Encounters between Arts, Ethnography and Pedagogy

Admissions

Apply within 15 June 2024

We wish to recruit highly motivated and self-driven students for this course, and the number of participants is limited. Applicants are required to include a letter of motivation with their application (see details below).

Admission requirements

Applicants must have completed a bachelor's (undergraduate) degree in a relevant field, such as visual and performing arts, music, anthropology, sociology, education / pedagogy, geography or related fields.

How to apply

Please submit your application by 15 June.

The application has the following steps;

1: Enter UiA’s formal student enrolment system. Select language, and then mode of login (Norwegian students use one of the first two options, international students the third: "Login International applicant").

Then select 'Other courses' on the bottom of the course list, and the name of the course: 8316 Encounters between arts, ethnography and pedagogy.

2: Please upload the required documentation in the application portal:

Documentation of relevant graduate study programme enrolment and/or relevant background (completed BA programme, or documentation that it will be completed this spring).

A letter of motivation (700 words max) outlining some of the ideas and approaches the applicant hopes to explore in their encounters in Lesvos and how these build on applicant’s prior artistic, educational or research practice(s)

Practical information

Economy

The students will cover their travel expenses to and from Lesvos, plus a small tuition / semester registration fee to UiA (NoK 685, ca 60 Eur). Teaching, supervision, accommodation and meals on the course site in Lesvos will be provided for free for participating students. The students may also need to cover some local transportation costs in Lesvos, and expenses for own choice of artistic materials or documentation, depending on the nature of the projects that evolve. Students may apply for an Erasmus grant through their home university. 

Travel

Students make their own travel arrangements and arrive in Metochi in the afternoon / evening of Sunday 28 July, and depart Sunday 11 August before noon. The course leaders and Metochi can help organize taxis from / to the airport in Mytilene if requested.

EU students might be able apply to their home institutions for an Erasmus travel grant. We will update this announcement with details when this is clarified.

Accommodation

Students and staff will stay at the Metochi study centre, Kalloni. Most students will be accommodated in double rooms. Please see other practical information on Metochi’s website.

Course dates and timeline

Foundation

We imagine the two weeks in Lesvos as a period of fieldwork, encounters with local people, artistic production, mentoring, discussions, lectures and workshops, as the groups of students develop different types of site-related work that demonstrate the potentiality of the combined practices of art, research and pedagogy, while also dealing respectfully with the contexts that one encounters.

From the approach of artistic practice, we are considering Miwon Kwon’s (2002) categorisation of what ‘site’ may represent in site-specific art, from the phenomenological (such as places, buildings, landscapes, sounds), to the social and institutional (events, places to meet, social practice, performance) and the discursive (stories, media events, ideas). Hosting such a course in Lesvos will, we envision, open up for all these dimensions.

In recent years Lesvos has become a major transitional route for refugees coming to Europe and has mainly been represented in the media as linked to the refugee crisis, and is, as such, already saturated in images from the global media. Through our encounters with Lesvos we aim to develop alternative approaches to representation, participation and outcome of ethnographic research, and to explore how these approaches may enable different ways of (re)presenting others, that is, enter new conversations about the site itself – through the everyday of people, institutions and places.

We encourage student research to be experimental also in terms of output and dissemination, such as producing films, podcasts, soundscapes, performative or artistic works, webpages, public scholarship or social action. We are also interested in how methodological encounters between different practices – such as art, ethnography (and other forms of site-specific research) and pedagogy – can be used as a vehicle to present complex issues of representation to audiences outside the walls of academia.

Instructors

The instructors in the course will include:

• Tormod W. Anundsen, University of Agder (Practice-based research methodologies; ethnographic, educational & artistic research) 
• Elmedin Zunic, University of Agder (Contemporary art, art theory and artistic research)