Conference of Susan Ossman at the Colloque de Recherche de ISSR
Susan Ossman is an anthropologist, artist, and director of “The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop.” She is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at the University of California, Riverside.
Susan Ossman will speak about the interplay of concept, research design, and individual and collaborative fieldwork and publication by tracing the development of her research on serial migration from concept to collective reflection individual field research and publication in multiple media. She delves into the design and practice of the mobile community of migrant artists and scholars that this research generated. The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop (MMTW) was created using forms of fieldwork design. Ossman draws out this design and shows how it has produced a space for transdisciplinary experiments. She presents some of the findings and productions of the MMTW and reflects more generally on creating “artificial” settings for experiments using current methods of anthropological research.
In her latest book, Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork –A Memoir of Anthropology and Art, she explores the paths she has taken for research across North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. She reveals that fieldwork today is not only about being immersed in a place or culture; instead, it is an active way of focusing attention and engendering encounters and experiences. She conceives a new kind of autoethnography, making art and ethnography equal partners to follow three “waves” of her research on media, globalization, and migration.
(https://anthropology.ucr.edu/people/faculty/ossman/index.html)
