Karl Andersson

Anthropologist

PhD week 0: The pre-week

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Tomorrow is the official start of my PhD programme, so this week I have spent days and hours browsing the university’s website, trying to get some overview and structure.

  • I’ve set up my university email account and subscribed to various mailing lists.
  • I’ve scheduled a first meeting with my supervisors for next week.
  • I’ve connected the Orcid account I registered when submitting to my first journal a month ago (still “under review”) to the university library.
  • I found a mandatory course called Research integrity, which I’m taking online and am halfway through. It’s really interesting and important. I’m learning things that I think should be part of the basic education for all postgraduate students at all universities.
  • I’ve signed up for various seminars, mainly in October 2021.

My thoughts before I begin

I’m very confused. I don’t know what it will mean to be a PhD student. Should I sign up for courses? Where do I find them? What are the “training programmes” that it’s my responsibility to attend? Or will it from day one only be about reading a lot and doing my own research? These are the questions I need to ask my supervisors, and maybe the separately assigned advisor, which I guess I will be informed about.

Note: There will also be induction events next week. So things will get clearer. But I wanted to record my honest feelings at the moment.

Other stuff

On Tuesday I had Indonesian dinner at Mabuhay with M&B, and my friend O.

On Wednesday I visited my classmate and friend A and had my first yoga/breathing exercise/mantra chanting. And then we talked. Walked home, 7 km, just before the rain started pouring down.

On Thursday night I had a walk and dinner at Paolo Pinkel with A: We had delicious Bibimbap from their Korean kitchen (they have three kitchens, so we’re coming back). And then we also talked.

On Thursday and Friday I participated as a listener, and quite selectively, in the Enqa workshop 2021.

On Saturday I had my first insect burger with friends and neighbours at H/O’s place. Not too bad! I guess I’m now an ento-vegetarian. Earlier in the day I spontaneously ran a bit in the park where I usually walk:

And today I had a walk in the same park with my friend A. It was 16 degrees and chilly – I need to dress warmer when I’m not alone and can adjust the temperature by my walking pace.

In the mornings I watch Japanese news – it’s exciting now with the candidature to LDP leader – and in the evenings I’m watching Macross: Tonight will be episode 9. I like it very much.

PhD and university related

My Manchester News:

SALC Academic Advising Community:

  • Making the most of now and planning for the future

SALC PGR Handbook

Subject specific

ENQA Workshop 2021: Futures beyond Crises

16–17 September 2021.

Nothing of direct relevance to me but I like Enqa and it’s interesting to hear about various queer research projects. Although Zoom presentations are very hard for me to follow, as noted earlier. One block per day will have to suffice.

  • Keynote address: Omar Kasmani (Freie Universität Berlin)
  • Panel: Crises, refusals and insurgencies chaired by Tunay Altay
    • Suparna Roy: Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation: A Reflection on Indian Politics for a Future ‘Beyond Crisis’
    • Maya El Helou: In the verge of something, anything, Maybe nothing and maybe life or the lack of thereof: Queer and Feminist insurgencies in Urban Beirut
    • A. Berkem Yanıkcan: Queering the Administration Crisis at Boğaziçi University: Sexual Politics and the Public University in Turkey
    • Manuel Bolz: Queering Revenge: Medicalization and psychologization of emotions and affects of crisis

Articles

Video

Today I summarised my impressions of my favourite Japanese study book 真日本語 500問 N2.

Let the new adventure begin!

University campus

Return of the study diary

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It’s time to start up the study diary again! I wrote it every week during my two years at FU, where I studied for my MA degree in Visual and Media Anthropology. It helped me get on top of things and inspired me to read more.

I’ll start with a little summary of the summer 2021, sometimes going back a bit more.

Concussion

It’s been a hard summer for me, because I had a concussion on 1 May 2021 which took about three months to recover from. It was a violent bike crash – I have no memories from it, the next thing I remember is waking up at the hospital.

The hardest thing during recovery was that I had to abstain from all cognitive work, a nightmare of sorts. Finally being able to get back to reading, writing, watching, creating feels like getting my life back!

PhD studies

In one week I’ll start a PhD in Japanese Studies. This has been in the works for more than a year:

  • In February 2020 I met a scholar in my field at an event in Tokyo. We had coffee afterwards and realised we had similar research interests.
  • In September 2020, while finishing up my master’s thesis, I contacted her and asked if she would be interested in supervising my PhD studies. She said yes.
  • In November 2020, after having submitted my master’s thesis, I crafted a research proposal, which we perfected together over two months. This was a lot of work, but it paid off:
  • In January 2021 I applied, in April 2021 I was accepted, and in May 2021 I was awarded school funding for my PhD project.

And now in September 2021 it will finally start – I’m so excited!

(Top image by Citysuitesimages via Wikimedia, CC-BY 2.0.)

Conferences

Last year I got a taste for academic conferences after having attended EASA 2020 as a listener. Now I’ve started to attend conferences as a presenter, which seems to be the norm.

March 2021: RAI Film Festival and Conference (London)

Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

I had been invited by my MA supervisor to present my master’s thesis (or some aspects of my fieldwork) in a panel he convened.

June 2021: 15th SIEF congress (Helsinki)

International Society for Ethnology and Folklore

The theme of the conference was “Breaking the Rules: Power, Participation, Transgression”, which felt like a good fit for me and my film, which had been selected for the audiovisual programme.

  • Roundtable: Mediating Empowerment

Upcoming in November 2021: IUAES Yucatan congress (Mexico City)

International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences

Submissions

  • In November 2020 I submitted an abstract about West German gay magazines’ image of Arab men and boys in the 1970s to a theme issue of an academic journal. It was not accepted, but I got a very positive rejection email (not a good fit).
  • In February 2021 I submitted the same abstract for a roundtable at DGSKA-Tagung 2021 – it was also not accepted (the convenors found it interesting but it was not a good fit).
    • I refrained from submitting this abstract to another theme issue of a journal – because their website didn’t have an SSL certificate (https instead of http) and I find that unprofessional and decided to trust my intuition!
  • 15 May 2021 I submitted a chapter proposal for a book based on the RAI panel. Not all of us will be selected for the book, and my brain was mushy when I wrote it due to the concussion I had two weeks earlier, so we’ll see.
  • 30 June 2021 I submitted an abstract for a paper for the IUAES Yucatan congress, which was accepted (see above).
  • On 20 August 2021 I submitted my first full article for an academic journal. It was the West German gay magazines again, which is a semester paper that I had rewritten, something I had planned to do for a long time, but I think I was intimidated by the weight of academic publishing. I’m happy I finally got to it. Rewriting and fixing the reference style to that favoured by the journal.
  • And on 30 August 2021 I submitted my whole master’s thesis (essay and film) to a competition, which involved some formatting and anonymising work. Exciting!

Submitting is such a wonderful feeling, the best! (In that regard, I keep coming back to Kim Liao’s “Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year” – first read in January 2019. I don’t take it literally, but I like the attitude.)

Unreal Boys

Submitting my film to film festivals is another matter and mostly done through Filmfreeway. My film has been out for a year now, so I’ve got a good understanding of where it fits and not. It is obvious that regular film festivals are uninterested. Ethnographic film festivals, however, have loved Unreal Boys:

  • March 2021: Days of Ethnographic Film in Slovenia was my first selection. I participated in a Q&A (Youtube link) and watched all the films! A great experience throughout.
  • June 2021: SIEF, as detailed above.
  • June 2021: The selection by Kyiv Film Festival was a bit of a surprise. A regular film festival – and Unreal Boys won Best Director!

Coming up

  • November 2021: And I’m happy to reveal that Unreal Boys has been selected for the prestigious Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival 2021!

I’ve also heard from two quite fitting festivals that my film almost made the cut. Well, too bad for them!

I’ve given Unreal Boys what it deserves now, and I’m happy it has had success at exactly the kind of venues where I think it should be shown and discussed. That will be all I do with this film. Due to several factors I can’t publish it online, which is a pity.

I still think I want to make a trailer though. Unreal Boys deserves one.

Events

Thanks to Covid, events and courses started moving online and I could participate in a plethora of them, although not always so actively:

  • 20 & 27 November 2020: Queer Methodologies Graduate Symposium (The Irish Sexualities and Genders Research Network)
  • 8-10 April 2021: Transitions 9: New Directions in Comics Studies (Birkbeck, University of London)
  • 17-18 April 2021: Insideout: Goldsmiths Visual Anthropology MA 2019-20 (discussion)
  • 24-28 May 2021: Sexuality Summer School (University of Manchester) – had to abort due to the concussion still being so fresh
  • 8 July 2021: Pathways to reconnection (discussion) – my classmates’ online exhibition, open until June 2022
  • 20 July 2021: The Academic Chorus (Creative Arts Research Network)
  • 28-30 July 2021: Manga and Anime Days (Wacom)

Plus the Second Life Book Club often on Wednesday evenings, and once an extra event with Tom Boellstorff.

Coming up

  • 16-17 September 2021: ENQA workshop
  • 21 September 2021: The Academic Chorus?
  • 17-19 November 2021: Queer Autoethnography?

Japanese

Anki

I finished the Japanese Core 6000 in Anki from the hospital bed (not knowing better – I should just have rested!). I kept repping for a couple of weeks before I realised I had to take a complete break from Japanese to not threaten my recovery from the concussion (more than I already had by not knowing better). Instead, it became the summer of Swedish radio.

When I decided to get back in the saddle I had 3,000 or so reps waiting for me. I realised that I was so easily distracted that I needed a God’s eye watching over me if I would get through it. I’m a bit proud of what I came up with: For seven consecutive early mornings I livestreamed myself doing Anki for about 2,5 hours each day. It worked! The potential global audience of Youtube became my God’s eye. Here is the 15-hour (!) playlist:

As a tech guy I enjoyed getting the streaming set-up right. It was learning by doing, so the first sessions are not technically perfect – but that was also not the point!

Kanji

During August 2021 I’ve also got on top of the jōyō kanji list again, that is, I have repped the 2,200 meanings in Heisig’s Remember the Kanji, and for this I use Flashcards Deluxe on my Ipad while writing the kanji on a paper, as shown in the one kanji writing livestream I did:

This is not distracting at all. In fact, it’s one of my favourite pastimes and I’m excited to learn more kanji – but first I must get on top of the readings (not just the meanings).

Manga

One of the few things I could do while recovering from the concussion was to read shōjo manga, so I finished the whole series of Kokoro Button:

Anime

Not much watched during my recovery. I finished Wataru, watched some more Granzort, and just this week started the legendary space adventure Macross from 1982.

Japanese Language-Proficiency Test

Today I registered for JLPT N2 which takes place on 5 December 2021 – it was cancelled at my venue last year.

Research

I’ve recently come into contact with a group of new research participants whom I have corresponded quite intensely with. They are providing new perspectives to my research, and that makes me very excited.

In May 2021 I purchased Atlas.ti for qualitative data analysis, but realised I was not fit to work with it since I was too fragile still after the concussion.

It’s a challenge to find a way to consolidate and store research participant data in a secure way. I’m still in the process of creating some kind of structure that lets me be on top of things.

Articles

Just some random articles that I’ve read:

On Franziska Giffey’s withdrawn doctoral dissertation, a trope in German politics:

Films (Varda)

I’m keeping track on Letterboxd now, but I think Agnès Varda deserves a mention as a new discovery (thanks to my Editing Forum teacher):

  • Black Panthers (1968)
  • Women Reply (1975)
  • Daguerreotypes (1975)
  • Mur Murs (1981)
  • Documenteur (1981)
  • Kung-Fu Master! (1988)
  • The Gleaners and I (2000)
  • The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002)
  • Varda by Agnès (2019)

Books

Worth mentioning is Writing Culture by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (editors) from 1986, the book that defined the “crisis of representation” in anthropology. I recorded summaries for each chapter and put them into a playlist:

  • I recently read Cal Newport’s self-help book Deep Work, which made deep impact – I did a video.
  • Angela Duckworth’s Grit is also helping – I’m halfway through.
  • Georges Bataille’s Eroticism is a hassle to get through but highly relevant to my research.

Life

It’s been a strange period in my life, both the concussion and other private matters.

I’ve got my two vaccine shots, visited an optician to get new glasses, and started to meet some people. Yesterday I met my classmates at Südblock to celebrate that they have now all submitted their master’s thesis, after almost a year of Covid extensions.

As I’m getting back into life, after not having been fully myself, I hope things will become good.

Unreal Boys discussed at SIEF 2021

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My film Unreal Boys was selected for the audio-visual programme of the 15th congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore “in” Helsinki (online) in June 2021. The theme of the congress was “breaking the rules”, which sort of aligns with the theme of my research.

After the screening I participated in a roundtable discussion called Mediating Empowerment, a title that I think captures quite well how my research participants use the “medium” of comics to empower themselves.

Here is the recording of my part of the roundtable (shared by the organisers with a Creative Commons license):

What I watched at RAI Film Festival 2021

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The film festival and conference of the Royal Anthropological Institute in the UK just ended. I was invited to present my master’s thesis in the panel Empirical Art, but my film was not part of the programme. So for the past ten days I watched loads of films, some talks, and also participated in a few discussions. I’m exhausted and inspired!

Main competition

  • One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (2019), 1h 53m – Canada
  • Ayouni (2020), 1h 15m – Syria
  • A Colombian Family (2020), 1h 20m – Colombia
  • Half Elf (2020), 1h 4m – Iceland
  • Oyate (2019), 1h 12m – USA
  • Persistence (2019), 54 min – Mexico
  • Survivors (2018), 1h 24m – Sierra Leone
  • The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019), 1h 27m – China

Already watched The Body Won’t Close (2020), 1h 14m – Brazil. Skipped the remaining five films.

Werbner Award

  • Broken Gods (2019), 42 min – India
  • Suspension (2019), 1h 13m – Colombia

Already watched A New Era (2019), 1h 11m – China. Skipped the remaining five films.

Shorts

Shorts 01 – Creative lives

  • Making Worlds Otherwise | 2020 | 28 min – Australia
  • (The Daring Young Girl on the Flying Trapeze | 2020 | 27 min – UK – already watched)
  • Nobody’s Metaphor | 2020 | 30 min – UK
  • IntranQu’îllités | 2019 | 20 min – Haiti

Shorts 03 – Pleasure

  • Come Here Come Here | 2019 | 28 min – UK/Netherlands
  • (Motels | 2020 | 27 min – Colombia – already watched)
  • Oink! | 2020 | 22 min – UK/Germany

Shorts 05 – Migration at the crossroads 2

  • Skrana | 2019 | 13 min – USA
  • Unwritten Letters | 2020 | 59 min – Italy/Syria

Shorts 06 – Animals | Humans | Ritual

  • Lives and Deaths Between Ebbs and Flows | 2019 | 14 min – Taiwan
  • Tajen | 2017 | 30 min – Indonesia (West Bali)
  • (Okinami | 2019 | 24 min – Japan – already watched)
  • Wild Honey: Caring for bees in a divided land | 2019 | 30 min – Indonesia (Timor)

Shorts 10 – Environmental crisis

  • Mountain of Trash | 2020 | 20 min – Thailand
  • The People Next to Coal Power Plant | 2019 | 23 min – South Korea
  • Don’t Let the sunny weather fool you | 2019 | 27 min – Philippines

Global Racialisations shorts

  • The Changing Same | 2018 | 22 min – USA
  • (Emails to My Little Sister | 2018 | 35 min – Germany/Ethiopia – already watched)
  • Cry Out Loud | 2019 | 43 min – India

Decolonising the Archive

  • VHS Diaries (2020), 1h 12m – Iran

Decolonising the Archive shorts

  • A New England Document | 2020 | 16 min – USA (Namibia)
  • New York Just Another City | 2019 | 18 min – USA (Brazil)
  • Faces Voices | 2019 | 18 min – USA (Nigeria, Sierra Leone)
  • Sight Unseen | 2019 | 20 min – Italy/Libya
  • This Is A Majlis: A Sound Essay | 2020 | 17 min – Pakistan

Talks

  • Global racialisations – Q&A with directors
  • The Visual Scholarship Initiative Emory University
  • Interview with André Singer
  • Filmmaking for Fieldwork
  • Honouring Professor Marcus Banks

Panels

  • P12a – Immersive Ethnography, 1h 1m
  • P21 – Crisis through comics: a roundtable discussion on graphic anthropology, 25 min
  • P26a – Empirical art, 54 min
  • P26b – Empirical art, 1h 12m
  • P26c – Empirical art, 60 min
  • P26d – Empirical art, 50 min

Bonus

In the middle of the festival I attended a very interesting seminar on dōjinshi culture at the University of Vienna:

  • u:japan lectures: Transcultural Potentials of dōjinshi Culture

Despite the screen fatigue, I must say that it’s so nice that important events like the RAI conference (and previously EASA and later SIEF) and the Japan lecture go online, so that more people can participate. I think we’ll have to rethink what a conference presentation and discussion should be like, though. Some of them were so hard to follow – they need to be shorter and clearer when online, in my opinion.

Memories of Days of Ethnographic Film 2021

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I went all in and watched all the films at DEF 2021. Except the two I had already seen (The Chateau and A New Era), and my own film Unreal Boys of course. So 17 films in total:

I was touched the most by The Daring Young Girl on the Flying Trapeze, a sensitive film about a woman with muscular dystrophy, who in a way frees herself through her art. She regretted some choices she had made earlier in life because she didn’t think she would live past 20. Now she’s 65. I think I will always remember these moments.

My favourite was probably Flox, which put me right in the middle of the chaos of a minibus station in Cairo.

China in Ethiopia was interesting and gave me a detailed view, from a Chinese perspective, of a larger development in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa. Tobacco Memories and Zagros also captured larger systems by showing us otherwise unseen parts of the production and manufacturing of tobacco and carpets in Bulgaria and Iran respectively. Likewise, The Days After was ostensibly about alternative farming in France, but captured so much more in terms of suspicion of what diverges from the normal.

To Save a Language surprised in becoming a portrait of a passionate linguist. And I loved the mixture of art and anthropology in The Fantastic – fantastic visuals!

All in all an interesting and inspiring mix of films. I think my film fit well in that it “brought us some variety” (as the organiser said) and showed how one can research a sensitive topic.

The organisers were kind to send us the Q&A’s for our personal use, so here is mine:

Unreal Boys film

Watch my film at Days of Ethnographic Film 2021

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My graduation film Unreal Boys will be shown at the film festival Days of Ethnographic Film in Ljubljana – but online this year.

This means you can watch it and a bunch of other interesting films – at home and for free! There will also be a prerecorded Q&A with the filmmakers, including myself.

The films will be available from 3 to 6 March 2021. You need to register, and a password will be sent to you the day before the festival. Just follow the instructions here:

This is my first film festival and I can’t stress enough how proud I am to be featured! I’m so happy for everyone involved: Solomon, Andy, and my brave protagonists. Kudos to DEF for their fierce selection – I wish we could be there in person!