Workshop days

Thursday: 10am – 5pm

Friday: 10am – 1pm

About the Masterclass

Are you a maker of multimodal works—a film, a game, a performance, a comic, a city walk, a web platform, an exhibit, a sound installation— but concerned about their legitimacy in institutional contexts that privilege text-based formats? Is it possible for us to appreciate and evaluate a multimodal work as academically relevant without becoming an expert in the specific affordances of each media format? What kind of pitfalls and risks exist when conceptualizing and practicing multimodal research, and are there ways to anticipate or even avoid them?

This workshop will draw upon the recently published Multimodal Appreciation Kit (Albrecht, Criado, Farias, Gilbert and Maier, 2025), and feature sessions devoted to identifying and articulating the value of multimodal works, as well as planning for and designing more-than-textual research. It will be of interest to those who have a multimodal practice, those who are considering incorporating multimodality into their research, as well as those who are curious about more-than-textual research and how to evaluate it.

Andrew Gilbert is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in multisensory and multimodal ethnography, experimental and collaborative research design, and the politics of social transformation in contexts of historical upheaval. He is professor of design anthropology at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, and former co-director of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology at Humboldt University in Berlin.

About the series “Masterclass Media Ethnography”

The use of audiovisual media has sparked an increasingly diverse methodological debate within the history of ethnographic research approaches. This has provided innovative impetus for the reciprocal collaborative relationships that are developing between ethnographic researchers, research participants, the audience of ethnographic research findings, and the various media involved. In the Cologne-Siegen Masterclass in Media Ethnography, leading figures in visual ethnology will present their work and research approaches and discuss their respective research material with the participants.