A post from Frances Howard and Becky Coles.

When attending conferences – the Journal of Youth Studies conference, the BERA conference, the Oxford Ethnography conference, for example – a usual starting point is to trawl through the programme looking for the ‘Arts’ presentations. A second reading looks out for research projects with creative and engaging methods, whilst putting a ring around both. Usually there are not many. Seeing them fills a quarter of the time at best.

However, at the ETHNOARTS conference – University of Porto, 22-23 June 2017 – every presentation could have been highlighted. Ethnographic Explorations of the Arts and Education was the full conference title and it’s programme included presentations of ethnographic research into theatre, urban art, dance, music, museum education and community engagement. It also included methodological presentations such as those that blended ethnography and learning, visual ethnography and ethnography using mobile technologies.

The keynote speech, Critical Arts-based Research: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Due, was given by Carl Bagley and considered together contemporary arts based research with undocumented students in the US and the work of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943). It stimulated discussion about ‘ethnoarts’ as a hybrid space between ethnography and art practice and as a space that must be politicised and activist. ‘Ethnoarts can resonate with audiences beyond the Academy’, Bagley argued.

Pat Thomson, alongside Alice Walton from Tate, gave a presentation about the Teacher’s Summer School programme titled Learning with the Art Museum: Experiments in talking/writing ethnography. We considered how teachers access artist experience as we moulded the playdough given out. This was followed by a presentation about the Serpentine Gallery’s ‘Changing Play?’ work to reconsider play and early years education.

We presented a paper on informal film-making education which explored the effects of austerity. We argued that filmmaking education survives in ever lesser funding streams by being innovative and flexible and drawing on the resources of young people’s ‘bedroom’ practices and artists’ workplaces. In doing so it enacts an ‘enterprising’ way of being and imports ‘enterprising’ ways of thinking and doing from these other domains.

These were only a few of the arts and ethnographic presentations given at the ETHNOARTS conference. If you are interested in reading more, watch out for the special issue of the Ethnography & Education Journal Ethnographic Explorations of the Arts and Education, which will be published in 2018.