Since the publication of our “Framing Ethno-World” white paper in May, the research’s key questions have been refined, and the last quarter has seen the Ethno Research team delve deeper into some of the work packages and focused projects.
You may have noticed our recent flurry of invitations for Ethno alumni to take part in the research. Our History team has been reaching out to connect with people who experienced the earlier camps, in the hope of capturing their memories of Ethno, and their reflections of how it may have impacted them. They have also been gathering data from Ethno Organizers to include in our visual historical timeline of Ethno camps – watch this space! We can’t thank all those organizers enough for offering up their knowledge to populate it, so we can aim to tell as complete a story as possible.
Another project, which invites Ethno Organizers to share a story about their experiences with Ethno via the innovative SenseMaker app, is almost ready to launch. SenseMaker is a research tool with some powerful data analysis possibilities, where participants are involved in interpreting the significance of their own story. The app has been tested, translated into Portuguese, and will be going live to the current Ethno Organizers in the coming days. Organizers will have a choice of which language they respond in – English or Portuguese.
Meanwhile, we’re delighted that two new research assistants, Keegan Manson-Curry and Pedro Tironi, have joined the team in Toronto. The Toronto Team has been exploring web-scraping technologies that analyse social media activity, and they’ve also started to create an Ethno “soundmap” – a geo-tagged map, which will host a collection of audio tracks recorded at Ethno sites. We look forward to sharing this when it’s ready to go public.
Though they’ve been unable to travel to research conferences this year, our team will be able to engage with those which have moved online. Laura Risk will present a paper entitled “Foregrounding Otherness, Performing Inclusivity: Negotiating Nation and Self at Ethno World Camps” at the Society for Ethnomusicology online conference in October. Her presentation will draw on fieldwork conducted by Laura and Roger Mantie at Ethno France 2020, and will focus on some of the complexities of Ethno camps as framed in the “Framing Ethno-World” white paper. Both Laura and Sarah-Jane Gibson will also present Ethno-related papers at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology one-day online conference in October.
Looking to the future, we’re beginning to make plans for two events of our own, to be held in 2021. The first event will share the research with an Ethno audience, coinciding with EthnoFest, while the second will share all Ethno Research’s findings at the end of the 3-year project.
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