Crispin Thurlow with the Multimodal Research Group Örebro University
Welcome to the weekly IMS seminar with the Multimodal Research group at Örebro University: "DRIFTWORK: GUERILLA ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE AFTERLIFE OF WORDS"
About the seminar: This presentation considers “driftwork” as an epistemological style for doing ethnographically-sensitive and multimodally-attuned research. Drawing on my current Articulating Rubbish project, the topical focus is the afterlife of words: language that’s been discarded, displaced, and made residual through everyday practices of wasting. As an ideally “messy” method for getting at the disorderly, illusive nature of waste, I turn to so-called guerilla ethnography. Together with some case-study example, I show how this is an approach for documenting semiotic landscapes and specifically for noticing the traces, fragments, and scrapings of language. This kind of noticing, however idle or off-the-cuff, is inherently political too.
Bio: Crispin Thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Bern, Switzerland and the 2026 Ander Visiting Professor of Geomedia Studies at Karlstad University. He hold affiliate positions in both the Centre for the Study of Language and Society at Bern and in the Centre for Diversity Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. More information about his work – including the Articulating Rubbish project – can be found at: www.crispinthurlow.net.
How to attend: Send an email to ims@lnu.se to receive the link to attend online.