking Uncertainty

A collaborative, improvisational ethnography focussing on the intimate might give the impression that our interlocutors’ world is limited, whereas they are connected to the broader society, discourses and politics. How can we juggle such an element of scale? Performance can show us how people relate to each other in terms of power. By using different modalities of ethnography, we get a parallax effect that can help generate different “truths”. Despite being a politics of intimacy, we need to always situate such practices within the broader political moment. Kazubowski-Houston emphasizes in her talk that the intimate improvisational moments between her and her interlocutor took place within the context of mass migrations and a broader affective economy of long-term-care in Poland.

Read insights from the talk here: https://www.urgentemergent.org/talking-uncertainty/kazubowski-houston.

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