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Paper short abstract:

Thinking with a drug policy reform network, this paper explores moments marked by "energy" or "aliveness". Utilizing both established theories of participation and recent approaches to multispecies liveliness, I explore how anthropology can contribute to understandings of participatory aliveness.

Paper long abstract:

Following ethnographic work with a drug policy reform network in Australia, this paper looks at moments when participants noted feeling “an energy in the room”—a sense of aliveness that ‘mattered’. These moments often took place when something new or somehow lively emerged: a new movement, a new sense of direction, or when an old disagreement or misunderstanding was worked through. This sense of energy may not be particularly surprising: Christopher Kelty has written about the ways in which, despite academic analyses of participation being “bloodless”, actual experiences of participation—often marked by connection with another or with a ‘mood’—are full of a sense of aliveness. Yet this “immediate, emotional experience of participation” (2019: 9) is rarely attended to.

While recent work on the ‘vibe’ or aliveness of connection or “something happening” has been written about by ethnomusicologists and anthropologists of surfers (Mark 2017, Rodger 2016, Witek 2019, Waitt and Frazer 2012), it is less commonly spoken about in policy worlds. And yet, ‘energy’, ‘aliveness’ and the ‘vibe’ are all routinely attended to in these worlds, even when such concerns were not supported by groups’ Key Performance Indicators. How can anthropology contribute to understandings of such aliveness and, perhaps, even to supporting spaces that allow for it? Attending to older theories of participatory experience, such as those of Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim, alongside more recent geographical, architectural and multispecies approaches to atmospheres and liveliness, this paper considers what anthropology might have to offer for understanding—and perhaps supporting—participatory aliveness.