Date: 20 January 2021 (Wednesday), 10:45-11:45
Speaker: Dr. Tanja Bogusz
Abstract: Research environments in biological and sociological field sciences are created through experimental situations where established experiences meet often unforeseen trials and the need for transdisciplinary co-operation. This is especially important for marine biologists facing planetary climate change and the loss of biodiversity. They work in and on marine field sites, where they have, like ethnographers, to develop particular skills in integrating these challenges into their everyday inquiries. Moreover, for ethnographers and naturalists’ encounter with societies, experience, trial and co-operation are impacted through complex modes of critique. Ethnographic and biological fieldwork as experience-based practices are, thus, generating complex knowledge on environmental-human interactions; however, they also give form to an enactment of nature, e.g. a “doing” biodiversity. In my talk, I want to discuss how research experiences are made „experimental“ through a comparison of ethnographic and biological marine fieldwork, and their interrelation with publics (“citizen science”). Building on a laboratory study in the division of taxonomy and systematics of marine invertebrates of the Parisian Museum for Natural History and a two-month ethnographic field trip to Madang, Papua New Guinea during a taxonomist expedition, my talk will explore such experimental zones, comparing marine biologist and ethnographic fieldwork, and discuss the potentials of a conception of the field as a collaborative “third knowledge space” bridging marine and ethnographic research.
Bio: Tanja Bogusz is sociologist, social anthropologist, visiting professor at Kassel University and second deputy speaker at the Graduate Center for Environmental Research and Teaching at Kassel University. In her research she focuses on marine social science studies, transdisciplinary collaboration, and social theory informed by practice theory and pragmatism. In honor to her ethnography of a taxonomist’s expedition on marine invertebrate biodiversity at the coastal zone of Madang, Papua New Guinea in 2012, a newly discovered species was named after her (Joculator boguszae). Find out more here: https://tanjabogusz.com/
Zoom meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83831390912?pwd=Z3RhLzJ0Vmd4cHowSHYwditCVDFIdz09
Meeting ID: 838 3139 0912
Password: 624204