Workshop
Sensing Darjeeling: Experiential Ethnographies Across Time
- Anna Notsu, Abhimanyu Chettri, Erik de Maaker & Swargajyoti Gohain
- Date
- Wednesday 21 January 2026 - Thursday 22 January 2026
- Location
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Darjeeling
This two-day collaborative workshop foregrounds the everyday significance of ‘places’ in Darjeeling for its residents. Darjeeling’s buildings, tea gardens, streets and its historic railway bear witness to how residents, whether humans, animals, trees, gods, or spirits, once inhabited these spaces. What unwritten histories do these places narrate according to (for example) college students, forest wardens and tea garden workers? How should these be told, and who should listen to them? In this 2-day workshop, academics, NGO workers and government officers working in the North Eastern region will together with people of Darjeeling listen, see, and sense places, neighbourhoods and environments. Together, the participants will collect stories told in words, images and sounds. Picturing, recording and mapping, workshop participants will jointly identify the significances which the past holds for the present, collecting stories that can be told and shared with anyone who wishes to learn from them. As such, the workshop wants to enable college students, WWF facilitators, forest warders, tea garden workers and project consortium members to build collaborations and connections.
Futuring Heritage
The two-day workshop ‘Sensing Darjeeling: Experiential ethnographies across time’ aims at developing new collaborative research methods that bridge everyday experiences, policy interventions and academic knowledge. The workshop is organized in the context of the Futuring Heritage research project, which focuses on everyday stories of the Himalayas in which environment and heritage connect.
Outline workshop
Tentative themes for the research groups to be formed include: (1) ‘Living in and with the tea gardens’; (2) ‘Colonial Darjeeling in the present’ (toy train and hidden roads) (3) ‘Rooting Tibetan exiles’ (Tibetan Refugee self help centre); (4) ‘Animal, plant and human life in Darjeeling Zoo’ (Zoo & HMI).
On the first day of the workshop, research groups will collectively come up with a research focus to engage in sensorial spatial mapping. Foregrounding the collection of pictures, sounds and short videos, each group will conduct collaborative research and create ethnographic records. On day 2, each group will work together on the collected ethnographic records: compiling, analysing and producing an (online) digital exhibition. To conclude the workshop, each group will then present this exhibition to invite further reflection on citizen science and its methodology.
