Conference

Doing Documentary Work: Life, Letters, and the Field
March 4-6, 2004

A Workshop and Conference sponsored by the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life in association with DoubleTake magazine

documentary conference poster Events are free and public. See schedule below. Sessions are being held at Shaman Drum Bookshop, 313 South State St, Ann Arbor and at the Michigan League, 911 North University Ave, University of Michigan Campus

The conference involves an international group of writers, documentarians, and social scientists focusing on the intersection of social science and literary approaches to documenting everyday life.

Participants include the well-known author, Jonathan Raban (living in Seattle - author of Bad Land: An American Romance and the more recent novel, Waxwings). Thomas Lynch, our Milford undertaker, poet, and author will also be involved, as well as well-known University of Michigan writers such as Ruth Behar (Anthropology), Eileen Pollack (English Language & Literature), and Earl Lewis (History & Dean of U-M's Rackham Graduate School).

Sponsors

The Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, founded with a grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 1998, is devoted to encouraging research and writing on everyday work and family life in the United States. Our faculty and fellows look beyond the abstractions of social science to explore people's stories, the emotional worlds of disappointment and uncertainty, and the brave coping of everyday life in which individual Americans reconcile their sense of how things should be with how they are. We see ourselves as exploring working lives in a tradition where ethnography and documentary come together. Toward these ends, center researchers can be found wherever life is lived - in schools, offices, factories, farms, small towns, suburbs, and urban neighborhoods - observing, recording, and documenting.

DoubleTake Magazine, founded by Robert Coles, is that spectacular journal that has published important essays, fiction, poetry, and photography in the documentary tradition since 1995. It is an entirely unique magazine that brings together the whole spectrum of documentary work. DoubleTake's unifying and courageous vision resists the fragmentation of the contemporary world by insisting that diverse human expression is underlain by a common field of virtue. It is a moral vision that argues for an understanding of others in the willingness to transform ourselves. DoubleTake's jargon-free accessibility and fine writing are themselves a rare illustration of the larger vision that we're all in this together.

Participants

Kelly Askew (UM, Anthropology)
Mark Auslander (Brandeis University, Anthropology)
Ruth Behar (UM, Anthropology)
Michael Coles (DoubleTake Magazine, Documentary Photographer)
Gillian Feeley-Harnik (UM, Anthropology)
Tom Fricke (UM, Anthropology - co-organizer)
Douglas Harper (Duquesne University, Sociology)
Kirk Kicklighter (DoubleTake Magazine, Executive Editor)
Earl Lewis (UM, Dean of Rackham Graduate School & Professor of History)
Thomas Lynch (Milford, Michigan; poet, author, undertaker)
R. Jay Magill (DoubleTake Magazine, Executive Editor)
Eileen Pollack (UM, English Language and Literature)
Jonathan Raban (Seattle, author)
Leslie Stainton (UM, School of Public Health, biographer)
Keith Taylor (UM, English Languages and Literature - co-organizer)
Alford Young, Jr. (UM, Sociology & Center for Afroamerican and African Studies)

Schedule

The following schedule is subject to change, so check back here frequently.

Thursday, March 4, 2004
1:00: MFA Program Roundtable with students and editors from DoubleTake Magazine, Hopwood Room, 1176 Angell Hall
8:00: Book Party/Reception (Shaman Drum Bookshop, 315 South State St.)

Friday, March 5, 2004
9:00-10:30: DoubleTake and Documentary (Michael Coles, Tom Fricke, Kirk Kicklighter, R. Jay Magill,)
11:30-1:00: The Field: Ethnography and Documentary Imagination (Kelly Askew, Mark Auslander, Ruth Behar, Doug Harper, Alford Young, Jr.)
1:00-2:30: Lunch
2:30-4:00: Life and the Literary Imagination (Tom Fricke, Jonathan Raban)

Saturday, March 6, 2004
9:30-11:00: Letters: Literary Documentary and Documentary Imagination (Tom Lynch, Eileen Pollack, Leslie Stainton, Keith Taylor)
12:00- ?:A Historian Reflects (Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Earl Lewis)
1:00 Lunch

Background

The workshop conference, "Doing Documentary Work: Life, Letters, and the Field," grows out of the vision shared by CEEL and DoubleTake. We think of the conference as a jointly sponsored enterprise. Letters, phone calls, and visits leading to friendship got us to talking about a workshop involving the magazine staff and people at the center. As our plans developed, we realized that it would be more exciting and more in keeping with our ethos to include as diverse a group as possible given the short time and resources.

Our conference inspiration and name come from Bob Cole's book, Doing Documentary Work, itself based on a series of lectures he gave to the New York Public Library. The book is an inclusive tour of the documentary imagination in the spirit of William Carlos Williams. "No ideas but in things," wrote Williams. By extension, Bob argues for an imagination rooted in the concrete experience of real people. He discusses the range of documentary inquiry from its early expression in such works as Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, through the writing, photography, and film of people like James Agee, Erskine Caldwell, Walker Evans, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothea Lange, Williams himself, and many others. He discusses the "moral and psychological tensions" that come with working with real people and the creative impulse of fiction tethered to fact.

Our conference is devoted to these layered elements of the documentary imagination. We have participants from literary and academic worlds whose work crosses the boundaries of photography, film, fiction, ethnography, and documentary literature. The participants are interdisciplinary and the emphasis is on informality & conversation across genres & approaches. We think of the general tone as approaching that of a series of informal craft sessions in which people talk about their personal experience of some documentary venture they are involved in --documentary is writ very broadly here to include the literary, the ethnographic, and the reflective. We will be discussing a range of themes that center on how the documentary imagination may or may not be a common element across disciplines and practices. Most of us agree that our writing, photography, and film ventures all "mess around" with our experience and depictions of everyday lives to greater or lesser extents. This agreement forms a basis for some of the things we'll be talking about in our conference. Are there degrees of messing around that cause the documentary & concrete to be vanishingly small elements of a work? What's the connection between the messing around and the disposition of the writer him or herself? How do the documents we find relate to the documents we create? How are these, in their turn related to the lives of the people we engage in our work?

Supporting Sponsors

College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts
Department of Anthropology
Department of English Language and Literature
Department of History
Department of Sociology
Institute for the Humanities
Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing
Modern Greek Program
Office of the President
Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Program in the Environment
Rackham School of Graduate Studies
Shaman Drum Bookshop