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Grieg Research School in Interdisciplinary Music Studies
Invited Speaker

Tormod Wallem Anundsen

Threshold concepts: Exploring connections between the practices of ethnography, arts and pedagogy

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For two years, I have led an international summer course in Lesvos to explore the methodological connections between ethnography and artistic practice, to develop new ways of approaching 'field research'. In our current work, we expand this scope to include pedagogy.

For our students in these explorative summer courses, it has been a challenge to navigate between the impulses from arts practices and ethnography. But we have started chiseling out some key concepts to understand how these various approaches may speak to each other or be combined. We see these as potential "threshold concepts", something that, once you develop an understanding of it, opens up the research or education process. One such concept is 'the encounter'.

'The encounter', the act of interacting with a local site or community, may label an approach that the social artist, the anthropologist (or ethnomusicologist), and the pedagogue intervening in local contexts have in common. And they use this encounter methodologically to... do what, exactly? Create their own artistic narrative? Document a 'culture'? Or improve life conditions of the communities encountered? Understanding the 'encounter' both as potential for various forms of research, as well as from a critical perspective on power relations, draws on the anthropological crisis of representation, the critical discourses of social arts practices, as well as on critical pedagogy. 

This is not so much a research presentation in the sense that I have developed data from actually doing much 'field' research myself, but rather from carrying out education-as-research while supervising students who try out these approaches. It sums up some key points of this ongoing research, after a pilot and at the outset of new 'field work' (both my own and that of our students), and intends to shape a new article on our threshold concepts that may form a space of research interaction between artistic, ethnographic, and educational practices.

Key Questions

  • How can we find new approaches to do field research between the practices of ethnography, arts and education?
  • What 'threshold concepts' are useful to approach such a research practice?
  • How can we combine critical scrutiny of the 'encounter' of fieldwork with exploring its potential for novel research?

Recommended Reading

Biography

Tormod Wallem Anundsen (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Musicology and Music Education at University of Agder, Norway, where he is also a founding member of the Art and social relations research group. Anundsen has a particular interest in the use of ethnographic methodologies across disciplines, developed through his PhD research on African immigrant musical performers in Norway (2014). Anundsen has headed a transdisciplinary Master’s programme in Arts (music, theatre, visual arts) at UiA from 2011 to 2018, and his current work explores interactions between the practices of arts, ethnography and education.