Welcome to Ethnofictions, a public scholarship site featuring multi-modal pedagogies and sample works by students in Anthropology, Culture & Politics, WGSS, and Film Courses.
Hello! I’m Mariangela Mihai, an anthropologist and filmmaker. This is a public scholarship site on feminist and queer pedagogies, anthropological methods, and the collaborative multi-media and experimental filmmaking I explore with students in my courses and workshops. I hope to connect with other experimental pedagogues. I hope too that the multi-media work my students produce and publicly share will inspire teachers and students alike to seek out and tell stories with playful and poetic twists. More about my own research, transmedia storytelling, and filmmaking praxis, here.
Freedom and happiness are the core tenets of my teaching praxis and I encourage my students to confidently follow the thread of their own passions. Sometimes, they collaborate with each other, sometimes with family and friends, sometimes with me, sometimes with strangers. Together, we explore the ethics of collaboration, of feminist media praxis, and the overall politics of knowledge production and dissemination.
Through an anthropological lens that brings together transnational feminist and queer theories, I encourage students to produce interdisciplinary and multimodal research. Wether they produce written or visual ethnographies, oral history projects, or experimental sensory montages, I invite the students to unlock the potential that ethnographically informed multimodal media holds for both academic research and public scholarship.
Beyond classic ethnographic work, I train students in making experimental films and multi-media work informed by feminist collaborative practices. I find that ethnofiction, a writing and filmmaking methodology that weds anthropological research with fictional representation, is a powerful and productive methodological tool that frees my students from the constraints public scholarship entails, allowing them to produce work on otherwise risky topics. Depending on the course, I guide my students through the production of classic anthropological research as well as experimental films, E-Zines, graphic novels, short fiction, autoethnographies, antropoetry, audio documentaries, photo essays, podcasts, and more.