Collaboration, Mediation, and Comparison

'Collaboration, Mediation, and Comparison: Epistemological Tools from Theory-driven Fieldwork Practice' is written by Cristina Grasseni and published in Anthrovision.

Author: Cristina Grasseni
Date: 08 February 2020
Links: Read the article

Abstract

Four of the five articles in this special issue are authored by members of the Food Citizens? team. Together with our colleagues from the Security Vision project (fifth article), we reflect on the epistemological and methodological practices followed in our ERC-funded research projects, which involve different forms of collaboration, mediation and comparison. The introductory and final remarks explain the rationale of the conversation and comparison across the two projects (one anthropological, one interdisciplinary). Both engage with (digital) visual artefacts, maps and diagrams. We do not use them as straightforward representations, but as moments of co-creation, during which collaboration (and frictions) become embedded in diverse modes of mediation. In the central part of the introduction, a brief ethnographic narration of the Food Citizens? project provides the framework for the following four articles, explaining how this investigation was neither simply empirical nor inductive (generalizing theoretical definitions from a collection of samples) but that it rather interrogated the field in a coordinated way, while at the same time refining and confirming its categories from the field.