WS: We exist! - Sustainability and Reciprocity in Intercultural Projects: Building Mutual and Cooperative Exchange

The workshop “We exist! - Sustainability and Reciprocity in Intercultural Projects: Building Mutual and Cooperative Exchange” will be based on the idea of fieldwork as a site for creation of sustainable moral relationships based on the notions of reciprocity and will be led by two cultural journalists, Nazik Armenakyan and Amy Mackinnon. Through and through we will examine social exchanges that develop in the context of fieldwork, tangible and intangible products of collaborative research as well as the ways in which the term reciprocity might or might not be used to analyse the relationships between the researcher and her collaborator.

Furthermore, the workshop seeks to creatively investigate how intercultural projects where different interests and power relations are at play can become sustainable and engender post-project futures. Thereby, we will discuss what sustainability could mean in this context, whether we can translate it into the context of project work at all as well as how the exchange between the different interests can become “sustainable”. Does reciprocity already entail forms of sustainability, or just the temporal aspect of continuity – is there a future for mutual and cooperative exchange?

To answer these numerous questions, we will draw on the expertise of our invited guests in project work, their examples from “post-project life”, as well as our own experiences from fieldwork and theoretical knowledge derived from the reading session organised in preparation to the workshop.

Further information on the joint reading sessions will follow soon.

Readings:

Graeber, D. (2011) “A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations” in Debt: The first 5,000 years, US: Melville House Publishing.

Mauss, M. (1954/2002) “The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies”, London/New York: Routledge.

Glowczewski, B., Henry, R. & Otto, T. (2013) “Relations and Products: Dilemmas of Reciprocity in Fieldwork”. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 14:2, 113-125.

Ish-Shalom, P. (2011) “Theoreticians’ Obligation of Transparency: When Parsimony, Reflexivity, Transparency and Reciprocity Meet”. Review of International Studies 37, pp. 973-996.

//Nazik Armenakyan has been working as a photojournalist since 2002. In 2004-2005 after completing photojournalism course organized by the Caucasus Institute and World Press Photo in Yerevan, Armenia, she began to have an interest in doing long-term documentary projects. In 2009, she won the Grand Prix award and first place in the “People and Faces” for her first long-term photo project “Survivors”, a series of portraits of survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, a category at the Karl Bulla International Photo Contest in Russia.

In 2011, Nazik was awarded a Magnum Foundation Human Rights & Photography Fellowship to study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In the same year, she received a Documentary Photography Production grant from the Open Society Foundations for her second ongoing project on LGBT people and the community in Armenia that she began in 2010. Nazik has participated in several projects and exhibitions.

Nazik is one of the founders of the 4 Plus Documentary Photography Center, which aims to develop Armenian documentary photography and empowering women through photography in Armenia.

http://www.nazikarmenakyan.com/

//Amy Mackinnon is an award-winning independent journalist with a focus on central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio Scotland and she has published in the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Coda Story, the Sunday Herald, the Sunday Mail and the Daily Record among others. Amy holds Master’s degrees from the University of Glasgow and Corvinus University of Budapest, and speaks Russian to a high level. Originally from Scotland, Amy is currently based in Tbilisi, Georgia.

https://amykmackinnon.wordpress.com/

Coda Story:  https://codastory.com/