Research Interests
As a cultural anthropologist I have spent many years exploring how an ethnographic approach to using the camera can contribute to the emergence of epistemic things. This gave rise to the methodology that I call camera ethnography, which I have developed both independently and within various research collectives since the 1990s. After studying cultural anthropology, visual anthropology, and the sociology of scientific knowledge, I wrote my PhD: an examination of the varieties of doing documentation in light of the crisis of ethnographic representation. The premise of non-visibility has been a fundamental guiding principle in the development of camera ethnographyas an approach that aims to bring forth rather than to represent. In a range of contexts including laboratory studies, object-oriented sociological projects, ethnographic classroom research, theatre and performance studies, ethnographic childhood research and studies on digital childhood, camera ethnography has been continuously tested and further developed. See: http://cameraethnography.com.
From 2016 to 2023, I directed the camera ethnography team in the research project “Early Childhood and Smartphone” within the Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Cooperation” (University of Siegen,). Now, based in Berlin (Germany) as a freelance camera ethnographer, author, consultant, and coach, I offer my services to support research teams and projects, and I give introductory and advanced-level workshops on the methodology and practice of camera ethnography. My book on camera ethnography will get translated into English as soon as possible (see: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-3531-7/kamera-ethnographie/).
For me, being an ethnographer is a fascinating way of being in the world and contributing to its diversity and its becoming in a perceptive, interactive, and performative way that involves encountering and learning from each other; creating and exchanging perspectives; experiencing and experimenting; listening, looking, feeling and reflecting; exploring differences, inventing connections, and creating something new; learning to see something ‘as something’ and sometimes ‘as something else as well’; opening up spaces of possibility; being a changing part of changing worlds.
