Paper short abstract:

How might future us look back on the state of academia today? In awe, nostalgia, disgust? This interactive session presents images of academia today drawn by members of The Reject Lounge. We invite you to write a postcard from the future in response: whether utopian, dystopian or something else…

Paper long abstract:

PJ Annand, Francesca Bernardi, Bee Damara, Sohail Jannesari, Ankita Mishra, River Újhadbor, Frances Williams

This interactive paper explores the role of creative practice (1) in the development of the Reject Lounge – a space for rejecting harmful academic norms and cultivating a research community that values compassion, social justice and solidarity; and relatedly (2) in fostering a state of ‘unknowing’: understood here as a condition of openness to understanding and imagining the world differently.

Made up of researchers, artists, activists, and members of community organisations, the Reject Lounge has embarked on a wandering, goal-less and curious journey. The Reject Lounge does not adhere to a predefined mission; rather, it evolves organically as we come together in collective care and creative unknowing. Within it we question established norms, challenge harmful practices, and re-imagine academia's purpose.

This session revolves around a series of images created in this tentative environment, each capturing our views of the state of academia today and our role in it. The images are presented as postcards to the future. We speculate how our future selves might look back on this time upon receiving them. We invite you to join us by writing or drawing responses from the future: whether utopian, dystopian or something else…

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how anthropological epistemologies became harmful to me, a trans anthropologist conducting fieldwork during a time of increased transphobia in Britain. I also show how I gained relief from anthropological ways of knowing by practicing community printmaking alongside fieldwork.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I consider how anthropological epistemologies became unhelpful and harmful to me, a trans anthropologist undertaking PhD fieldwork during a time of increased transphobia in Britain. One morning while conducting fieldwork about Welsh language revival in Cardiff, I opened my phone to learn that a local trans person had died by suicide, the third trans person I knew to have died by suicide that week. In the aftermath, a friend reflected, ‘It really felt like it could’ve been any of us’. I am grateful that anthropology has taught me how to connect local events of injustice with more dispersed, structural issues. But on a personal level, these ways of knowing can grow heavy. I struggled to continue fieldwork after this event. My PhD research seemed pointless, the impact of structural transphobia on people around me was all I could see. Seeking to know anything else through anthropology felt impossible. I had to look elsewhere. Consequently, this paper also explores how I, a trans artist, gained relief and distance from anthropological ways of knowing by engaging with community arts practices alongside fieldwork. I began a printmaking mentorship at a community print studio, putting my fieldwork duties aside one day a week to engage with different ways of thinking from those that were consuming me. This “dis-epistemology” (Ben-Moshe 2018), letting go of certain anthropological knowledge for a short time each week, was crucial to my recovery and fieldwork completion. Finally, I consider what anthropology can learn from such experiences.

Paper short abstract:

Conducting ethnographic research in my hometown with friends and close kin, I used illustrations to process the emotional truths that my anthropological writing did not dare disclose. My illustrations came to haunt my scientific project, revealing both the joy and trauma promised by our discipline.

Paper long abstract:

I reflect in this paper on the relationship between anthropological writing and the more creative genres that haunt it, such as memoir, artwork, and field notes. I return to my own experience of conducting ethnographic research in my hometown of Chennai, India, with queer communities and activists who were both friends and close kin. As a doctoral student, trying to offer a critical and “sociological” analysis of these intimate relations was a traumatic and alienating experience of “failing” at anthropology. Faced with my own emotional blind spots, I turned to illustration which lent themselves to ambiguous meanings, overwhelming the identity of the anthropologist, exposing too much, and undermining the self-seriousness of the scientific project itself. In the years that followed, I developed a robust illustration practice that contains the emotional truth of my research experiences which could never be represented in papers and reports. In this presentation I present my drawings and the story they tell, and how they led me to seek scholarly community where we can reflect on the emotional labour involved in anthropological fieldwork, and how to re-evaluate this labour with the neo-liberalisation of academia. The dis-epistemology of my illustrations came to haunt my scientific project, revealing both the joy and trauma at the heart of my relationship with anthropology. Over time, illustrations have offered ways to connect with students, interlocutors, friends and colleagues in ways that have indeed, as Ben-Moshe suggests, allowed me to "be in community with like-minded people in an ethical manner” (2014).

Paper short abstract:

Heartwork is a commitment of another kind. Heartwork is the labor and attention (fieldwork + homework) that must be nurtured to see and feel the intensities of others. It is extraneous endeavor; the lives of others should not be so easily consumable. It is work on top of work—heartwork is hard work.

Paper long abstract:

H e a r t ///// B r e a k

—Katherine McKittrick

I turn towards the heart and ask what does an analysis from the heart offer? What if we see the world this way? I look at feminist and Islamic epistemologies to learn more about the heart. I focus on heartbeats to understand knowledge as gift and heartwork as being integral to honoring our entanglements. While a lot of attention is directed at the author, should more be also demanded from the reader (the “adjudicator of knowledge”)? I also focus on another quality of the heart: its propensity for injury. A heartache is a productive condition, not a lamentable state that must be wished away but a necessary ontological position. Heartache is hermeneutic openness, departures from the world as is. An investment in the heart warrants the redrawing of the very parameters of thinking and writing—how we approach others, what constitutes our site of engagement, and how we choose to express devotion and to whom.

Heartwork is a commitment of another kind. Heartwork encapsulates the labor and attention (fieldwork + homework) that must be nurtured to see and feel the intensities of others. Heartwork is extraneous endeavor; the lives of others should not be so easily consumable. It is work on top of work—heartwork is hard work.

Paper short abstract:

Through an autoethnographic, mix-genre (poetry, creative non-fiction, memoir, and scholarship) approach, this paper seeks to explore the limits and potentials of the non-knowing eye/I of ethnographic fieldwork and writing as it manifests in the soundscape of ethnographic voice and authority.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to conjure an abstracted time-space from the researcher’s embodied experiences. Moving through the researcher’s memories of growing up in the American Midwest in a blue collar military family and in a Fundamentalistic religious community and through long-term ethnographic fieldwork among anarchist activists in Barcelona, this paper weaves together multiple registers of locution and ways of knowing, including poetry, creative non-fiction, and scholarship. A central preoccupation of this paper is how to locate the self of the researcher in its social and historical position while disembodying itself from that position. In so doing, it explores intimacy, self-reflection, relation, and politics of knowledge production in ethnographic research and writing. This paper seeks to perform a mode of not knowing argumentation that operates on the level of affective resonance. The goal is to explore the extent to which lyrical saturation of the shared sonic environment of the conference space can expand into a communal field through which audience members and performer can co-imagine an “ethnographic” field.

Paper short abstract:

In the paper, I present my experience of ethnographic paralysis, the shifts in my understanding of field encounters, and the textual and social experiences resulting from these shifts.

Paper long abstract:

During field visits to my birth country of Tunisia, I was faced by the harsh reality of everyday violence and precarity. The language of academia became dysfunctional in encounters with my interlocutors. I was overwhelmed by a research paralysis that provoked me to think differently about the format of interviews and participant observation as they were classically framed in anthropological literature. The structure of my field encounters and the words of my interlocutors became too powerful for the academic writing to hold. In the process of writing my research, their stories, charged with emotion, resisted the academic writing process.

Stepping back from the illusion of the need and urgency to write about my field encounters, I started humanizing them as first and fore most human encounters. I began thinking about ways to meet my interlocutors away from a research agenda, rather as act of coming together, of empathy and recognition of shared struggle. Accordingly, a specific pathos was generated by these encounters, which I transferred into the writing using a strategy of writing through/with anger and pain. The outcome is a collection of stories that present my interlocutors’ life trajectories and words, in addition to a collection of their own writing about their experiences of socio-political precarity. In the paper, I present my experience of ethnographic paralysis, the shifts in my understanding of field encounters, and the textual and social experiences resulting from these shifts.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork with families bereaved by the Sewol Ferry Disaster in South Korea, this paper reflects on the responsibilities of anthropologists researching grief and trauma, ethnographic co-presence and vulnerability, and the inability of fully knowing how to 'witness' the pain of the other.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have rightfully been careful to reflect on what we do onto the field, and reflexive of the ways in which our ethnographic fieldwork and the ensuing practices of knowledge production may do onto the field, the lives therein, and the people thereof. But what of the things that ‘the field’ does onto us, and the potent emotional spillages that come back ‘home’ with us? Based on 15-months of fieldwork among families bereaved by the Sewol Ferry Disaster (2014) in South Korea, who have been campaigning for truth, accountability, and remembrance of their deceased children, this paper reflects on moments from fieldwork in which my co-embrication with the people I sought to ‘study’ was made strikingly evident, and the complicities and responsibilities that I have yet to fully respond to. What is the ethnographer to do with stories of shattering grief from the field? If they are to ‘bear witness’ to grief and trauma, is academic writing the most efficacious, reciprocal mode to do so? Rather than treat these moments as excesses or appendages to the fieldwork experience and the academic writing that emerged from it, I consider them as constitutive of the very co-presence and vulnerability that fieldwork demands and generates. In reflecting on moments and encounters that shaped my fieldwork, and shaped me as an anthropologist, this paper offers a sympathetic critique of accounts calling for ‘witnessing’, which necessarily presumes that anthropologists know what it means to, and how to bear witness.

Paper short abstract:

Addressing epistemological uncertainty generated by a witchcraft diagnosis, I argue that conceptual humility in the face of experience pushes us to keep epistemology and ontology as open, liminal spaces of playful refraction with our participants, rendering them as modes of connection among worlds.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes as its point of departure an experience of epistemological disorientation stemming from receiving a witchcraft diagnosis. Ethnographic fieldwork typically stages an encounter between anthropologist and research participant, an encounter which often produces incommensurable ways of knowing and being in the world, as each party applies their epistemological and interpretive resources to the other. Likewise, each party to the encounter can undergo experiences which seem to push against the limit of experience, or which cannot be epistemologically, conceptually, or even ontologically domesticated within either party’s own experience. How, then, to think with experiences which seem to resist interpretation within familiar epistemological frameworks? How to conceptualise (or even narrate) that for which we have a limited or impoverished conceptual language? How to interpret an experience where the status of the experience remains murky and uncertain?

This paper argues that such uncertain encounters may be both epistemologically and theoretically productive; by showing us the limits of our conceptual vocabulary when confronted with unruly experience, they prompt us to re-frame what we think we know about the world (and indeed our procedures for knowing the world(s)). Such productively recursive uncertainty reminds us of the need to make pluriversal connections, leaving epistemology and ontology as open, liminal spaces of play - as meeting grounds where each party can take the measure of the other one without either interpretive or epistemological tradition dominating the other, but collaboratively generating a 'ch'exi' or 'motley' (or 'worldly') epistemology out of a hermeneutics of suspicion.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the opportunities and challenges, even failures, of reflexivity and collaboration in anthropological research. Building on a failed film project with people living with mental illness in Namibia, it argues for the value of "not-knowing" for novel anthropological imaginings.

Paper long abstract:

Reflexivity and collaboration in anthropological research open opportunities while simultaneously bringing forth complex challenges. Whilst these have the potential to address important ethical, methodological, and epistemological issues located at the intersection of power and representation, they also reveal the limits, even failures, of reflexive and collaborative approaches for anthropological knowing, especially when doing research with vulnerable subjects in a postcolonial context where race and the legacies of the colonial past intersect with the diagnosis and medicalisation of mental illness. Based on a failed collaborative film with people living with bipolar disorder in contemporary Namibia, this paper underlines the generative and transformative forces of reflexive and collaborative methods, simultaneously exploring their potential for stagnation and failure. In taking inspiration from Ben Moshe’s powerful call for “dis-epistemology”, this paper aims to critically examine the limits of knowing in anthropology by focusing on the complex emotional and personal entanglements in the field, the love and wounds we experience, but still, we cannot analyse, and how these have the potential to shape novel anthropological imaginings beyond current neo-liberal academic discourses and practices. By stressing the value of ‘not knowing’, this paper aims to open a dialogue on how we can create from a space of (dis)-epistemology collective and caring academic communities, potentially subverting hierarchies of power and knowledge in anthropology.