EMERGE (formerly known as Infrastructures of Ethnography) is a SHRCC-funded partnership of five ethnography labs now in its second year. The project's five members are the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab (CE2 Lab) at the University of British Columbia Okanagan; The Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE) at the University of Pennsylvania; The Ethnography Studio at the University of Southern California; The Ethnography Lab at the University of Toronto and our own Concordia Ethnography Lab. This project set out to create a space to generate new methods in ethnographic research and connect graduate students with faculty across all five research spaces. While each lab will conduct its research, the idea is to find creative ways for collaboration between disparate groups and localities.

In undertaking this project, we looked forward to more than making connections between (dis)similar spaces; our main intention was to explore further what it means to do ethnography in the 21st century. This is a moment in which many ethnographers are occupied trying to understand complex material assemblages, distributed agencies, and political histories of the infrastructures that shape our contemporary world while using tools developed to examine the small, the sedentary, and the intimate. We are particularly interested in engaging with the current context in which multimodal ethnography is birthing alternative ways of knowing, collaborating, and disseminating research and in which publishing venues and universities need to be more attuned to how multimodal ethnographers and ethnography labs produce knowledge. To respond to those challenges, we are currently developing ethnographic protocols and educational tools that inspire and guide others to share data and methods and find alternative ways of disseminating ethnographic work.