KIRIWINA
Applied Ethnography and Transmedia Narratives_
Kiriwina is a project grounded in ethnographic research and visual anthropology, aimed at exploring ways of life, social processes and contemporary challenges in both local and global contexts.
The project combines documentation and social analysis to transform research into visual outputs and transmedia narratives that are accessible, rigorous and socially relevant, with particular attention to how knowledge is produced and shared.
From a situated anthropological perspective, Kiriwina brings visibility to often overlooked experiences and questions dominant narratives, creating spaces for dialogue between research, culture and society. Through its research and collaborative projects, it engages with issues such as social inequalities, migration, borders, global health, socio-environmental relations and human rights.
Kiriwina is oriented towards the social return of knowledge and cultural impact, working from a global justice perspective while developing projects in collaboration with social, cultural and educational organisations. From this standpoint, it is committed to more collaborative, responsible and context-grounded forms of research, with the aim of fostering more informed, critical and inclusive perspectives
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust
Choosing the name Kiriwina —an island in Papua New Guinea— is a way of engaging with the origins of ethnographic fieldwork, often associated with the work of Bronisław Malinowski in the early twentieth century. We take this reference consciously, aware of the role it has played in shaping anthropology as a discipline, but also of the power relations and asymmetrical historical conditions that made that knowledge possible
Rather than approaching ethnography as a neutral or detached practice, we understand it as something always situated, shaped by relations of race, class, gender and inequality. From this perspective, fieldwork cannot be reduced to observation or extraction, but involves forms of engagement that are relational, accountable and open to more horizontal ways of producing knowledge.
Kiriwina, then, is both a reference and a repositioning. It keeps us in dialogue with the history of the discipline while pushing us to work differently: towards forms of ethnography that are collaborative, reflexive and grounded in the contexts where they take place.
