Diskussion mit Andrew Bergerson

Collaborative Knowledge and Creative Truths

22.06.2023, 14:30-16:00

Ordinary people often experience everyday life as resistant to change, their visions of alternatives treated as fantasy. Yet consensus about the presumed truths of everyday life is precarious. Our life worlds are also always being renegotiated through microsocial interactions and the self-authorizing claims of imaginative, yet ordinary people.

There is a contradiction, then, between the life worlds we study and the worlds we write into existence in our scholarship. In contrast to empiricism, most scholars underplay the role of imagination in our writing. Moreover, the measure of academic achievement in many disciplines is still single authorship. Although those worlds are wholly intersubjective, we claim the right and responsibility to interpret everyday life as sovereign individuals. This self-deception about the role of imagination and collaboration in our everyday lives as scholars leads to the marginalization of creativity and creative work in our careers.

Andrew Stuart Bergerson (Professor of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City) has led many innovative research projects involving both co-authorship and imagination, including a new fantasy novel. In this conversation, he will critically interrogate his own practice:: 35 3n ethnographic historian to make a case for recognizing collaborative knowledge and creative truths as legitimate aspects of our scholarly methodologies.

Mehrmals im Semester kommt die Wiener Werkstatt Ethnographie zusammen und steht fortgeschrittenen Studierenden und Forscherinnen und Forschern mit ethnographischen Anliegen und Ambitionen offen. In wechselnden Formaten fokussieren wir regelmäßig auf verschiedene theoretische und praktische Aspekte ethnographischen Arbeitens.

Mehr Informationen hier.

Eine Online-Teilnahme über Zoom ist ebenfalls möglich. Bitte senden Sie eine kurze Anmeldung an:
martin.nestepny@univie.ac.at