The Center for Experimental Ethnography was founded in 2018 at the University of Pennsylvania to promote multi-modal research practices as both method and theory, integral dimensions of scholarly research. Directed by Deborah A. Thomas (John L. Jackson, Jr., Co-Director), we are a group of faculty across eight of UPenn’s twelve schools who facilitate and support multi-modal research practices among undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and our partners within the City of Philadelphia and beyond. We coordinate scholarship, research, and public partnerships related to multi-modal work practices; consolidate those activities in which we (and our students) are already engaged; and grow these generative connections by hosting Visiting Scholars, coordinating workshops and conferences, supporting multi-modal project-based courses, facilitating visual, sonic, and performative undergraduate and graduate research projects, producing rigorous criteria for assessing those projects, engaging with arts and community-based institutions throughout Philadelphia, and forging connections with other like-minded institutions worldwide.
We believe that multi-modal research practices transform how we conduct research, how we generate and disseminate knowledge, how we train students, and how we remain accountable to the communities in which we interact and through which our research circulates. We see creative practice as intellectual work that necessarily historicizes the inequalities that pervade our society, and that develops solutions for their present iterations through collaborative and participatory work. A basic premise that underlies our efforts is the contention that an expanded and multi-modal definition of what counts as scholarship will help lead to a more diverse university community, a community in which artistic practice is a cornerstone not only for engaged and participatory democracy and social justice but also for the reimagining and transformation of the university as a whole.
