Paper Short Abstract:

What modes of well-being(s) might we uncover if we collaborate to reflexively experience relatedness through collage making to deconstruct exclusionary power dynamics normalized by the colonial logics of institutions all around us? Let's co-explore!

Paper Abstract:

My paper tries to re-envision Anthropology and Ethnography as an atelier, a collaborative space of collective worlding, and an anthropologist as a collaborator. Contextually, it stems from ethnographic interactions with a cohort of art therapists and their clients coming together for collective engagement. Theoretically, I put Niewohner’s (2016) idea of co-laborative ethnography as joint epistemic and [affective] work in conversation with Stewart’s Weak Theory (2008), and Pandian’s Possible Anthropology (2020) to imagine the possibilities of anthropological action in and through collaboration to create shared spaces of well-being that disrupt the power dynamics of structural and ontological politics of identity making.

Here, I propose an immersive collaborative collage making experience, where the collective making-thinking-relating space that I call an anthropological thought atelier (Schroeder Yu 2024) emerges as a shared space of sense making (Stewart 2007), in which well-being is experienced relationally through an affective attunement with being-in-the world.

I wish to collectively explore the following: What sense(s) of relatedness can we evoke while collaborating as anthropologists in action? What kinds of curiosities can such collaborations provoke for us that might be used to understand worldings of well-being ethnographically? How might we curiously relate with/to our colleagues and interlocutors to create space for anthropologies of well-being to emerge? Throughout the paper collective making becomes a space of experiencing shared well-being, which in turn is a critical action necessary for anthropologists to disrupt colonial logics of dominance we see prevalent today.