[MULTIMODAL PANEL]
Pluriversal Futures in Practice: Multimodal Ethnography, Data Justice, and Everyday Transformation
Convener: Ignatia Dyahapsari
Co-convener: Rivaldo Herman
In many parts of the world, the spaces where people live, work, and sustain social life are undergoing profound reconfiguration due to overlapping environmental, political, and economic pressures. As communities are confronting rapid transformations to the spaces they inhabit as environmental change, development interventions, conservation regimes, and shifting political-economic, many are forced to reshape everyday life, including in the Global South. The shifts are not merely as a phenomena, but as an experienced disruptions to livelihoods, mobility, and social reproduction.
In response, there has been a growing engagement with multimodal approaches, such as film, sound, photography, animation, and other audiovisual forms. This becomes a way to engage and capture the dynamic of transformation that exceeds beyond textual representation. Yet, this increasing turn to modality also raises critical questions on who produces these representations? Who controls their circulation? How are consent, ownership, and accountability negotiated? And how might multimodal research avoid reproducing extractive data production under such modalities?
The panel posits multimodal work not simply as illustration or visual description, rather as a mode of thinking, an analytical and methodological practice capable of engaging dimensions of lived realities that are often difficult to convey through text alone: waiting, uncertainty, fatigue, attachment, and hope. Subsequently, this panel also foregrounds questions of ethics and data justice within multimodal practice, which invites critical reflection on the politics of representation, in which responded to the urgent need to rethink on how environmental and societal change is documented and disseminated.
This panel emerges at the intersection of living transformation, multimodal experimentation, and the politics of knowledge production. It invites contributions that critically and creatively engage with transformation of living space and livelihood across diverse contexts in the Global South and beyond. Submissions may take the form of ethnographic films, animation, sound works, photo essays, interactive media, or other audiovisual and multimodal experiments grounded in ethnographic research. We particularly encourage collaborative and process-oriented works, including works-in-progress that could reflect on how knowledge is produced and/or co-produced in shaping how alternative futures are enacted in everyday life.