Short Abstract

Do conference panels inevitably rely on polarization? Can this be challenged or subverted? Participants will explore polarization by experimenting with alternative formats for sharing and engaging with scholarly work: dialogic, dramatic, ritualistic, multimedia, or combinations of these.

Long Abstract

Do conference panels inevitably reproduce, or have they the potential to challenge the various polarizations that increasingly characterize the contemporary world? Are panels inescapably reliant on individuated presenters and presentations, on clearly marked divisions between speakers and audience, and on the demarcation of ethnography’s famously messy knowledge-making practices from the more orderly academic venues where their results are usually shared? Are some of these retained by newer, shorter conference formats like lightning talks? If so, do the formal constraints of academic conferences reproduce or even reinforce other polarizations (economic, ethnic, political, racial), along with the strict boundaries between selves and others that they mobilize and the hierarchical and authoritarian political projects that these frequently underwrite? Could we imagine other, more relational modes of differentiation? For this “panel” we seek participants who are willing not merely to discuss but to performatively explore alternatives to polarization in the conference setting itself, including through engagement with other genres and media. Submissions should describe a polarization they wish to explore. Presenters will meet virtually in advance of the conference to collectively devise a performance/audiovisual format through which to share their work, interact with one another, and, if possible, elicit direct audience participation. Possibilities include (but are not limited to) dialogic, dramatic, ritualistic, kinaesthetic, and multimedia formats (or shifting combinations of these), in which distinctions between individual voices and between speakers and addressees are rendered porous, and in which a more fluid and playful exchange of differences takes the place of stark dichotomization. The idea is to inhabit the conventional space and occasion of an academic panel while actively challenging and subverting some of its habituated constraints. Panelists and audience will be asked not only to reflect upon but to enact more generative alternatives to the multiple polarizations seeking to capture and define us.

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