Why is an introduction in order? A bit of background

This introduction is an epistemological remnant; hence its placement as a supplementary outro here. It comes from the place from which I myself come: the kernel of book-centered academic cultures of the 20th century. It seeks to explain away a process of digital writing, which is intended to produce contrasting understandings of anthropological knowledge, while the author would rather leave the experience of multimodal poetry generate by itself the immersive effects it wishes to ignite.

The book appears to be a poetry collection that is based on auto-ethnographic observation. However, it stems from, and incorporates, various elements of current theoretical discussions in a multimedia format. It employs digital affordances in order to address textuality differently and implements the verse with visual argumentation; sonic engagement of the reader; insinuation and irony as key feminist writing principles that take, here, the form of hyperlinks. Thus, if it is to venture into a “performative break with everyday speech”—in Tyler’s terms—then poetry ought to be left alone to provide context and function without further explication.

I sincerely wish I was able to resist having to explain myself, to ‘come clean’ as an experimental anthropologist and simply deliver this unorthodox theoretical (?) text in the form that engulfs its very argument. Nonetheless, it appears that at a transitional historical time when the controversial academic codes of the emergent digital humanities are not (yet?) widely acknowledged and shared, some justification is indeed in order. As a way to soften the effects and gravity of this justification, I have chosen to place this discussion at the end of the book so as not to overshadow the centrality of the autoethnographic account.

The writing form that the book supports is a move away from exhaustive explanation, annotation, and bibliographical referencing—an evocation of several reading modalities that support sensory and aesthetic identifications with the theoretical ideas and ethnographic experience it illustrates. It subtly posits that visual-sonic gestures as affective monologue can work in a complementary way with what we are accustomed to view as ‘theory’ and engage wider audiences in the reading of ethnography, in unprecedented ways. If a positionality is to be inhabited in crafting such a text, this would occupy the slim land at the intersection of four malleable rivers: design anthropology, autoethnography, feminist scholarship, and the digital turn. All four are hard to pin down and define, with such queer and liberating qualities I have found hard to either exhaustively detail or resist. So, this outro sets out to do just that: to briefly identify the premises of multimodal poetry and inscribe it in the writing repertoire of contemporary anthropology.

My initial urge to produce such a book chronologically precedes the practical ability to write in this manner. My concern stemmed from the observation back in the late 1990s, when I began studying anthropology, that no writing modality has ever been sufficient in itself. Elegant theoretical proclamations about the purpose and nature of ethnography kept falling short when finally confronted with the actual deed of writing the other. When, a few years later, I was faced with ethical issues of writing ethnography myself, I grew gradually uncomfortable with the limited repertoire available for conveying anthropological knowledge.

This project, in particular, brought with it the same old ruminations along with a fresh set of options. An academic paper about writing experimentation would be a contradiction in terms. An unsupported poetry collection would be identified as nothing different to ‘art’ (and not a very good one at that). A navigation through various links and images would probably amount to a digital installation missing the necessary context and inner connections that would grant it the status of ethnography. Once this became allowed by current narrative tools and environments, I decided merging it all was worth a try. Given recent technological affordances, this book is an innovative attempt towards this under-represented and under-published direction, in accordance with an evident shift in the humanities and social sciences towards acknowledging emerging readerships and supporting experimentation vis-à-vis writing tropes.

So, the experiment went like this. I started taking notes of self-observation in 2006, when Tereza was born and many of the constitutive parts of my mental and corporeal experience were largely destabilized. The autoethnographic process took many turns and was full of gaps and intense periods of productivity—but it never stopped. Thoughts, references, books, songs and films were collected, along with my research journals (alternating four major research areas on which I have focused throughout the years); my dream diary (some 210 pages long); photos, ideas, and fears; breakthroughs and frustrated thoughts. Then, suddenly, in 2018, after experiencing major discontent with academic writing and the extreme limitations that the academic text posed in conveying the various ‘fields’ in my work and my experience, poems started to emerge—as if out of nowhere— containing concentrated information of what at first seemed like scattered outbreaks and soon (within roughly a year) took the form of distinctive themes or cycles of specific interest. I timidly shared some of them with a handful of persons I trusted at the time and was rather amazed to witness the various effects that these texts had on other people. This is when a vague desire started to become a possibility: what if I placed the collected autoethnographic material inside these poems? What if this staging of diverse auto/ ethnographic material could be an analytic contribution to current anthropology and, at the same time, a deep sigh of relief?

The product of the period that followed was a rather overloaded text with hundreds of links and many more poems than the ones included in the collection onscreen/on the page. As it so happens in ‘conventional’ ethnography, most of the ‘evidence’ didn’t make it to the final text. I left out what seemed extremely hard to grasp or unrelated to the other pieces of work in the same chapter. I chose not to include material that was compromising for loved ones or research interlocutors. Many pages from this introduction were also tossed away, in a hard bet to keep this book/ artefact actually accessible, easy to read, and as light and theory-free (in terms of jargon and standard referencing) as possible. What finally remained in the present artefact maintained its original form: i.e., the dreams and notes are presented uncut, just like they were in the first take, as are the pictures or the sounds recorded (sometimes the words have been rewritten on paper or on a word processor in order to be easier to read, although in this way they have lost a considerable chunk of their scribble character). In any case, an exhaustive presentation is the opposite of the attempt I am making in refining ethnographic meaning in abstract language and multimodal narration, so the largest part of documentation/information ultimately fell outside the final draft.

In this respect, this work was no different than other texts, theses, books and articles I have shared with readers in the past. What I believe needs to be noted, however, is that in this case, each piece of evidence, despite its often abstract nature, has for me a very traceable root and follows a very specific route for it to enter a poem or a hyperlink. But given the centrifugal, non-linear and largely speculative quality of the artefact’s constitutive parts, what is theoretically or emotionally apparent to the end reader/user/listener/participant is something that cannot be guaranteed or safeguarded but to a very minimal extent. Serving the implicit genre of poetic autoethnography, I tried to allow for sufficient stimulus for the word or concept to function in my own imagined—desired—manner. Some links refute the content of the word they accompany, others play with the word’s placement in the text, some support and intensify the meaning attributed to it. There is a very specific and highly personal trail of thought that has led to the selection of words, the production of the multimedia content and the assemblage of various sources, but the intention of this discussion is not to resolve doubt and explain complexity out of ethnographic meaning—quite the contrary. Therefore, it is up to the reading routes, choices and modalities of each visitor as to how she is going to approach the poems, the underlined words, the collection of supporting evidence or the chronology implied in the chapters of the unfolded autoethnography. In my view, this is the limit of authorship, after which I am somewhat obliged to let go and trust that the fragile multilayered narrative will perform an effect, if not equivalent to my own initial trigger, then maybe at least engaging enough.

To that end, the content engulfed in the hyperlinks is inherently dynamic, which means that it may change from time to time, rendering the core text open to different readings over time and allowing the author(s in me) to maintain an open dialogue with the material and the visitor-reader, as well as ‘tamper’ with the ideas and abandon the very idea of a closed, finished, final ‘text’. I find that this malleability, inherent in feminist writing as well as in the anthropological sensibility of multiple and contrasting readings of social reality, is made possible through digital annotation and multimedia experimental writing, for which I have become increasingly grateful. Nevertheless, this stance inevitably encompasses the instability of the text in two ways and the reader needs to be informed for this programmatic gesture: first, the ability to periodically change the content of the links and perpetually re-create the underlying layer of information is offered as a playful and dynamic way to (re)layer an initial text and comment on the nature of meaning to subtly change with each new visit. Secondly, by acknowledging the malleable and transitional character of the world wide web and leaving room for the possibility that after a certain period some links may cease to be functional or, even lead to different sets of information, we are entering an era when control is willfully surrendered in favor of understandings of networked knowledge, connectivist communities and emergent ways of un-learning and re-learning how textual navigation works.

The sections that follow in this short outro address some key themes as they relate to the origin of the experiment. Initially I posit that, while digital ethnography has gained considerable ground within digital humanities in researching cyberspaces (chatrooms, fora, videogames), internet technosociality, and data-driven practices (Schüll, 2016, 2018a, 2018b) and has begun to systematically explore the collection of data in virtual space, not much has been done in the direction of the (re) presentation of collected data in digital form. Therefore, the interplay between emergent forms of digital textuality and anthropological representation needs to be briefly discussed.

Secondly, I address the fact that the legitimacy of autoethnography has in recent years gained escalating ground as a sub-field of anthropology and now constitutes a somewhat privileged locale for experimental writing. Thus, a growing body of feminist reading and writing pushes this direction forward and the inherent ties between (auto) ethnography and experimental feminist writing are further illuminated. There is also an expansive literature concerning anthropology’s affinities to art, both in regard to the collection and interpretation of data and in the process of textual representation of our interlocutors in the field, which is discussed as a foundation for employing fictional/ poetic autoethnography. Following recent anthropological work, I view interiority as a vantage standing point for researching, and reflecting upon, social life. In this process, theory-based poetic language delivers an accurate and appropriate vehicle for the understanding and narrating of this viewpoint. The key objectives of the approach include the cultivation of pleasurable ways of reading ethnography, in motivating the affective, imaginative, sensory and intellectual capacities of the reader (with minimum digital literacy required); and secondly, it boils complex theory down to carefully distilled quotations and references incorporated (or ‘hidden’) within the text, thus promulgating an independent exploration of layered text on the part of the reader. Hopefully, the artefact at hand/onscreen encompasses long-standing debates in anthropology and literature, and gestures towards the limitless capacity of documenting human experience, inhabiting the border between poetic and ethnographic writing, conceptually and epistemologically troubling both.

After this rather confessional beginning, a set of pressing questions immediately arise. Why poetry? Digital in what sense? Which feminism? Autoethnographic to what degree? And perhaps more pressingly so: how much can you subtract from a discipline’s principal orthodoxies and still claim citizenship within it? As noted, I chose to include the introduction at the end of the book, entertaining the idea that it is less intrusive this way, but mostly indulging in the conviction that such a declaration of intention, brief and concise as I can make it, might stimulate many more such experiments registered under the rubric of ‘anthropology’, ‘theory’, and ‘science’; not plain ‘poetry’ or ‘prose’. So, in the pages that follow I seek to situate the book in the emerging area of the digital humanities and to address visual and digital representational narrations of ethnography, as they have been problematized in recent discussions in the field. I interrogate the limits and the potential offered by autoethnographic and feminist writing modalities and argue that multimedia poetry is a fine conductor through which to carry ethnographic meaning. In doing so, I seek to challenge a series of disciplinary and academic boundaries in order to join forces with emerging modalities or writing, reading and thinking through (and about) anthropology.

Autoethnography and poetry: an inextricable tango

Autoethnography is a somewhat embarrassing genre. It often implies a certain self-indulgence in the part of the ethnographer, if not a lack of seriousness as implied in the—indirectly objectivized—distance between the observer and her subject. For a discipline that reserves for the anthropologist the most central and critical position among the research instruments, it is often quite puzzling how little we actually come to know about the internal processes, complex positionalities, political stances, and private blockages of the persons who write ethnography. That does not necessarily mean that a full disclosure of all aspects of the writing subject’s life is in order; it does however push to the direction of acknowledging that a genre that deals with reflexivity par excellence should not be dismissed off hand as a lesser form of representation. In my view, it is astonishing that it has been thirty years since Lila Abu-Lughod advocated experimenting with narrative form and creating what she called “narrative ethnographies of the particular,” pointing primarily to autobiographical ethnographic accounts that could encompass several genres (1991, p. 138) and yet, still today, there are actually so few attempts to challenge the dominant assumptions of disciplinary writing.

In this book, autoethnography is about the telling of stories drawing explicitly on the personal experience of the author; that is, recounting stories of and about the self, filtered and delivered through the lens of culture. The emergence of autoethnography as a genre and its disciplinary acknowledgment and inclusion within the methodological array of qualitative research was a result of shifting considerations about social research, which include: the full recognition of the limits of scientific knowledge; the increased importance of social identities and identity politics; and a gradual appreciation for personal narrative, story, the literary and the aesthetic, which accompanies concerns about the ethics and politics of research practices and representations (Dicks et al., p. 8; Livholts, 2011). Since the mid-1970s, when autoethnography first appeared as a term, it has come to mean various things: from the self-account of informants to that of researchers dealing with ‘home’ anthropology, and to the more recent inclusion of personal narrative, reflexivity, and subjectivity that comes with writing ‘the other’. During the past decade, and with the emerging blurring and merging of disciplinary as well as artistic expressive modalities, autoethnography has come to denote “the investment researchers have in their research; by being personally, emotionally, aesthetically, and narratively connected to a cultural group or experience, autoethnographers may take more responsibility for and greater care in representing themselves and others” (Ellis, 2011, p. 18-19), which oftentimes entails academic prose being imbued with “different representational forms—for example dialogues, scripts, stories, poems, diaries and journals, photographic essays, biographical reflections and multi-layered writing” (Dicks et al., 2005, p. 33).

The use of poetry, both as a tool for collecting data (Furman et al., 2006) and as an expressive outlet for the anthropologist has been unexpectedly pivotal to the self-observation entailed in this project. Research poems are generally used as guides for practicing educators for building relationships in the field (Cousik, 2014); or for juxtaposing research tools such as in-depth interviews to more expressive means for representing the same sets of observations (Langer & Furman, 2004). But they also have been exceptionally popular in articulating autoethnography (Shelley, 2008) and underline the inevitably expressive character of note-taking and arts-based approaches to ethnographic knowledge (Duncan, 2004). Poetic language has a prominent position in this problematisation, even though, in my case, it presented itself as a possibility after years of self-observation—I suppose more as a culmination of note-taking and less as a creative outlet per se. Laurel Richardson views poetic representation in research as a ‘method of inquiry’ that contains both creative and analytic research work and the use of non-traditional academic genres, such as poetry, drama, conversations, etc. (Richardson, 2000, p. 929-930). Nina Lykke (2010) takes the dimension of the poetic further when discussing Richardson’s work, and argues for a certain ‘poetic truth’, which can be raised against a positivistic view of truth as objective and generalisable. Drawing on Hywel D. Lewis’ definition of poetic truth, she sees the benefits of the use of poetic genres in research as being composed “around their effects on the reader, effects that are both aesthetic and ethical; they fascinate, give a sudden experience and make us both think and feel around what is presented to us” (Lykke, 2010, p. 190-191). There are valuable lessons to be learned from attempts to combine ethnography with fictional writing which are mostly performed on the level of autoethnography, where issues of reflection, memory, and consent are easier to handle when compared to ‘standard’ fieldwork with other research interlocutors. This is not a coherent genre in the humanities, since it covers a wide range of themes and approaches—from methodological novels (Ellis, 2004) to narrative research; it suggests that tales of personal experience are especially useful for understanding how disciplinary life and work can be realized (cf. Heuston, 2011; Tedlock, 1999). Arts-based research and autoethnography are both efforts to employ and emphasise the expressive qualities of generative forms of feeling “in order to enable a reader of that research to participate in the experience of an author [/writer],” a place, or a situation (Barone & Eisner, cited in Manovski, 2014, p. xvi).

Autoethnography as a “passage between disciplines” that scrutinizes the implications of borders between constructed and organized universes of knowing (Hagoel & Kalekin-Fishman, 2016) valorizes literature and the visual arts in considering them not only as objects of knowledge but as possible modes of anthropological engagement (Apostolidou, 2022b). Autoethnography, in its various affinities to visual research (Oliver, 2017) and to feminist theory delivers extraordinary accounts of the writing self (Boon et al., 2018; see also Sheriff, 2011). It has made use of new and changing ideas about and ideals for research; setting a recognition of the limits of scientific knowledge; and has resulted in an emerging appreciation for personal narrative, story, the literary and the aesthetic, emotions, and the body. This contemporary strand of thought presents a heightened concern over the ethics and politics of research practices and representations, with notable interest on using the potentials of new media (cf. Pensoneau-Conway, Adams & Bolen, 2017).

Storying is a prominent feature in such bodies of work, bringing together pieces of cultural and personal narratives, although it is only evidently embraced in the Anglo-Saxon world (Grant, Short & Turner, 2013)—coinciding with contemporary literary trends such as magical realism (Hegerfeldt, 2005)—than in Greek and southern-European academia. This is presumably because of the anchoring of the humanities to local epistemic orthodoxies and a rather conservative view of expressing and articulating ‘scientific facts’ and the complex ethics of writing about oneself in a ‘non-exposure’ culture. The genealogy of the disciplinary emergence of the humanities in modern Greece attests to a rigid and canonical view of what falls into the category of ‘academic’; despite the progressive proclamations of numerous contemporary scholars, performed on the level of articulating theory, there are very few exceptions of troubling the very vehicle and gesture of the dialogue, that is the academic text. What is more, the erasure of the writing ‘I’, an erasure that is thought to safeguard epistemic credibility, showcases the deeply- rooted anchoring of the Greek academia on the (obscured) dogmas of objectivity as a validator of knowledge.

Critical autoethnography is presented as a highly creative genre of doing ethnography, which inherently engages ethnographic work with performance (Holman-Jones & Pruyn, 2018) in bringing together gender, sexuality, and theatricality (Taylor & Villegas, 1994) and is especially reflexive in the case of motherhood—a principal concern in my own research and personal routes. Bringing attention to tensions and binaries rather than resolving them, autoethnography shows how the use of personal, family intimacies is a way of constructing empowering narratives that question taken-for-granted cultural discourse surrounding women’s work, mothering, and relationships (Faulkner, 2018, p. 110).

Therefore, the present attempt to engage in creative autoethnography as an exercise in expanding my writing repertoire and intensifying dialogic reflexivity makes a case for autoethnographic stories as “artistic and analytic demonstrations of how we come to know, name, and interpret personal and cultural experience. With autoethnography, we use our experience to engage ourselves, others, culture(s), politics, and social research. In doing autoethnography, we confront the tension between insider and outsider perspectives, between social practice and social constraint” (Adams, Jones & Ellis, 2015, p.1).

On mediations: when feminism and anthropology met the digital

Definitions of digital humanities have long demonstrated a tension between a computer-based framework and the culturally-oriented appropriation of digital media (Nyhan, Terras, & Vanhoutte, 2013). Information technologies and the humanities are often seen as antithetical and very few approaches see them as a spectrum of the same questioning, wherein the digital aspect is part of the humanities’ traditional interrogation, on the one hand, and the sociocultural is reflected in all aspects of digital culture, on the other.

Going through recent discussions, we may observe a tendency on the part of ‘digital ethnography’ towards the problematisation of all aspects of anthropological work: politics and relationships, visibility, temporality and space practices, infrastructures; but also, the importance of art and play in contemporary digital spheres, as well as the elements of design that guide the production of knowledge (Hjorth et al., 2017; Whitehead & Wesch, 2012; Boellstorff, 2015, 2021). The most prominent issue that has arisen from this vibrant research area are digital subjectivities1 and the incorporation of ethnography in the studies of rhetoric in digital humanities (Ridolfo & Hart-Davidson, 2015). Also, this discussion has ignited a problematisation of material culture as imprinted in the representation of knowledge-bearing artefacts (Tilley et al., 2006; Eglash, 2006; Pink et al., 2016; Sumartojo & Graves, 2019). Collected works of practitioners in digital humanities working across disciplinary boundaries show that such representation requires scholars to make explicit what they know about their material and to understand the ways in which that material exceeds or escapes representation.

But let us take a step back. The digital turn in anthropology and ethnography is not a sudden rupture to the field’s epistemological quest. There is a distinctive genealogy in reflexive discussions about representation that have evolved from the textual to the visual and more recently to the digital ‘turn’ in anthropology.

Anthropology of media has long acknowledged representation of self and other, the relation of technology to truth and the active audiences as the key components of (textual/narrative) mediation across cultures (Askew & Wilk, 2002). Mostly focusing on photography and video, the early discussion raised some intriguing questions about the mediation of cultures and the production of identities through partial representations of cultural instances. I believe that anthropology has made peace with the partial character of represented social reality and might now endeavour on a more adventurous terrain, given that technological opportunity makes it possible—or even imperative (in terms of reading practices and modalities of understanding and everyday communicating in the west). In the past 40 years, media anthropology has mostly been about technologies of communication; however, it is very difficult to separate the operation of communicational media cleanly from broader social-political processes of circulation, exchange, imagination and knowing (Boyer, 2012).

Examining mass media production in the mid-twentieth century, and media reception after the 1970s, the anthropology of media in recent years follows the crisis of representation (Marcus & Fischer, 1986; Rabinow, 1986; Clifford, 1988; Minh-ha, 1989; Clifford, 2015) and problematises the uses of technology in ethnography (Borgmann, 2006; Alarcón- Medina, 2020) and in scrutinising colonial, national, and global hegemonic projects. From the documentations of the internet as enabling identity and community expressions (Miller & Slater, 2000), we have begun to address more sophisticated questions which move away from reductionism, naturalisation, essentialism and binary oppositions that prevailed the analysis of early anthropological work on the power of technology (carried out by Bateson, Mead and Boaz). Anthropologists do not view media technologies as scientific modes of cultural documentation or as technical means to capture ‘the truth’ anymore. Furthermore, media technologies are not restricted to visual forms. The term media implies two or more poles of engagement: “Media technologies do not mediate between themselves and people. Rather, they mediate (medius: middle) between people and this is what defines them as a distinct variety of technology” (Askew & Wilk, 2002, p. 2). If the understanding of mediation ceases to rely on substantialist and essentialist models of culture, then it becomes apparent that technology does not occur after or outside culture but is in itself the foundation of most activity nowadays (Mazzarella, 2004); which is to say, cultural technologies and practices and technological mediations produce contemporary meanings. In this orientation, ethnography has a responsibility to expose the centrality of mediation in current communication, kinship (Madianou & Miller, 2013), religion, and education. After the anthropology of new media and the limitation of research to digital technology as a research tool, the challenge for digital anthropology is to accurately build up analytic categories from which we may be able to capture the complex imbrications of technology and society (Sassen, 2016; Horst & Miller, 2012, 2020).

The work at hand strives to situate itself on the tension within media anthropology between its common research foci (which are most often technological or representational in their basis) and what we might gloss as processes of social mediation. That is, social transaction in its broadest sense: of the movement of images, discourse, persons, and things. In this respect, I follow the turn through which ‘mediation’ becomes a significant presence within the analytical language of media anthropology, wherein the ethnographer is also producer and receiver of mediated meaning (for discussion, see Boyer, 2012, p. 386). My preoccupation with mediation goes back to 2000, and it began with my postgraduate studies in anthropology of art and visual culture, a territory which exposed me to the powerful position of visuality, way before digitality became an object of interest.

Visual culture was indeed the first to enter the anthropological methodological array of mediation, through the use of visual empirical material since the mid- twentieth century (Berry, 2012) in the form of what we call visual anthropology, which has always been ‘inherently interdisciplinary’ (Kalantzis, 2017) as the act of studying the production and circulation of meaning of visually perceived objects (Tsilimpounidi, 2016; Carastathis & Tsilimpounidi, 2020). Visual research and representation in anthropology has been a rapidly growing field the last thirty years, with many interesting contributions on a theoretical and methodological level, such as the problematisation of representing visual knowledge; the technical means of capturing and reproducing cultural conceptualisations; and hypermedia as anthropological texts (Pink, 2004).

In this vein, anthropological hypermedia, which combine image and writing, have also been viewed as capable of resolving the unsatisfactory relationship between film and text in anthropology (Pink’s contribution in Pink et al., 2004). Even though fifteen years ago, this trend heavily relied on illustration, Sarah Pink suggests that to close the divide between visual and mainstream anthropology requires not simply new ethnographic film forms but also anthropological texts that combine and mutually situate visual and written ethnographic materials with anthropological theory. She claims that hypermedia offer one route towards such an anthropology that allows the visual to make critical insights that inspire us to rethink the way anthropological arguments are conventionally constructed (Pink, 2004, p. 164) within a media-oriented production of knowledge.

In this context, many subfields of anthropology have emerged, including anthropology of technology, anthropology of cyberculture and cyberspace, virtual ethnography, anthropology of information technology or multimedia anthropology (Cohen and Salazar, 2016, p. 5). As Athena Athanasiou points out, the internet, an archive of cultural processes and dynamics, is also a lab for reflection and critique. Internet ethnography (Athanasiou, 2004) has not only set new correlations between ‘local’, ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ localities, but it has also redefined the anthropological conceptions of the body, the senses, the experience, the community, and ethnographic time, further nuancing the discipline’s highlighted concepts such as population, community, public sphere, social interaction, but also cultural intimacy and familiarity, participant observation and ethnographic text. Athanasiou follows Arturo Escobar in asking: How does cyberculture transform these modern arrangements of life (body, self, nature), labour (production, economy) and language (speech, communication)? In attempting to answer such questions while practicing ethnography, a tentative answer may be that the ethnographer cannot afford to occupy the space of the observer and sit comfortably behind the written text as a quasi-invisible yet authoritative voice. The transformations which have already taken place in most areas of everyday social life demand more engaged tropes of doing ethnography, fresh lenses of interrogation and, equally important, new modalities of ethnographic ‘writing’.

This dovetails with recent research that is oriented towards visualisation in sociology and anthropology (Pauwels, 2015) promoting the idea of the visual researcher as producer, facilitator, and communicator. This figure employs genres such as the visual essay—a blending of art and social science that is a work in process and as a scholarly form resides in the synergy of the distinct forms of expression that are combined (Apostolidou, 2022a)—images, words, layout and design, which add up to a scientifically informed statement (Pauwels, 2015, p. 139- 166). Thus, the project registers writing in the realm of technology, and attempts to challenge some of the dogmata that run through one of the strongest western metaphors for thinking, acknowledging that the very process of writing constitutes a way of constructing, producing, circulating and representing cultural knowledge.

As Penelope Papailias further demonstrates, the rhetorical solutions offered by the literary crisis of anthropology in the 1990s (dialogic experimentation), however useful in placing reflexivity and self-criticism at the core of the anthropological endeavor, did not offer a let-out from the crisis. Rather, the professionalisation of anthropology was implemented on the degradation and annulation of other practices of cultural documentation (Papailias, 2016, p. 38). In an attempt to bring to the fore these ‘other practices’, at the expense of which professional academics often claim and exert their institutional power, the effort made in this artefact is to show that digital ethnography presents many affinities and similarities with feminist ethnography as far as the main theoretical and methodological approaches are concerned. In a sense, they are both disturbing or peripheral subdisciplines—supplements in Derridean terms—which have triggered parallel critical commentary to anthropological thinking. On a methodological level it may be argued that a focus on gender in ethnography has also corresponded with greater reflexivity with respect to the contexts of knowledge production, such as that in the work of Ruth Behar (1996) or Kamala Visweswaran (1994), who examine women’s lives and the practice of feminist ethnography (see also Behar and Gordon, 1995; Bell, Caplan & Karim, 1993). Similarly, the increasing focus on the visual (e.g., Pink, 2014; Banks & Ruby, 2011) and on the senses (Howes, 2003; Pink, 2014; Vannini, Waskul & Gottschalk, 2012) at the turn of the century came with new methods as well as a challenge to the dominant ways of ‘knowing’ and ‘researching’ that privilege particular senses.2 My own work is situated on the intersection of such ethnographic, feminist, and media studies interrogations; it attempts to bring together methods and modes of sensual writing that constitute a timely and ethnographically applicable convergence of recent discussions.

A second common feature of feminist and digital anthropology lies in the heightened interest on the body as a primal location of interrogation. This book envisages digital anthropological practice as embedded in the wider area of material culture and underlines the centrality that the human body occupies in this strand of ethnographic interest. Indeed, most approaches that problematize material culture deal with the human body, in one way or another. For example, Chris Tilley’s work (1997) on the phenomenology of landscape makes an interesting point in correlating spatial narrativity with the landscape and the art of narration. He notes that the praxis of movement is an act of understanding space (as incubating both place and time), so the description of a place is also already a description of a bodily movement and a shifting landscape, that allows for narrative understanding. Language as already physically invested stands at the core of this digital autoethnographic project. To the extent that gender is an assignment with a specific citationality, I wish to trace the difference “between embodying or performing gender norms and the performative use of discourse” (Butler, 1993, p. 231) in the instances of gendered subjectivity construction portrayed in poems. In this sense, then, “language and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and refers to that which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified” (Butler, 1993, p. 68). Judith Butler follows Jacques Lacan in viewing language as essential to the development of morphology, the process of how bodies materialise, how they come to assume the morph, the shape by which the material discreteness is marked; and insofar as language might be understood to emerge from the materiality of bodily life it constitutes a primary act of displacement and condensation (Butler, 1993, p. 69).

So, the interrelation between embodied genders and technology lies at the core of my most recent research concerns. As Donna Haraway (1997) notes, “[b]roadly conceptualized reproductive practices must be central to social theory in general, and to technoscience studies in particular.” This very interrelation has been the object of attentive study ever since ‘new reproductive technologies’ gained attention from prospective mothers/ parents and theorists alike. Historians of technology have identified the aspect of reproductive technologies as one of the prominent areas of interest in late modernity— along with the limited presence of women in the design and sciences of technology, the gendered use and consumption of technological artefacts, and the multiple masculinities associated with gender (Rendezi, 2012, p. 44). What is of great interest in the genealogy of the relationship between gender and technology is the traditional apprehension of women as consumers and passive users of technology (which is traditionally designed and circulated by men), a thesis that has been widely contested by historians and anthropologists, who have proved that both gender and technology are culturally constructed concepts in constant resignification and mutual interrelation.

This also coincides with recent feminist views on the technosocial understanding of the female body and processes of physical reproduction. In Rosi Braidotti’s work (2011) the notion of ‘the human’ is both de-stabilized by technologically mediated social relations in a globally connected world and is thrown open to contradictory redefinitions, arguing for a sustainable modern subjectivity as one in flux, never opposed to a dominant hierarchy yet intrinsically other, always in the process of becoming, and perpetually engaged in dynamic power relations, which are both creative and restrictive. The central concern in this framework is the constructive theorization of post- humanity, as well as the multiple aspects of the experience of techno-cultural somatization, where multiple processes of mediation are pivotal in the cultural conceptualizations of reproduction that merge the boundaries between the human and the technological (Floridi, 2015; Whitehead & Wesch, 2009; Kornwachs, 2021), and indeed “the very intelligibility of that which is human” in modern biopolitcs (Athanasiou, 2003, p. 125). The theoretical starting point of such reasoning is that the subject and object of anthropology must shift from the exclusive focus on the “human” so that more complex “post-institutional” forms of subjectivity and cultural action can be detected (Athanasiou, 2004, p. 66- 67).

Feminist critique early posed the problem of patriarchy as an omnipotent one, stretching well into the very mode of representation, be it artistic or academic. Even the very distinction between artistic and academic might be argued to derive from a positivist stance sanctioned by centuries- long phallocentric writing documented in western medicine, philosophy and politics. For example, Judith Fetterley’s proposal of resisted reading (1978) describes how the female reader, raised in a language system and literature that still presumes its authors and readers are male, often ‘eavesdrops’ upon a literary conversation that was intended entirely for male authors and readers. She argues that they become psychologically “immasculated,” in the sense of being culturally trained to think and read and write like men. She proposes that “the resisting reader” fights that transformation and detects the ways in which the text’s constructions of its world reflect assumptions about gender itself, as well as reproduction, marriage, careers, and many other things in a culture which may be identified by the gender of their participants. Reading women writers offers us a chance to experiment with this thesis. Taking Fetterley’s proposition about the resisting reader one step further, I argue for an ethnographic accommodation of the notion of a resisting writer (cf. King, 2007), in terms of experimenting with the very vehicle of western academic orthodoxy: the monograph, the paper, the academic text. In portraying a slice of human experience that is fragmented, embodied, and imbued in metaphoric meaning (like multimodal poetry), the ethnographer is in a position to challenge the claims of social ‘science’ itself by way of articulation of research findings. A notable danger of this approach, however, is falling into essentialist notions of gender and women’s writing, as evinced by gynocriticism’s focus on ‘feminine’ subject matters in literature, the literary history of female tradition, or even a distinctive feminine mode of experience, or “subjectivity,” in thinking, feeling, valuing, and perceiving oneself and the outer world (Abrams, 2012 [1957], p. 505-506). Being cautious about such homogenising preconceptions, I propose that the resisting writer will stubbornly look for ways that subvert the qualities of truth of the academic text and seek to portray the intersectional construction of gendered experience (Carastathis, 2016).

To this end, the body as a vehicle for reflection is presumably the optimum locus of attention. Écriture féminine, from Virginia Woolf to Hélène Cixous, has been heavily theorised on the inscription of the feminine body in writing and the breaking up of the constraints of western logical, linear, normative discursive schemata (cf. Hawthorn, 2000, p. 56-58). In my work, female embodiment is inscribed in language and culture according to Luce Irigaray’s “insistent reference to the elemental economy of the female body designed to retheorize the specificity of the feminine and not to essentialize ‘woman’ or ‘anatomy’ by way of fluid textual corporeality” (Tzelepis, 2017, p. 203). It is indeed an attempt at the rewriting of feminine morphology through the metaphors of multiplicity, plasticity, and tactility (Tzelepis, 2017, p. 205). Elena Tzelepis warns us of the essentialist topographies entailed in this process: “the work of reappropriating the feminine entails displacing, relocating, and relayering both essence and difference, as well as on the inside and outside the realm of phallogocentric intelligibility” (Tzelepis, 2017, p. 205).

In its actual application to our academic writing tropes, this technocultural and embodied practice calls for a challenging of conventional academic jargon. In her book, Gender Research: a Guide to Feminist Theory, Methodology and Writings, Nina Lykke identifies five elements relating to how and why experimental writing has influenced research work in the field of gender studies: epistemology and the speaking subject (different telling positions); research ‘objects’ as subjects with agency; the language and narrative turn effectuates a move beyond traditional texts and genres; to write body and passion; to write understandably (Lykke, 2010, p. 178–197). The present text fully embraces all five discursive gestures as a political positioning vis-à- vis elitist, cryptic, and phallocentric academic language, which has become established as a dominant western trope, and which, more often than not, is uncritically performed by self-identified feminists in the academia.

Another strand of interrogation that runs along both fieldwork and ethnographic writing in this project is the relation between gender and space (Moore, 1995). Anthropological research on the relationship between space and gender has long indicated that the organisation of space and the exploitation of spatiality is not a backdrop to social activity but is the active and interactive context within which social relations and structures are created. Central to practices of pregnancy, sexuality, and childbirth are often the shared experience of pain and bodily restrictions (such as prohibitions over food intake and physical activity, or seclusion). Yet, it is interesting how women emphasise the positive aspects of motherhood and childbirth because it gives them power and social responsibility. As Henrietta Moore (1996) shows, the female renegotiation of representation often challenges the socially dominant representations of women. Space is therefore a flexible medium of presentation and communication that facilitates gendered visibility and challenges gender ideology (p. 198- 199). Maintaining this emphasis on space, both material and discursive, Moore also registers poems in a genealogy of feminine strategies to express a corporeally determined positionality and the inherent creativity-imagination work this voicing often entails.

Writing praxis, hypertext and ethnography

A central stake of this sort-of-book is to attempt to resist the established format of academic and ethnographic writing (lecture, paper, book and so on) and provide alternative spaces for conceptual problematization through the convergence of ethnographic writing, feminist writing and digital poetic form. On an epistemological level, this emphasis on crafting a new media text, allowed by the freedom of digital media, is, in a way, a return to the epistemic origins of western modernity. The emphasis on making, tinkering, and design transcends research, reproducibility, and corroboration in science and pushes to the forefront educational, emancipatory, exploratory and aesthetic-centered uses of our experiences as academic subjects/objects. In exploring the potential of open science hardware available to researchers today, Denisa Kera (2017) discusses hybrid and ambiguous practices, which have the potential to bridge divides between present disciplines and skills but they also define science as an everyday activity directly connected to the private and public interests of citizens. She follows Hannah Arendt’s 1958 critique of homo laborans and homo faber and claims that science artisans (citizen-scientists, geeks, makers, and hackers) offer an alternative to professionalisation of science as practiced in university and research and development laboratories. Central to this endeavour are playful, expressive, and performative strategies and define the present practices as “artisanal science” (Kera, 2017): “[t]he science artisans strive for and explore sovereignty, dignity, and freedom in an age immersed in science and technology controversies by bridging the divides between art, science, engineering, and humanities” (Kera, 2017, p. 97).3

A look at the historicity of writing and its technologies is quite illuminating if we are to explore such attempts at bridging. Jay David Bolter (2006) examines writing as a technology (an art and a technique), as one of the most powerful cultural practices in contemporary western societies, which is at the same time a powerful metaphor of the metaphysics of writing. He reminds us that the organised text is a relatively recent construct, which took its current form at the end of the eighteenth century. In recent years, this form is being disorganised, partly due to the acknowledgment of the visual and acoustic dimensions of writing. Following Christina Haas in underlining the importance of technical, visual, and physical means that organised reading, Bolter stresses the tangibility of computers as a new materiality for writing and dismisses the conceptualisation of writing as an external technological force, viewing it, rather, as a shifting social practice. He commends new rhetorical relationships, proposing a multiplicity of meaning that does not support the hierarchy of the written text, and is not topical/thematic but topographical: the view of text as a space, which contests the logocentric notion of writing being a servant to spoken language (Bolter, 2006 [2001], p. 54-55). This is not the end of typography; but rather, it is yet another stage in the genealogy of writing.

Recent interest in the materialism of literature is also fueled by the tendency of the study of textual technologies or textual media, which stand at the crossroads where digital literary studies meet the history of the book. What has recently been described as a “material turn in digital studies” includes computers and computational processes as purely material phenomena by their very nature (Sichani, 2018). In Transferred Illusions, Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (2016) observe the persistence of reading and writing technologies and the inability of imagining a total replacement of old technologies with new ones. They claim that in the early 1990s, hypertext was briefly hailed as a liberating writing tool for non-linear creation; however, the newspaper, print’s most powerful mass vehicle, largely shapes its electronic remediation through huge digitisation initiatives, dominated by a handful of centralising service providers, funded and wrapped round by online advertising. According to these authors, it is faulty to assume a culture of total replacement. This is precisely why it is important that writers, critics, publishers and librarians—in modern parlance, the knowledge providers—be critically engaged in shaping and regulating cyberspace, and not merely the passive instruments or unreflecting users of the digital tools in our hands (Deegan & Sutherland, 2016, p. xi).

The hypertext-based navigation of the poems in this collection pushes for this emancipatory use of the available tools. Although writing practice has not penetrated academic formal text as one might expect given its ease of use, its enriching potential, and the fact that, as a writing modality hypertext is not that recent an idea. Roland Barthes— following Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein in their respective attempts to demolish the linearity of argumentation and narrativity—adopts the style of fragmentation and rupture in commenting on the rigidity of the writing style of established typography. Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, and Butler each has also in one way or another supported an elliptical style of writing. In discussing hypertext environments, Andrea Austin (1997) highlighted the blurring of distinctions, which renders value problematic, and thus has its impact on the practice of literary criticism: “The dissolution of the opposition between style or look and content in hypertext is a fascinating terrain, one which is just beginning to be mapped” (Austin, 1997, p. 212). Bolter holds that hypertext entails a transition from the footnote to the link and identifies several elements of the text as ‘hot’ elements (the ones accompanied by a link), thus changing the roots of meaning. The participatory actions demanded by the reader (activating, or not, the material through a click) might work in the present artefact in two ways: either cool down the temperature of the nodes/links (since, as one anonymous reviewer pointed out, they engage vision and hearing and ask of the reader to connect the dots between word and insinuation); or, alternatively—and in fact ideally—the act of choosing will intensify and further deepen the heat of the links and the overall surrounding text. The reader is encouraged or invited to go through the links freely and maybe come back to them after they have read the present outro. In discussing hypertext as fluid, dialogical, multi- routed and multi-rhythmic text that has not fully fulfilled its potential in the uses of educational or scholarly form, Bolter (2006 [2001], p. 150) points out the element of not-yetness and the risk and uncertainty as speculative methodologies introduced by emerging technologies (Ross, 2017). In my view, these technologies are not to be viewed only as technical systems and applications but whole orchestrations of phenomena, such as the technologies of reading, writing and even reflecting. There is tremendous potential for impregnating academic texts with varying intensities and contrasting meaning and hypertextual fiction— notably poetry, in this case—provide a space of interrogating both an individual (hyper)text and its very placement in an epistemological viewpoint about human knowledge. Indeed, hypertexual fiction has been the most convincing expression over the idea of the hypertext (Bolter, 2006 [2001], p. 169) and includes: hypertext novels or short stories; hypertext narrations within film and television; hypertext digital performances; and interactive or kinetic poetry.

The main characteristic of this trend is the surrendering of control of the text on the part of the author and this letting go is at times very soothing, a gesture also to be found in familiar fictional writing (Bolter, 2006 [2001], p. 171), which embraces the rhetoric of multilinearity and seeks to upset the conventional order of meaning, the organisational principles of printed fiction, and the clear monologue or dialogue of the parties involved. Another characteristic of hypertext fiction is the contesting of the chronological order. The condition of waiting, a great concern in contemporary ethnography (Khosravi, 2021; Janeja & Bandak, 2018) brings to the reading of multimodal poetry the physical and intellectual proximity to field research. Waiting on the part of the reader for the succession of the story to be continued and implemented might not be rewarded since “these consecutive delays or postponements put forward by the hypertext may never come to an end” (Bolter, 2006 [2001], p. 181).

How do these fragmented technologies make sense (auto) ethnographically? The use of hypertext in ethnography has a short and rather timid history (Coover, 2003). Ethnographers who embrace the technology make strong claims regarding its usefulness, suggesting that hypertext might alter the ways that we represent experiences from the field and create more reflexive texts (Pink, 2004). Three characteristics of hypertext make this possible: multilinearity (Dicks et al., 2005); multivocality (Pink, 2012); and multimodality (Coover, 2003). Careful attention to their implications with proper and adequate design features in ethnographic representation is needed (Drazin, 2013): “although there is great potential afforded by the technology, one must be careful not to overstate its usefulness” (Wood, 2011, p. 12). Rulon Matley Wood (2011) provides an account of the attempts that anthropologists have made to incorporate it into their work since the early 1990s and presents the limitations this has posed for ethnographic practice. He concludes that there is ample room for further research and notes that “although the technology has been in existence for some time, we lack practical applications that might help us better understand its strengths and limitations as applied to ethnography” (Wood, 2011, p. 9-11).

Moreover, hypertext fiction has done a lot to eliminate the distinction between writing and interpreting, in performing a turn over the construction criticism in adopting a vocabulary that contested the very principles of typography and “serious” academic and fictional writing (Bolter, 2006, p. 250). This coincides with the view of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) in their articulation of the theory of the rhizome. They describe theory and research that allows for multiple non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.

This collection aspires to be a rhizome, which “pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21). Literary hypertext abolished the logocentric character of literature, in accommodating extra-linguistic forms of mediation such as images, graphics, sound, moving picture etc. Hypertextual literature is perceived as a de facto reconfiguration of printed literature, somewhat inherently revolutionary and transgressive of the narrative order. Sofia Nikolaidou traces some initial features of the hypertextual form in earlier modernist and postmodernist attempts, from Borges to Sterne who use the element of παίγνιο (playfulness) in their writing (2009, p. 84-85). This almost intrinsic connection of hypertextual narration to playfulness is, I believe, the key element upon which to build a multimodal (auto)ethnography, in accommodating the intertextual and intratextual references available that link social phenomena to the interpretative mediation by the anthropologist and, ultimately, their performative representation.

Apart from the rather short history of hypertext use in anthropology and literature, this experiment also draws on more recent digital literary approaches. Digital literary studies are a flourishing experimental field that ranges from perspectives of game studies, social and ubiquitous computing, to e-literature, and visualisation, among many others (Siemens & Schreibman, 2013). Large interdisciplinary compilations have recently been released stressing on the transformation of disciplines that has taken place in recent years on account of the technologization of language (Fairclough cited in Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011, p. xxiv); but also, due to the evolution of media methods both in traditional fields such as cinema and telecommunication as well as evolving themes is the extraction of big data, virtual photography, cybernetics and so on (Arthur & Bode, 2014). Some go so far as to describe online reading as a ‘big bang’, which is in grave need of cultural criticism in order to become a flourishing academic domain (Liu, 2014).

These approaches take hybridity as a given and attend, instead, to the inherent multimodality and cultural embeddedness of these different ways of (inter)acting with/ through new media. Most of them stress that practice and creative generative research methods are also a requirement for digital humanities to remain a flourishing realm of study. The mere application of media capacities and the digitisation of analogue forms of data are not enough to revolutionize the field. New media sociolinguistics, when studying not the “grammatical” language of linguistics, but rather the everyday life of language in use—or just discourse—recognise a series of creative genres in digital discourse, including texting, messaging and multimodality in everyday communication (Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011). The turn to the user-generated content and the new narrativity formats that spring from the digital media promote an experimental tendency in the ways we think, reflect on and produce/disseminate ethnographic information (Manovich, Malina & Cubitt, 2001). Herein lies much of the potential in new media for invention and creativity: “time and again, research shows how users overcome apparent semiotic limitations, reworking and combining—often playfully—the resources at their disposal. These approaches illuminate that it is the situated, spatialized (which is not to say static) experiences of new media that are also crucial to an understanding of their meaning” (Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011, p. xxvi). And, I might add, for the expansion of contemporary publishing practices (Jefferies & Kember, 2019).

In defending the value of narratives in reflexive digital humanities, Lai-Tze Fan (2018) addresses the difficulty of representing the figurative meaning of narratives through digital tools and proposes a critical view of the limitations of computation materials and databases. He proposes alternative models of content management and organization that more closely resemble figurative meaning- making in human language. The epistemological differences between digital technologies and the humanities are in one way exemplified by the relationship between the database and the “traditional” narrative. Fan proposes two modes of enquiry as applied to the digital humanities which encourage the critical comparison, juxtaposition, interpretation, and reflection of digital tools and research. More specifically, she argues for two kinds of meaning in the creation of textual artefacts in the digital humanities: the first one is ‘humanistic thinking’, which implies the reflexive and interpretive modes of inquiry in which humanities scholars and students are trained and an interrogation about risking any priorities and responsibilities of the larger humanities project. The second is ‘narratological thinking’, which is an understanding of the linguistic play and semiotic depth of language, as it is used to construct works of narrative literature. This second mode of thinking calls for an engagement of literary elements such as plot, theme, imagery, poetics, medium/media, and intertext. “Narratological thinking is, in this sense, a mode of inquiry that is necessary to understanding how figurative meaning functions as a unique and vital quality of meaning making in general, including how we communicate with each other by offering information in the form of stories” (Fan, 2018, p. 4-5). As far as their application for (auto)ethnography, these approaches are always evaluated in conjunction to the writing surfaces upon which the narrative is inscribed. [4]

Again, this is not a groundbreaking new trend that sprung from the catchphrase ‘digital era’. In Reading Writing Interfaces, the contributors seem to defend a return to the book, bound up with a logic of demystifying devices—promoting, especially, writerly demystification. By opening up how interfaces limit and create certain creative possibilities and going back to older writing interfaces, such as the typewriter (Emerson, 2014, esp. pp. 87-128), they remind us how poets in the 1960s and 1970s (working heavily under the influence of Marshall McLuhan and before the widespread adoption of the personal computer), sought to create concrete poetry as a way to experiment with the limits and the possibilities of the typewriter. Widespread attempts to digitise literary texts (Aljayyousi, 2017) present results about the capacities of the digital medium and stem from an understanding of the material repercussions of the migration from print to digital.

Recently, there have also been some attempts to articulate a theory of performative materiality and its potential application to interface design from a humanistic perspective. They connect the materiality of digital media to investigations of materiality and the specificity of media in critical theory and aesthetics (Drucker, 2013). The ideal of performative materiality, the enacted and event- based character of digital activity supported by specific literal and physical conditions, promote the thesis that a system should be understood by what it does, not only how it is structured.

By re-engaging with the intellectual traditions of critical theory from structuralism to post-structuralism, deconstructivism, cultural and critical studies, and complex systems grounded in ecological approaches that posit emergent properties, we can bring an analytical framework for approaching the materiality of digital activity into focus. In this framework, we chart the shift from a concept of things as entities to a concept of them as events; from a notion of what is to that which is always in flux; from a literal to a contingent materiality that is exposed by the performative dimension of use (Drucker, 2013, p. 3).

I hold that today an ethnography in flux may well be demanded by its very subjects, its amateur practitioners, its end listeners/“users”. Most recent volumes on digital ethnography portray it as inherently unorthodox, a field that requires attention to alternative forms of communicating, a highly reflexive research practice that engages with multiplicity and perceives ethnography as an open event and, most importantly, a field that decentres the digital and views media as inseparable from other activities, technologies, materialities, and feelings (Pink et al., 2016).

Advocates of the power of literature in digital times (Pennington & Waxler, 2018) argue that reading literature in the digital age is politically important since it puts into motion the ‘educated imagination’ of readers as opposed to contemporary quick forms of narration, communication, and political engagement (Socken, 2013). So, bringing this quality in the realm of ethnography and using digital means to create literature might be a beneficial move in more than one disciplinary terrain: it could even promote “the encouragement of tolerance” (Frye cited in Socken, p.6).5

In this context, I think it is indeed fascinating to employ (auto)ethnographic layering, which has been indicated to coincide brilliantly with narrations about kinship and family ties through the compilation of recollections, family tales and dreams (Rath, 2012). This trend derives from early approaches to explore the potential of hypertexts in viewing the text as a set of horizontal layers with vertical interconnection mechanisms enabled by encoding with relevant material (Kynde, 1998). Layered texts, largely used in education and children’s narrativity (Watson, 1993) are texts that either consist of words and phrases that to a large extent are the same, or texts that allegedly constitute the same objective and are interconnected by nodes. The critical understanding of western textual tradition and the re-instating of layering in a wide range of fields, is also timely in the backdrop of the emergence of digital culture, but also vis-à-vis the gradual disempowerment of the theoretical humanities within academia, and helps us revisit persistent concerns, such as the interplay between writing and the body, textuality and history, différance, and the feminine (Margaroni, Lampropoulos & Chatzichristou, 2017). This may well be performed on a practical level, by systematically upsetting the orthodoxies of the normative text (such as linearity, orthography and truthfulness in writing).

So, I have attempted here to evoke politically in-correct reactions from the audience by use of subversion within the narratives. Strategies usually expelled from the academic text such as mockery, mimicry, sarcasm, and insinuation have been employed as narrative gestures in order to challenge the epistemological foundations of academic and ethnographic ‘givens’. Furthermore, these codes and literary gestures are somewhat endemic in cyberspace; satire and irony are to be found as frequent—at times dominant—modalities in online communities, e-identities, social media, techno sociality, cybertechnoscience and multi-player gaming, and so on. After all, the hybrid figure of the cyborg represents for Haraway an “ironic political myth”, a hope of extricating women from the dualities of western epistemology (nature/ culture, body/mind) that have historically put women in a tightly restrictive gendered “nature” (Athanasiou, 2004, p. 65). As noted before, upsetting narrative modalities, such as irony and sarcasm (Tzelepis, 2017, p. 201), has been employed in my work in order to destabilize authoritative ethnographic writing. Tzelepis discusses Irigaray’s ironic intervention that has posited the feminine as the radical alterity of discourse through a complacent seriousness that lies at the heart of the master narrative, thus destabilising preconceived claims of knowledge (Tzelepis, 2017, p. 201). Such a writing orientation coincides with the digital turn and the attendant writing modalities discussed above, since it interrogates both the message and the medium of ethnographic écriture.

Who will listen in? Reaching out to the reader

In preparing this book’s draft proposal for FAC press, I was urged to address the following questions: for whom are you writing? Who do you imagine will “listen in”? Over the years, this has become one of the most pressing questions for me and it was indeed exhilarating to see this overtly stated in a book proposal format. Is it our teachers, our professors, and/or parental figures, echoing commitments we made to ourselves years before we started to write? Is it peers, evaluators, or judges with often arbitrary criteria that will define the evolution of our academic routes? Is it funding bodies, administration mechanisms, and institutional check-lists? Or, as I see it, students, daughters, and friends that might be interested in what anthropology has to contribute to a deeper understanding of selfhood and otherness?

This bring us back to ethnography as a reading-writing hierarchy and a highly topographical positioning: there is often a hypothesis in reading ethnography that the author represents reality to the best of their capacity. Thus, the ethnographic text is a performance of the actual (i.e., cultural) text, much as a theatrical play is a performance of a work of literature, that somehow presents and seeks to approximate the text as best as possible. Following this analogy leads us to the assumption that “the work itself, i.e., social reality anticipates, even authorizes, its many occurrences and somehow contains their variety” (Sayre cited in Lentricchia & McLaughlin, 1995, p. 91), thus possessing an a priori status in relation to its manifestations. Performance itself becomes an event of the second rank, including imperfections, mis-readings and mis- interpretations, which, in turn, brings us to the intricate relation between reading and writing.

“Writing and reading are not separate, reading is a part of writing. A real reader is a writer. A real reader is already on the way to writing,” writes Hélène Cixous in her book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (cited in Livholts, 2012, p.12). The ideological division of keeping genres of writing and reading separate as ‘science’ and ‘literature’ does something to the spaces people inhabit and the ways in which the world is perceived and imagined. Recent research shows that reading is an activity that goes on at different levels simultaneously. As Mona Livholts notes, “[s]cholars read the texts of other scholars, but they also read work that does not ‘count’ as academic or feminist theory, yet nevertheless does provide important influences for critical analytical thinking. Also, the academic author is the first reader, the first audience of their own work in the process of its becoming. Listening to and transcribing an interview involves careful reading/listening skills. Writing the multiplicity of bodily sounds involves re- visiting and re-thinking the scene through acts of memory and imagination” (Livholts, 2012, p.12-13).

Moreover, the experience of reading involves the very materiality of a ‘text’ (be it printed, digital or acoustic) as well as the physicality it entails as highly bodily, active, and immersive action. For some electronic texts “the ways of reading demanded by an installed text may require a physical engagement, may require bodily movement either to activate aspects of the installation, or to access portions of the text. The reader’s body may provide a continuity for an otherwise fragmented text, or the experience of the text as complete may be conceivable only through being in it” (Siemens & Schreibman, 2013, p. 312- 313).

In some ways, this might be our century’s witnessing of the death of the author as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault theoretically established it in post-structuralist thought (cf. Landow, 1997); rendering the text as a “methodological terrain”, which seeks to eliminate the distance between author and reader and engage them in a single signifying practice (Barthes, 2017[1967]) with dialogic characteristics. I trust that in multimedia autoethnographic poetry this dialogue takes three different forms, as Bolter has identified them (2006 [2001], p. 163): namely, dialogue between author and reader; dialogue between linguistic, visual and sonic means of representation; and dialogue between old and new forms of media (website, paper, book, video, etc.). Given the specific genre of autoethnography where the self of the author is accentuated, this dialogue between author and reader might at times feature as an unequal task; it may be balanced through gestures and points of entrance to the mediating artefact through the physical and intellectual acts of reading and surfing the initial text.

An example of such gestures, besides the ones incorporated within the texts and insinuations, may include a forthcoming call, which would invite interested readers to record their voice reading out the poems, or their thoughts and feelings during the act, allowing us to digitally weave them back into the open, diverse and malleable body of symbols that the initial text bears. Along similar lines, oral descriptions of all visual material may be invited, so as to incorporate captions for readers with low vision or blindness, crafted by volunteering readers without the intervention of the writer. Another example is the choice to print parts of the text, allowing readers to haptically interact with it. Or a link that would lead the reader to a request to fill in their postal address and receive a tangible ‘part’ of the text—these are some ideas for how a born-digital artefact might take the form(s) of analogue materiality. This form of dialogue is therefore facilitated through the other two forms (i.e., means of representation and new forms of nodes, allowing for a methodological terrain between reader and text to emerge in the absence of the writer). The concept of linguistic bodies is useful as a mediator of meaning. As Ezequiel Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher (2018) offer, “linguistic bodies by definition work on making sense of contradictions and tensions. Embracing the mess, we find adults realizing themselves as linguistic bodies, incorporating specific sensitivities and powers, and incarnating the styles, perspectives, and attitudes of other linguistic agents—that is, learning with others, learning to be themselves with others—in all of their ‘adulting’ endeavors” (Di Paolo, Cuffari & Jaegher, 2018, p. 251).

In this trans-sensual experience of reading, I also try to take into account the various literacy skills of the book’s and artefact’s intended audiences. Technology is not separated from the social (as representation or device) (Papailias, 2016, p. 216), and therefore digital literacy does not refer to an isolated act of reading, but rather to a process that starts with access, eagerness, minimising stereotypes and fear, promoting connectivity and collaborations, participation in audiovisual production, and deconstructing preconceptions by active and perpetual experimentation. Recently, new reading rituals have emerged as strategies required to mitigate unequal access and to bridge the gap between print and online literature (Sanz & Goicoechea, 2012). The principle of entropy pushes digital texts to move at their own speed or time and the reader to exercise a rotation or reading around the space that the work occupies, making obsolete the reader’s habit of presupposing a linear structure for texts. Even on the level of academic discourse, distraction is acknowledged not as a problem for scholarly reading in the humanities but as a mechanism that facilitates knowledge creation in conversation with and between sources, “bringing together disparate times and places, authors and forms of source material, frames of reference and layers of insight, harnessing peripheral vision as much as central focus to create the conditions for serendipitous discovery” (Edmond, 2018).

In this vein, Lanham’s digital rhetoric (1989), which demolished the distinctions between high and popular culture, commercial and pure reviews, talented or contingent creation, visual or acoustic stimulus, virtual or alphabetical information, offers an important foundation for the present investigation. On the part of the writer, the stakes are high in forging a successful combination between theory and narration (Joyce, 1995) and aiming for temporal and emotional immersion and interactivity as the two main virtues of narrative as virtual reality (Ryan, 2001). There is also the issue of popularity of media when forecasting the engagement of users in academic/ autoethnographic findings. Alyssa Arbuckle (2014) notes the tensions between popularity and precision, ethics and economics when discussing the generation of new genres (as is the case of digital ethnography). The realm of public digital editions of literary works have indicated that well received texts have not always met the strict academic criteria of editing, annotation and production and vice versa: well-documented works have gone unnoticed by the general public. However, I am not convinced that academic reception or popularity ought to be the principal criteria for evaluating the anthropological merit of experimental writing tropes. Being embedded in a rigid and habitually slow-moving institutional nexus, the academia is—paradoxically—often the less equipped party for noticing and acknowledging disciplinary and epistemological change. More often than not, these shifts take place outside—or in the margins of—conventional academia and are incorporated as legitimate knowledge practices with considerable delay. As David Westbrook (2008) remarks: “[i]nstead of somehow ‘updating’ a model it no longer seriously espouses, ethnography for present situations operationalizes, makes practical and internal, what was once offered as a critical (meta-, external) insight: ethnography is a form of writing. As such, the difficulty of communicating something significant about the world provides more than enough discipline to make the enterprise rigorous, intellectually respectable, and to hold an institutional space within the university, that is, to constitute a discipline” (2008, p. 116). In this context, the new position of the reader today is placed between the traditional roles of author and reader (Bolter, 2006, p. 239), while at the same time pushing the cogs of disciplinary reshuffle.

On the structure of this thing

The autoethnographic study at hand records a period of eleven years, in the course of which the author has undergone various transitions in regard to her academic and private being. The types of material used for the poetic argumentation include a series of writing events which include academic texts, personal notes, photographs and hand-crafted artwork, digital spaces and sites, audio testimonies and songs as well as dreams, literary excerpts and other data accumulated in the process of autoethnographic observation. If placed side by side to my academic ‘CV’ the key themes that arise in poetry may also be found in titles of research projects and publications. Tempting as this juxtaposition may be, I find that this chronological ‘explanation’ is, in this context, made redundant. As already noted, the artefact adopts a phenomenological approach to the research and writing of ethnography and employs design anthropology, remix and fiction writing as extra-textual tropes of ethnographic narration. In doing so, it suggests that, in certain cases, when the collected stories are central to the ethnographic narration, digital multimodal poetry is preferable and indeed quite distinct to standard written text. The overall orientation of this experimental book aims at new audiences and the unconventional online readership of ethnography, facilitated by multilinearity, multivocality and multimodality. The hidden elements of theory that lie behind selected words of the poetic form are in accordance with the rapid transformations currently taking place in the digital humanities, where more and more ethnographers use digital media in planning, designing, analyzing, and presenting ethnographic work.

The succession of the chapters has been designed to serve the complementarity of the experiential realms that each chapter portrays, yet they remain somewhat distinct in their thematic focus. The first chapter, ‘At the beginning there was chaos. Then desire’, is a Foucauldian-inspired chapter that illustrates desire as integral to ethnographic scrutiny and the constitution of anthropological authorship (Foucault, 1998). It details “the shadow sides of fieldwork” (McLean & Leibing, 2008) and seeks to manifest how sexual and erotic energy often inform our relationships with subject matters and field interlocutors.

Chapter two, ‘Daddyland’, stems from the work of psychotherapists Irvin Yalom and Vangelis Pappas, as they have guided me through the belated knowledge of my father. It documents what it means—and feels like—to forge surrogate parents who come from the realm of theory and not from kinship.

The following chapter, ‘Take it like a woman’, is a marker of how one’s work is always and inescapably affected by the social construction and experience of gender. It draws on Judith Butler (1993) and other post-structuralist feminist theorists to document the variations of womanhoods as inextricably mediating all forms of text.

The fourth chapter, ‘Of daughters and other paradoxes’ comments on motherhood as a learning modality that is intertwined in ethnographic work, from the initial urge to ‘do research’, down to the methodologies and articulation mechanisms that deliver research findings. It places itself in dialogue with various daughters’ and mothers’ accounts, both literary and ethnographic, in order to illuminate the varied experiences of motherhood.

Chapter five, ‘Soft-edged fairytales’, delivers a more fictional take on relatedness and memory. It builds on anthropological work introduced by Janet Carsten (2000), Sara Ahmed (2013) and Amanda Coffey (1999) and subtly comments upon the fabricated character of self-narration, past appreciation and imagination.

The chapter entitled ‘Subvert me up’ is about subversive and subconscious experience as indicators of how fieldwork progresses. It could be classified as primordially Freudian (Thomas, 1990) with a touch of Malinowski (1989). Key texts and audiovisual data tie together its psychoanalytic and ethnographic stances; while chapter seven, ‘Mi útero es tu útero’, draws on recent autoethnographic accounts by Eric Teman (2019), John Freeman (2015), Carolyn Ellis (1999), and others. It springs from my recent work on surrogate motherhood and it details how research problematics become embodied, internalized, entirely personal before they end up being portrayed as anything else.

The works in the chapter ‘Foucault got it wrong (this is in fact a pipe)’ seek to engage the reader in a dialogue with the ontological and aesthetic questioning raised by Foucault and Magritte (Shapiro, 1997; Foucault, 2020) about the object and its simulacrum, advocating that the words are actually the very sign they symbolise, thus bearing similar effects on intellect and body (if the binary is to be at all sustained). In doing so, it expands the discussion/ exhibition to more contemporary concerns in anthropological representation and fictional writing.

‘Hormonal panic attacks’ revisits the ‘problem’ of age as pivotal in (auto)ethnography. This chapter sheds light on the consecutive and notably gendered ‘rites of passage’ that the anthropologist goes through and which go hand-in- hand with reflexive work on the research topics, hypotheses and methods. It builds on anthropological work on aging by Philip Kao (2020), Jason Danely (2017), Didier Fassin (2014), and Annette Leibing and Lawrence Cohen (Leibing & Cohen, 2006), among other thinkers.

The concluding chapter, ‘Death comes knocking’, lingers on the common denominator of anthropological and human experience, introspection and work. It offers examples of personal liminal points of physical and symbolic death as they have greatly informed the depth and breadth of social research (Engelke, 2019; Bille, Hastrup & Soerensen, 2010). Last but not least, a note on the muttering bodies in the title. This is the one point at which I wish to exert my authorship privilege; I have decided to leave the title unexplained. Just a tip: observe yourself while immersed in the artefact and its constitutive fragments and look for your own mutterings as they surface. Writing it felt like manually typesetting a queer palpitating text. Thanks for taking this leap with me.