Short Abstract:

The Lab continues the conversation on disciplinarity started by Rival at ASA16 through a set of creative collaborative practices. Led by a trained educator and activist, the interactive exercise makes use of Baron Cohen's pedagogy to approach the scientific endeavour as cultivated attention.

Long Abstract:

The purpose of this Lab is to use creative collaborative practices to continue the conversation on anthropology and interdisciplinarity started by Rival at ASA16. The interdisciplinarity-inducing rules that are increasingly framing the research practices advocated by global agendas setters have normative effects. Moreover, they undermine and/ or marginalise anthropology's power to create collaborative spaces for critical reflection and open diversity. The Lab will engage calls for research integration that are rooted in modernist understandings of change and progress by helping participants to confront the value context in which interdisciplinarity is being deployed. After warm-up and ice-breaking exercises, we will use our sensory intelligence to connect empathically with our ways of learning in and knowing from the world. In the interactive exercise led by an educator trained in mindfulness, participants will learn to embody the boundary between known and unknown so as to develop their ability to cultivate an intentional open attention. Individual experiences with demands for a new kind of awareness of - and attention to - rapid systemic change will be shared among us. We will then use the remark 'Ultimately, all drivers of climate change have roots in human cultural values' to explore the ways in which persons interact dynamically with ecological and historical constraints to transform these into choices and values. We will end with an exchange of ideas on how to form collectively the intellectual and methodological tools we need to pluralize science in the Anthropocene.