Etnography of empowerment in Europe and America: designing the future with communities

Abstract

In this article we propose integrate experiences in research and intervention at the confluence between digital and material approaches on stage in Europe-Spain and Latin American countries-Ecuador. As for digital, we present a balance of the processes of receiving a series of ethnographic documentaries with communities to transform the social reality in a model that we have been called ethnographies of empowerment (Martinez and Camas, 2014, Camas and Martinez 2015; Trueba and Delgado, 1991). This embodiment of ethnographic documentaries from participatory research (Pereda and Prada, 2014) has been allowing us to establish learning communities (Elboj, 2002) and local knowledge or communities of practice (Betancourt, Mertens and Parra, 2016) in the currently in Ecuadorian society. At the end of the previous material we bring reflection on contemporary social movements in Spain to apply what they learned in the School of qualitative sociology of Madrid in order to generate a critical and reflective perspective of social sciences in Latin America. Our proposal involves the creation of audiovisual productions, the generation and dissemination of knowledge in Mode 3 (Acosta and Carreno, 2013), the answer to the forms of power through participation and horizontality and eventually allow the change from a form of research and social intervention focused on the design of future communities. We propose an epistemological reflection for an anthropological knowledge from an ethnography focused on the future designed and planned by people, and not only with academia. We return to this idea of a new way of doing ethnography as a commitment to the future which would be an applied one, as shown in the documentary we made in 2002, The rhythm of our dreams and in 2014, Acolítame Ñanon, the first in Cordoba, Spain, the second in Cayambe, Ecuador. All this interweaving takes a turn in the days that follow the disastrous earthquake in Ecuador's coast on April 16, 2016 when this text was being drafted. The analysis of how we are reviewing our way of designing the future with communities from community mental health (Cohen, 2009) since that day is in these pages.