Short Abstract:

This lab considers the risks and rewards of co-creative methods that work to record, archive, generate and perform culture while seeking to respond to the emergence of life on its own terms.

Long Abstract:

This lab asks: How can we harness the arts in co-creative and collaborative ways to allow us to respond to the emergence and unpredictability of an increasingly partial and fragmented globalised world? It will bring together scholars interested in making as a mode of theorising.

The concept of "multimodal anthropology" emerges from recent trends in ethnographic practice towards drawing on divergent kinds of evidence, employing diverse modes of representation and reflexively engaging new forms of collaboration and creative intervention. Schneider and Wright - in chorus with Ingold (2011), Grimshaw and Ravetz (2005, 2013), Gunn, Otto, and Smith (2013) - state that theory is "now in the way of making, rather than outside it" (2013:2). The rewarding possibilities of new theoretical frameworks brings with it the risks of the contested relationship between art and anthropology. By shifting our focus to the continuous verb forms of 'risking' and 'rewarding' we might reflect upon the continuous processes of relationality in both art and anthropology that allow us to ask what constitutes a shared space of co-creation? What happens when collaboration fails? How do we continue to challenge the politics of representation through our methods? How do we observe, and participate with, contemporaneous culture?

The lab invites creative works of all kinds, including, but not limited to, film, photography, dance, music and poetry. Researchers will share work in progress for group discussion and feedback.

Please contact the Lab convenors directly for more information.