on 4 March 2025, Magdalena Nowicka and Piotr Goldstein will deliver a lecture entitled “On Forrest Curtains and Metal Walls: What to do when what we want to see is not visible?” at the Ethnopolgy and Cultural Anthropology Department of Warsaw University
Does Visual Ethnography Prove Effective in the Study of Hidden and Concealed Phenomena? During our presentation, we will share our experiences from field research conducted in Brandenburg and the Lubusz region as part of the project VISION: Envisioning Convivial Europe (2022–2025). The starting point of the VISION project is a critical reflection on the large-scale cross-border labour migration between Poland and Germany, as well as the pendular migration from Romania to Germany. These mobility patterns reflect persisting social inequalities in Europe and the challenges faced by the regions affected by such phenomena.
The aim of the project is both to render these issues visible and to identify potential solutions that would bring us closer to the vision of a convivial Europe, just for all its inhabitants. In the VISION project, we sought to strategically employ visual ethnography to offer a novel perspective on the regions under study and to describe everyday life and its challenges beyond what we perceive as the inadequate vocabulary of growth, crisis, or winners and losers.
However, during fieldwork, visual ethnography proved insufficient, as both the people and the issues we aimed to explore often remained invisible, concealed, or hidden. In our presentation, we will discuss these challenges as well as the sensory and multimodal ethnographic approaches we have adopted in response. In particular, we will examine the use of sound—both independently and in combination with visual materials and the narratives of Polish workers in Brandenburg.
Further information on the event (in Polish): https://etnologia.uw.edu.pl/o-lesnych-zaslonach