This workshop will highlight the role of (audio-) visual and participatory arts works in the development of representations that move away from the fixity and/or Othering of identities. Our aim is to explore worlds of difference through the intersectional lens of race-ethnicity-sexuality-ability-class complexes. In the process, we revisit the classic anthropological task “to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange" and query representational boundaries - between subjects, spaces and relations. Moving beyond depiction, we pose wider questions about the representation of life-worlds and the politics and ethics of visual ethnography.

In a series of case-studies, we will move from the intimate and ambivalent life-worlds of people who negotiate difference on an everyday basis, to the memories and actualities of forced displacement, to campaigns for equity and social justice. Traction between scales of focus in these terms opens questions about the effects, affects and potentials of visual ethnographic knowledge. The case studies will be drawn from:

• social changes and continuities in the lives of people of transgender and same-sex desiring experience in Nepal (Paul Boyce and Daniel Coyle)

• the family within the space of gender transitions in Cuba (Olga Lidia Saavedra Montes de Oca)

• re-appraising the visual with respect to an ethnography of people with impaired vision (Karis Petty)

• India-Pakistan partition memories among the diaspora (Raminder Kaur)

• graphic narratives in the anthropological representation of human rights issues (Matthew Clark)

• the video camera as a participatory action learning tool to explore questions of water and health in Nepal (Sian Aggett)

• the impact of globalisation through a focus on Black Friday and consumer habits in Brighton (Genna Print, Ayla Reeve, Esme Soiza, Jack French, Alison Valley)