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- Convenors:
-
Ignacio Farias
(Humboldt University of Berlin)
Andrew Gilbert (Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores contemporary forms and norms of studio anthropology as an emergent site or stage of methodological, epistemological and ethico-political transformation in anthropology.
Long Abstract
For nearly two decades, the studio model has inspired anthropologists seeking to rethink ethnography beyond solitary observation and writing, as well as to reconsider long-held assumptions that intervention in the field is epistemologically contaminating or ethically suspect. Initially imagined by a few pioneering practitioners as a pedagogical space for collective inquiry and learning through making artefacts, the studio model is finding renewed interest as a key site and mode of practice in multimodal anthropology. By embracing concept-work, design, and the prototyping of field devices and multimodal artefacts, the studio invites reimagining ethnography as a practice of the artificial.
This panel invites contributions that explore contemporary forms and norms of studio anthropology, from more formalized settings of collaborative work to improvised arrangements within ethnographic practice. This poses several questions: Which collaborations does the studio model require and facilitate? What is the relation between studio and field, or the archive? How do studio practices—prototyping, tinkering, co-designing, materializing concepts—reshape what counts as ethnographic knowledge? What are the promises and pitfalls of reimagining anthropology as a science of the artificial organized around field devices and multimodal artefacts?
By bringing together scholars and practitioners who work in, with, and through these practices, this panel seeks to trace the contours of the studio as a site or stage of methodological, epistemological and ethico-political transformation in anthropology. We welcome papers and presentations that critically and creatively engage with studio-based projects, experimental collaborations, and multimodal forms of ethnographic practice.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Drawing on 3 scenes, I reflect on spaces of knowledge-generation: Fieldwork, filming, and the ethnographic lab/studio. From workshops and tarot with township tech entrepreneurs in Cape Town, to filmmaking and incubating in an Afghan/Danish Collective, and to anthropology students in a Copenhagen Lab
Paper long abstract
Drawing on 3 scenes, I reflect on various ‘spaces’ of knowledge-generation: Fieldwork, filming and the ethnographic lab/studio. One scene is set on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa where I have done longitudinal fieldwork. Collaborative and multimodal methods have been part of co-creating knowledge in the field. In recent projects, however, I have with colleagues turned to design workshops – bringing differently situated actors around the table (or circle) across differences. ‘Whose turf is the township - and whose turf is the workshop space’? A tarot deck is part of this first scene. Another scene shows the Afghan/Danish Film Collective ARTlife giving a pitch at the CPH:LAB incubator for non-fiction storytelling across platforms. We have worked together making documentary in a Collective for years. In our endeavour to produce a game, sharing dilemmas for a young woman in Scandinavia with an Afghan background, we found ourselves invited into others’ defined workshop space – still filming. A mock-up is part of this second scene.
The third scene is set in the Ethnographic Exploratory and MultimodalLab, University of Copenhagen. An old library, now filled witth plants and posters, is a space for multimodal experiments. Yet, in a neo-liberal university system that teaches mastery, perfection and focus on grades, how can we truly invite for experimentation and communities of practice? A website is part of this third scene. What do the scenes show about ethnographic knowledge-making between the Studio and the field - politics of inviting and politics of participating?
Paper short abstract
Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban occupation in São Paulo, this contribution examines participatory design, urban plans and collective work practices as epistemic infrastructures reconfiguring territory, autonomy and political intervention in Brazilian peripheries.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban occupation on the outskirts of São Paulo, this paper analyses how residents collectively design and build their neighbourhood through participatory workshops, assemblies, scale models, urban plans, and construction brigades mutirões. It proposes approaching autoconstruction not only as a housing practice, but as a space of experimentation where urban concepts, possible futures, and political claims are materialised through artefacts.
Focusing on community design sessions, locally produced urban plans, and the circulation of models, maps, and building devices, the paper examines how these practices operate as epistemic infrastructures. They mediate negotiations with architects, social movements, and public authorities, while simultaneously reshaping local understandings of territory, autonomy, and collective life. Rather than separating “field” and “studio,” the occupation itself is shown to become a hybrid site of research where ethnography unfolds through making, repairing, and speculative design.
Engaging with Science and Technology Studies and multimodal anthropology, the paper explores how participatory design and urban prototypes transform what counts as ethnographic knowledge and political intervention. It argues that these practices generate alternative urban imaginaries that challenge hegemonic planning paradigms in Brazilian peripheries, while raising ethical and methodological questions about collaboration, authorship, and intervention.
Paper short abstract
Formed in 2021 amidst COVID-19, the collective ‘studiolab.work on work’ rethinks knowledge production by blending concepts of studio, laboratory and para-site: In and outside our virtual autonomous ‘house’ we experiment with collaborative multimodal practices to create community commons.
Paper long abstract
The collective 'studiolab.work on work' was formed within the atmosphere of COVID19, and against the backdrop of universities shaken by Bologna reforms, third-party funding, and precarious conditions of employment due to the German Academic Fixed-Term Contract Act (WissZeitVG).
For the last five years studiolab virtually brought together people from various academic backgrounds to jointly discuss our experiences with researching work and our own academic working cultures, aiming to collaboratively envision and experimentally create a space for developing and living our reparative vision of academia. Sharing our experiences led to establishing values and rules for the collective that we were forming.
Inspired by the tradition of “Hausprojektkultur” we created our autonomous house - a metaphor to build an alternative community space for knowledge production and to come together as scholars. Our house is a hybrid: part studio (Rabinow et al. 2008, Farías 2025) for being loud and creative, part laboratory (Collier et al. 2007, Bieler et al. 2021) for experimenting and somehow an autonomous para-site (Holmes & Marcus 2007) besides our academic everydays.
The talk discusses our rethinking of knowledge production and co-creating community commons on a broader scale – especially when working together with institutions and people outside of our collective. We will share how we have worked multimodal, used workshops and discussions aimed at sustaining and expanding these collaborative, experimental practices with third parties, engaging with a heterogenous and challenging public, local communities and academic actors in deeper conversations about alternative models for knowledge production and community commons.
Paper short abstract
Between lab and studio, this paper examines how the Global Heritage Lab reframes ethnography as transdisciplinary knowledge production with diverse, historically and regionally situated research partners from academia, arts and society, and reflects on the potentials and tensions of this approach.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the Global Heritage Lab as a site where ethnographic practice unfolds through transdisciplinary collaboration rather than observation, documentation, or analysis alone. It uses the figures of the lab and the studio as contrasting yet productive ways of thinking about how knowledge is made. The laboratory, historically tied to the natural sciences, is associated with controlled experimentation oriented around hypotheses, while the studio, rooted in artistic practice, is a space of making where knowledge develops through material engagement and improvisation.
Rather than treating lab and studio as opposing models, the paper approaches them as two figures that illuminate different aspects of knowledge production in collaborations between artists, scholars, and diverse publics. In the Global Heritage Lab, this takes the form of dialogues across disciplines, co-created artworks, and participatory installations that invite visitors into ongoing conversations.
Here, the Lab itself becomes a field for experimenting with new multimodal methods of ethnographic practice. Anthropological concerns enter into dialogue with other disciplines, the arts, and members of local and global society, and are transformed through these encounters. Rather than speaking about others, ethnographic practice shifts toward what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls “speaking nearby,” grounded in listening and more-than-textual practice.
Drawing on projects addressing the legacies of Christian missionisation and fashion, and inquiries into human-plant relations shaped by colonisation and extractivism, the paper discusses the potentials and pitfalls of this approach for rethinking ethnographic practice as a form of transdisciplinary co-creation.
Paper short abstract
Focusing on studio image-work developed through ecological research, this paper examines how images shape ways of sensing, attending to, and knowing environments. Moving across digital and material forms, it reflects on image-making as a site of multimodal inquiry
Paper long abstract
This paper engages debates on studio anthropology by examining studio-based image-work as a transdisciplinary practice through which different fields think together, without assuming a hierarchy. Rather than treating the studio as a site for the production of field devices, the paper approaches it as a space where concepts, relations, and modes of attention are reworked through aesthetic practice.
Drawing on my work as an anthropologist and artistic researcher within ecological research contexts, the paper focuses on image-work developed through and from fieldwork, archives, and collaborative practice. The material comes from the UKRI Treescapes project and includes photographic, moving-image, digital, and materially mediated works produced across studio, exhibition, and museum settings. These images do not function as documentation or translation of field encounters, but as sites where mediation itself becomes perceptible: where the conditions through which environments are sensed, imaged, and known are brought into view.
Engaging the panel’s interest in ethnography as a practice of the artificial, the paper argues that studio image-work reshapes what counts as ethnographic knowledge by foregrounding aesthetics as method. Working transdisciplinarily, I treat image-making and anthropological inquiry as forms of reasoning that emerge across practices, rather than as instrumental means: the artificial is not defined by technical intervention, but by the deliberate composition of mediated relations between bodies, images, instruments, and environments.
The paper offers a situated contribution that reflects on the promises and limits of studio practice for multimodal anthropology, showing how image-work operates as a site of methodological, epistemological, and ethico-political transformation.
Paper short abstract
This paper discusses Liminal Seashells, a project which through staging an intervention shows how entanglements could be studied within a studio setting. While shifting the attention to the collective enactment, dynamics between temporarily intertwined fragments can be observed.
Paper long abstract
Liminal Seashells treats the seashell as an epistemic agent, shaped by molluscan life, geological sedimentation, industrial extraction, and cultural reuse. Its material history is dispersed across bodies, carbon cycles, architectural infrastructures, and multispecies dwellings. Following work in multispecies relationality, the shell can be understood as an assemblage whose coherence is always temporary.
The intervention takes place in the studio. Participants are given fragments of a larger theoretical poster and tasked with assembling them into a coherent composition. No piece contains the whole argument; coherence only arises through negotiation of perspectives. The process surfaces interpretive differences while demonstrating how provisional agreement is materially achieved.
Crucially, the studio format mirrors the condition it investigates. The seashell assemblage is itself temporally and materially distributed across agents and environments; the fragmented poster reproduces this distribution in another register. By gathering dispersed elements into an artificially bounded space, the studio allows an in-depth investigation of the relations between individual elements without collapsing them into a single narrative.
The project contribution is practical and methodological. Through biomimetic sensibilities, it offers a concrete example of how negotiation can operate as both method and data. At the same time, it acknowledges the limits of studio practice: artificial environments may foreground certain voices or risk aestheticising complex realities. By reflecting on these tensions, the paper argues for a careful but sustained role for studio-based methods in contemporary anthropology—particularly in an era when ecological entanglements challenge inherited distinctions between observation and intervention.