How does defamiliarization relate to that which it assumes to be familiar? This chapter explores this question in the context of toxicity, an often invisible and imperceptible power, with the aid of two case studies from landscape art. Wout Berger’ s work Giflandschap (Poisoned Landscape, 1992) is exemplary of the ways in which defamiliarization has been a useful aesthetic strategy for artists to make toxicity’ s presence in the everyday tangible. But if toxicity (also outside artistic contexts) always has to be discovered or remembered anew, as Lawrence Buell (Toxic Discourse. Critical Inquiry 24(3): 639–665, 1998) already pointed out, how can we learn to live with toxicity and to understand its ongoing, pervasive presence? Can defamiliarization actually stay with the toxic trouble at hand (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)? Through a second case study, Alexandra Navratil’ s Silbersee (2015), this chapter explores the possibilities of getting intimate with toxicity instead. Ultimately, it suggests that in the context of toxicity, it can be generative to make the strange familiar again.
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Ethnographic fieldwork is a balancing act between distancing and immersing. Fieldworkers need to come close to meaningfully grasp the sense-making efforts of the researched. In methodological textbooks on ethnography, immersion tends to be emphasized at the expense of its counterpart. In fact, ‘distancing’ is often ignored as a central tenet of good ethnographic conduct. In this article we redirect attention away from familiarization and towards ‘defamiliarization’ by suggesting six estrangement strategies (three theoretical and three methodological) that allow the researcher to develop a more detached viewpoint from which to interpret data. We demonstrate the workings of these strategies by giving illustrations from Machteld de Jong’s field- and text-work, conducted among Moroccan-Dutch students in an institution of higher vocational education.
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Ethnographic fieldwork is a balancing act between distancing and immersing. Fieldworkers need to come close to meaningfully grasp the sense-making efforts of the researched. In methodological textbooks on ethnography, immersion tends to be emphasized at the expense of its counterpart. In fact, ‘distancing’ is often ignored as a central tenet of good ethnographic conduct. In this article we redirect attention away from familiarization and towards ‘defamiliarization’ by suggesting six estrangement strategies (three theoretical and three methodological) that allow the researcher to develop a more detached viewpoint from which to interpret data. We demonstrate the workings of these strategies by giving illustrations from Machteld de Jong’s field- and text-work, conducted among Moroccan-Dutch students in an institution of higher vocational education.
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