Aina Landsverk Hagen

The Magic Trick of Creative Capital: Competition, Confidence, and Collective Enchantment Among “Starchitects”

Hagen offers a rare insight into the world of architects competing in the global elite, while also struggling to uphold their ideology of collaborative creativity. Focusing on the Norwegian-based company Snohetta, the chapter draws attention to collective enchantment, professional confidence, and material agency through empirical sound bites of “digital experts” interacting with 3D software and miniature models, and repeated performances, rites, and formulas of senior “garden magicians’” for securing the creative capital of the company. In simultaneously winning prestigious competitions, while not making “too much” profit, these architects appear to be overcoming the contradictions of art and commercialism, turning it into a magical capitalism.

Visual Inquiry: Exploring Embodied Organizational Practices by Collaborative Film-Elicitation

Analysis of visual data is underdeveloped in visual research, and this article gives a methodological contribution on how to perform collaborative video research on organizational practices, combining ethnographic methods and intervention through film-elicitation. We provide guidance for how to (a) collect ethnographic data with (and without) camera, (b) make preparations for film-elicitation, and (c) facilitate collaborative sensemaking with participants. Building on an enactive approach, we argue that film-elicitation based on a preliminary visual analysis and categorization conducted by researchers reenacts the immediacy and vitality of lived experience. This is done through enabling organizational members to create communicative constructs of the culturally embedded, inarticulate, and embodied aspects of social conduct. As such, we argue that video research is a powerful means for process-oriented theories concerned with capturing the multiplicity of organizational practices.

The Amplifier Effect: Oslo Youth Co-creating Urban Spaces of (Be)longing

How can young residents actively co-create and co-design urban space? This chapter aims to share methodological insight on what we call the “amplifier effect”: the co-joined effort of anthropologists, artists, and architects to experiment within a disciplinary framework, to increase youth’s well-being and enhance the participation and influence of youth on policymaking in cities. Based on exploratory ethnographic encounters with minority youth in Toyen, the eastern part of the capital of Oslo, Norway, we investigate the strengths and failures of experimental engagements, through discussing (1) youth co-exploring their sense of (be)longing and (2) youth as potential co-creators of urban spaces. We discuss key methodological challenges and limitations and conclude with looking at the amplifier’s potential for impact on social change.