The conference presentation I have chosen to review is a talk given by a doctoral candidate from the University of Copenhagen, Trine Mygind Korsby, at a 2011 conference of the Society for Cultural Anthropology in Romania. The title of this talk was “Bodies, Categories, and Ambivalence: Fieldwork with Romanian Victims of Trafficking,” and it was given at a conference centering on material culture in anthropology. Korsby spoke about fieldwork she had completed with young women who had been trafficked from Romania to Italy, discussing various social relationships that shaped the lives of these women following their trafficking experiences. I found a recorded version of this presentation in a random online search, and was drawn in by the subject matter. The talk proved to be interesting, well delivered, and concise.
I enjoyed listening to this presentation, and found myself liking the presentation style although it is very different than the type of talk given at most of the conferences I have attended. The presenter uses no visual aids, forcing the audience to focus on her words. While it may have been possible to design visual materials to add to this presentation, I think they also may have ben distracting to the audience particularly during the relation of narrative episodes. While Korsby has quite a strong accent, she speaks clearly and at a good pace. Her voice is animated while remaining consistent. Since the talk is mainly read from a script, there is not much body movement apart from relatively frequent eye contact with the audience. While I think that the presenter could have engaged more with the audience, I do recognize that the incorporation of anecdotes from her field research that are so rich in detail would be very difficult to relay accurately if not previously written out.
The fieldwork that Korsby uses as the basis for her talk is preliminary work with contacts for her upcoming doctoral research. Examples of different types of social relations important to these young women, such as with their families and friends back home and with their traffickers, are used to illustrate the concepts of ambivalence, detachment, and distance. The presenter makes excellent use of anecdotes from her fieldwork, primarily focusing on the experiences of one young woman. Descriptions of interactions with “Amelia,” illustrating her relationships with her mother and childhood friends as well as her relationship with her traffickers throughout and after her ordeal, alternate with a discussion of how these types of relationships affect and are affected by the lives of the young women living in the shelter. Each anecdote is used to illustrate a concisely explained point about how these interactions shape and are shaped by the experiences of these women. In this way, anecdotal narrative and theoretical discussion are smoothly incorporated. The presentation progresses logically and flows well, and Ms. Korsby’s conclusions are introduced broadly at the beginning of the talk and then built more specifically throughout using well chosen examples to illustrate her points.
In this presentation, Korsby focuses on points of contrast within social relations: presence and absence, fear and trust, detachment and dependency. She argues, ultimately and very poignantly, that despite and perhaps because of absences both physical and emotional, family members and traffickers are extremely present in these young women’s lives and shape their experiences in terms of actions, possibilities, and agency. The presenter also focuses on contrast in terms of the established categories of victims and traffickers, which in the minds of most are well-defined in terms of which is good and which is evil. However, she also describes two of her contacts that are young women who were trafficked in the same way as the others, but who left the shelter and became traffickers themselves. In this way, Ms. Korsby questions the rigidity of these categories and the absolute contrast between them.
This work is presented as preliminary to Korsby’s doctoral research, and as such there are several questions that were mentioned only in terms of her future plans to expand her discussion on these points based on future fieldwork. Mentioning the direction in which she plans to take her research allowed the presenter to extend the implications of her research beyond this presentation alone. Having contacts on “both sides” of the story, those who are victims and/or perpetrators of trafficking, Korsby is uniquely positioned to examine the relationship between these categories. In this presentation, she clearly demonstrates the importance of social relationships characterized by both presence and absence in shaping the experiences of young women involved in human trafficking, and outlines the ways in which she hopes to contribute further to these dialogues with the research she will complete in her dissertation. The talk succeeded in drawing me in and getting me interested in the young women Korsby studies, and ultimately left me wondering what her further research will show.
Hello Laura!
Thanks for sharing – it definitely does sound like an interesting presentation! I find that a lot of presentations that involve narratives require exact script reading and have far less visual aids in order to focus the audiences attention. Do you think that this style is appropriate for all forms of anthropological presentations? Are there some you think this style wouldn’t suit? Is there anything that you would have wanted more out of this presentation? Thanks again for sharing!
Hi Kat,
Thanks for your feedback! I think that this style of presentation is more appropriate for talks like this one in which the presenter relates narrative episodes. I think that this type of data is more difficult to present visually, and that having visual aids during the relation of the narrative is often distracting. Visual aids may have been appropriate during the other sections of the talk, but I think that similar to the first job talk we saw, there is difficulty in deciding what to do with the screen when the attention should be drawn back to the presenter’s words. I don’t think this style would necessarily suit the presentation of other forms of data, where visual depictions of skeletal features or artifacts may be important for the audience to understand the points being made. I don’t think that there was necessarily anything that I wanted more of in this talk. Many of the questions I was left with were aspects of the subject that she plans to address in further research.
Hi Laura!
Thanks for sharing such an interesting talk. I agree that it was very well done. The presentation I discuss in my blog also didn’t use powerpoint and the author seems to only use it very sparingly in other presentations. You mention this is uncommon at the conferences you have attended but could this be a useful way to go? Maybe not without but minimal use? I think Kat already mentioned this but I was also curious if there was anything you didn’t like or thought could have been improved in the talk?
Hi Annabelle,
Thank you for your comments! As I mentioned in my response to Kat’s comment above, I think that this style of presentation is more well suited to the presentation of qualitative data from interviews or participant observation. I think that it could be used well in physical anthropology, but not for all presentations – many talks rely on the audience being able to see the lesions being discussed, or other representations of the data in question. I think that you mentioned in your blog post as well that you thought the presenter may have used a chart or other form of visual representation if he had been presenting original data. For presentations that use narrative episodes as their examples to show their points or that discuss broader concepts, this presentation style could likely be useful.
There was nothing that I really disliked about the talk. I did think that some of the anecdotes, especially the few used early on in the presentation, were overly detailed. Providing this amount of detail was a bit overwhelming rather than just serving to set the scene. I understand that the presenter wanted to immerse the audience in the episode she was describing, but she likely could have accomplished this with slightly less detailed descriptions. As well, although I recognize that the script was necessary for accuracy in relating her anecdotes, I think that she could have made more eye contact and engaged more often with the audience.
Hi Laura, great post!
The decision to not use any visual aids for this presentation is great, and suits the content well (as was discussed in the other comments). However, I noticed that in the background the projector is still turned on. Based on my own experiences this is very distracting. When everyone is facing towards the front of a lecture hall, and the audience has only one place to look (at the speaker), this may make the viewers feel uncomfortable or restricted, and their minds may begin to wander. I’m wondering if a different layout, such as a seminar circle, would be better suited for non-visual presentations. What are your thoughts on this?
Hi Zack,
Thanks for your comments! I noticed this as well, and assumed that it was only because others in the session were using visual aids. You have made a great point though, and I think that at the very least having the screen switched off for this presentation may have reduced the level of distraction. I think that using a different layout like a seminar circle or other arrangement might serve to increase engagement with the speaker, but I don’t know that this would be feasible for a large conference with many attendees.
Hi Laura,
Nice way to mix it up a bit with a topic outside of your field. It’s also nice that you’ve got someone, more or less, at the same professional level. Several of you might be able to imagine giving a very similar kind of talk.
I often wonder whether we get a bit formulaic in our sub-disciplinary presentation style. I wonder if we could see the sub-disciplines that rely heavily on visuals cut down on them – say only two or three key visuals in a talk – to force a stronger narrative style…and those that rarely use visuals try to be see what these cues may do for us.
I want to talk a little bit about powerpoint and the use of visuals in class tomorrow, but I’m curious as to whether anyone can identify particularly strong visual elements in the talks they looked at (or other talks they have seen)…perhaps unexpected images, ones that pushed the narrative in useful directions?