Short Abstract:

In this lab, we will facilitate a dialogue and workshop on the forms and importance of diverse and engaged methods to drive disruption within anthropological and ethnographic interventions into this (un)well world.

Long Abstract:

How do we reconcile the demands of the academy, with the need to do meaningful work in an ‘unwell world’: bringing change to the here and now and lived experiences of better outcomes?

What should this transformative research look like and how do we practice it?

This lab will curate a space to explore our privileged positionalities within the academy and open spaces for voices of the bodies on which our field seeks to ‘act’. We want to collaboratively develop and practice methods that allow us to navigate impactful and paradigm shifting research,. This will require the long work of making social justice the primary aim of research.

• Extending Fassin’s (2013) discussion on the afterlife of ethnography, we will interrogate the question of ‘what does our work leave behind?’. We want to query the afterlife of our research such that its products are continually oriented towards the here and now, and what is produced in everyday lives in their ‘wake’.

• Do we need to forge new spaces outside of the academy? Or should we work in ways that align with Tsing’s metaphor of ‘hair in the flour’ (2005) through the disturbance of subservience and routine?

The lab aims to collaboratively produce the initial stages of a blue-print to change the underpinnings of research practice in an un-well world. We hope to identify methodological, activist, and art-based tools, which can be used interchangeably across disciplinary backgrounds to illuminate best praxis that counters the erasure of everyday bodies in mainstream research.