Is a shift in reflexivity possible in the short-term ethnographic work that has been recently gaining popularity in anthropology? Ethnography is not a toolkit, and there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to collaborative research methodology. Performance ethnography can just as easily constitute a “wolf anthropology,” where the scholar forces collaboration and pushes their own agenda. In fact, “performance” has become a trope for community engagement, where the neoliberal academy has usurped the language of social justice, only to recreate colonial power relations and extractivist research processes. We need to resist the urge towards imposing our own - potentially neocolonial - flavours of “equity” and “equality” with our interlocutors. Ethnography should always be context-specific and driven by the needs of the community. In fact, our interlocutors might sometimes be more interested in “a politics of invisibility” instead of recognition.

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

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