Workshop Contribution
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Valuing nature: Epistemic collaboration and ethnographic experimentation in Marteloscopes

Ronja Mikoleit & Dr. Marion Mangelsdorf

What is the value of a tree, or a forest? How can we understand knowledge practices? What role do incorporated knowledge and affects play in ethnographic situations? Using the so-called Marteloscopes (1 ha silvicultural training sites in which all trees are measured and assigned economic and ecological values) as a creative fieldwork device, we experiment with collaborative research formats which cut across different professional knowledge cultures, disciplines and research traditions in the group of researchers (from anthropology, sociology, forestry, economics, arts/filming), as well as in the group of other participants (students, foresters, ecologists, trainers). In this field, different human and non- human actors engage intermingling layers, creating complementary as well as dissonant perspectives. Inspired by the filmmaker Trinh T. Min-ha’s approach of „speaking nearby, not about“, which foregrounds the process of visualization itself, one emerging outcome of this collaboration are i-Docs – interactive non-linear web-documentaries. They portray and create simultaneously the entanglement of bodies, biodiversity, economics, affects, athmospheres, specific natural elements, and recording and tablet devices in movement and thus follow a sensory ethnographic strategy. Through this format, the camera, the filmer and the person moving through the i-Doc become accentuated as key actors. This form, which is set in dialogue with more traditional research formats such as group discussions, interviews and questionnaires, emphasizes the researchers‘ positions as participants in the social worlds themselves and supports the notion of knowledge, action and abilities as not attached to individuals, but created through several (intermedial) intra-actions inside and outside the forest.

Ronja Mikoleit is a PhD student in the interdisciplinary ConFoBi project at Freiburg University. She studied Sociology in Freiburg, Potsdam, Berlin and Lisbon. Her research focus is on the sociology of knowledge, especially on epistemic orders and the environment, the role of materiality and the body, gender studies and qualitative research methodology.

Dr.a phil. Marion Mangelsdorf is Managing Director of the Freiburg Gender Studies. She is cultural scientist, ethnographer, and Feminist Science Technology Studies researcher, interested in transdisciplinary, collaborative, and experimental approaches especially in the field of Gender and Environment. In these contexts, she combines her ethnographical praxis with art-based research.