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- Convenors:
-
Mikołaj Smykowski
(Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Alexandra Oancă (KU Leuven)
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- Formats:
- Lab
Short Abstract
EASA continues its successful experience with Labs as a space for collective discussion, collaborative practice, and creative contribution; and we encourage participants to explore this year’s theme, Anthropology: Possibilities in a Polarised World.
Long Abstract
We suggest submitting proposals that differ from the typical 20-minute conference paper format and favour the experimental forms of sharing practical anthropological knowledge. As previously, Lab organisers would facilitate interaction, improvisation, speculation, as well as creative and open-ended approaches that go off the well-trodden paths and unveil new ways of anthropological thinking.
EASA2026 asks the potential Lab convenors to consider the following key questions:
- What is the role of anthropology and humanistic reflection in a polarised world?
- What does polarisation mean from the anthropological point of view?
- What does polarisation mean for the anthropological debate?
- What possibilities do we have and what possibilities can we open through our engagement?
- How to encounter, translate, and witness conflict in a polarised reality?
- How can we contribute to imagining a reality that is less polarised and conflicted than the one we currently find ourselves in?
- What could be the transformative and generative potentialities of polarisation?
Accepted labs
Lab short abstract
This lab explores foraging in urban Poznan as an emplaced, convivial way of knowing in a polarized world. Participants join guided attunement exercises and a foraging walk with an ethnobiologist and forager, document their experiences in multimodal field diaries and share reflections and materials.
Lab long abstract
Foraging offers a compelling lens through which to examine a polarised world marked by inequality, dispossession, and ruination. Once tethered to rural subsistence, it is now dismissed in some contexts, romanticized in others, and increasingly folded into the logics of commodification. For those who forage, it might figure as a necessity, hobby or calling, yet it consistently enables and fosters agency and relationality. Foraging thus both mirrors contemporary polarisation and cultivates more-than-human belonging and conviviality.
Taking place in the city of Poznań - whose name shares its roots with the word ‘poznanie’, meaning ‘knowing,’ ‘cognition,’ or ‘recognition’ - this Lab explores foraging as a way of knowing grounded in sensory, embodied, and place-based encounters.
Participants are invited to sensuously engage with the city under the guidance of Polish ethnobiologist and forager Lukasz Luczaj. The lab welcomes 10-30 participants and is structured into three parts. We begin with a guided attunement exercise. This will be followed by a one-hour foraging walk in the surroundings of the Morasko Campus, which participants document via a multimodal field diary. Lastly, participants finalize, share and discuss their field diaries and their experiences with each other.
A selection of materials produced in the lab may be presented as a collaborative contribution in the exhibition "Foraging at the Edge of Capitalism" opening in October 2026 at the Anthropological Museum in Heidelberg, Germany. Pre-registered participants will be given three short preparatory texts on foraging in Poland, the city of Poznan and sensory anthropology.
Registration:
https://forms.gle/Z7FjaPf7auLpJViC9
Lab short abstract
This lab explores polarisation in Poznań through anthropological photography and visual storytelling. In collaboration with Pix.House, participants learn documentary photography methods and join a guided photowalk to experiment with anthropological photography.
Lab long abstract
Photography has a long history in anthropology, mostly as a marker of scientific validity (Perera 2019). More recently, photo-anthropologists have called for a reconsideration of photography as a medium of future anthropologies (Leon-Quijano 2022; Miller 2024). In this sense, photography stops being an impartial record and becomes an active medium (and a subject) that shapes how social worlds are perceived, negotiated, performed, and contested.
In Poland, documentary photography has developed a particularly rich vocabulary for exploring social transformation and polarisation. Poznań’s Pix.House has become a central hub for this work, sustaining a vibrant culture of exhibitions, workshops, photobook publications, and community-based archival projects that collectively document political, social, and generational shifts. Within this environment, documentary projects such as “NIE-NOT” (Wykrota 2018), “MECHANZM” (Forecki 2019), and the “Public Protest Archive” exemplify how Polish photographers use visual storytelling to reflect on emerging civic tensions, historical continuities, and the multiplicity of voices shaping public life. Their work demonstrates the potential of photography as a means for anthropological discourse.
This Lab introduces participants to contemporary documentary photography in Poland and invites them to experiment with this medium as an ethnographic method. After a brief discussion of selected works from the Pix.House collection, participants will grab their cameras and join a guided photowalk in the centre of Poznań, exploring how photography can facilitate anthropological reflections on the past and present of a city in transformation. The session concludes with a collective reflection on how photo-anthropology can challenge, complicate, and expand disciplinary understandings of polarisation.
Lab short abstract
This is a mindful, creative lab using sound, improv and ethnographic fieldwork to co-write poems and songs. Through sensory warm-ups and collaborative lyric work, participants leave with a song or poem seed and skills to bridge academic and public divides through creative ethnography.
Lab long abstract
This two-hour lab invites participants to create mindfully and playfully using a call-and-response format to co-create melodies, rhythms, harmonies, and poetic lines inspired by our ethnographic fieldwork. Guided by anthropologist and poet Maruška Svašek and singer-songwriter and anthropologist Kristina Jacobsen, the first part of the workshop will attune us to our social, physical and multi-sensorial environment through listening, recording, and producing sound. Using mindful walking and skills from applied improv theatre, we will warm up our senses as well as our bodies in preparation for a creative deep dive.
During the second hour, we will plant the seeds of lyric writing and explore how to turn a lyric or poem into an accompanied song or an unaccompanied vocal melody. While this is a process-based workshop focused on collaborative writing skills (“cowriting”), participants will leave with the seed of a song or a poem inspired by their ethnographic fieldwork.
Ethnographic poetry and songwriting allow us to translate research data into accessible formats for a broader public beyond the academy, thus expanding our reach as public scholars and enabling conversations around the complexities of cultural difference in a polarised world. These and similar outputs help address the current divide between academic discourse and wider publics. In addition, cowriting—something rarely taught within the space of the academy—allows anthropologists to co-create and connect across our own differences of training, methodology, language, and country of origin. In this way, cowriting fosters a skillset that bridges another form of polarisation within the academy itself.
Lab short abstract
We invite a group of 10 (max) participants to roam the campus of AMU on an open-ended poetry walk, centering experiences of wonder and confusion. Through a series of playful prompts linked to movement, observation, and self-reflection, participants will compose poems in pieces.
Lab long abstract
“Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability. It cracks open the dialectic and sees myriads all at once.” - Fanny Howe
In this Lab, we invite a group of 10 (maximum) participants to roam the campus of Adam Mickiewicz University on a poetry walk. Through a series of playful prompts linked to movement, observation, and self-reflection, participants will compose poems in pieces. Bringing together poetry and the spirit of ethnographic observation, we will draw on poet Fanny Howe’s “Bewilderment” and Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska’s writing on astonishment. We encourage participants to roam around in a state of wonder and confusion.
This Lab contends that wonder and confusion are generative not only for the practice of ethnography but for our ethical-political becoming per se. Virtually unimpeded flows of global capital and media forms often give a sense of a world that is already known and grasped. This Lab aims to cultivate gestures that keep us from readily acquiescing to such closures. An appreciation of bewilderment is important not only in our encounters with ethnographic elsewheres. Even what we take to be "here” and properly "ours" has its solidity only because it is an accumulation, a refrain — "a rutting by scoring over," as Kathleen Stewart puts it. Therefore, we need new habits to attend to such "nameable clarities" in fresh ways.
After the walk and self-reflection, participants will gather together to playfully collage their writing, guided by an additional series of prompts.
Lab short abstract
A hands-on lab to prototype a dialogic “critical glossary” across anthropology and art. Participants will experiment with entry formats (eg. paired voices, frictions, image/text responses), map key terms, and leave with a shared editorial template and possible draft entries.
Lab long abstract
Over the past decade, collaborations between anthropology and the arts have expanded rapidly, yet concept work often lags behind method talk. This lab proposes a practical, collective step: prototyping a critical, dialogic glossary that does not stabilise definitions, but holds tensions, parallel genealogies, and productive frictions across art and anthropology.
The session is structured as a working studio for concepts. After a short framing, participants will (1) identify “sticky” terms that travel between art worlds and anthropological work; (2) experiment with shared entry formats in small groups/pairs, so that each prototype links a concept to at least one ethnographic case and/or one artwork, and (3) test ways to visualise relations between concepts (constellations, cross-references, response-notes, image counterpoints). The lab is open to anthropologists, artists, curators, designers, and hybrid practitioners; early-career colleagues are welcome.
By the end, we will produce: a draft editorial template; 6–10 potential “starter entries” or entry-skeletons; and a shortlist of terms + proposed interlocutor pairings to potentially take forward as a collective publication project.
Lab short abstract
This Lab explores fanzine-making as an anthropological method to translate theory, share lived experience, and co-produce knowledge. Participants will collaboratively create a fanzine on polarization through hands-on, collective practice.
Lab long abstract
This double Lab proposes fanzine-making as an experimental anthropological method that bridges theory, lived experience, and collective knowledge production. Fanzines—low-tech, tactile, and accessible—have long circulated as tools for counter-narratives, political expression, and situated knowledge. In anthropology, they can function simultaneously as a medium of translation, documentation, and participatory inquiry.
The Lab will be structured as a hands-on workshop spread across two consecutive sessions. Participants will first collectively choose one topic related to the conference’s overarching theme of polarization from three proposed options. They will then divide into three sub-groups, each engaging with a distinct anthropological use of the fanzine: translating an academic article or theoretical argument into an accessible, visual and textual fanzine format; collecting and transmitting first-hand témoignages, observations, or experiences related to the chosen topic; experimenting with the fanzine as a participatory method for collective reflection and co-thinking.
The sessions will alternate between discussion, making, and sharing moments. The Lab emphasizes collaborative learning, experimentation, and process rather than polished outputs. By the end, participants will have collectively produced a draft fanzine and reflected on the epistemological, ethical, and political implications of fanzine-making in anthropological research and public engagement.
Lab short abstract
How can we encounter, translate, and witness reality across divides? This experimental lab invites participants of all skill levels to join an ethnoGraphic experiment exploring collaborative modes of seeing, sketching, and engaging as a means to build bridges in an increasingly polarized world.
Lab long abstract
Acknowledging anthropology's ability to encounter, witness, and translate conflict in an increasingly polarized world, what can the discipline do to contribute to a more cohesive dialogue across difference? Multimodal ethnography has shown promise in creating space for such dialogue by highlighting embodiment, processuality, and relationality in its methods. More specifically, multimodal ethnographers engage with drawing as a sensorial, body-mediated experience (Taussig 2009; Causey 2012). For Taussig (2011), drawing juxtaposes documentation and imagination; for Ingold (2011), the medium allows the ethnographer to be fully "present," and Jain (2021) describes drawing not as an illustration of an idea, but the idea itself. Based on these prompts, lab convenors propose to conduct an ethnoGraphic experiment, inviting participants to draw in a collective, participatory and non-judgemental way, as a mode of being together, and as a means of gathering impressions, rather than forcing a point of view.
Guided by a series of prompts, we will explore what it means to create at the site of difference, to engage with contentious topics, and to invite both human, and non-human actors into the process of co-creation. Weather-permitting, part of this lab will take place outdoors. Lab convenors will ensure that the lab will be accessible to participants of all artistic levels, and physical abilities, and drawing supplies will be provided on site. The lab’s aspiration is to challenge our own attachments, viewpoints, and ideas about authorship in an open and sensitive manner as a critical opening into what it means to create together across difference.
Lab short abstract
Transform fieldwork materials into tarot cards. This Lab experiment with the symbolic representation of local crises. The aim is to create collaborative tools that enable fictional narratives, and facilitate conversations in fieldwork and teaching on the global dimension of local crisis.
Lab long abstract
This Lab proposes an experimental methodology for engaging with our ethnographic encounters through the symbolic language of tarot's major arcana. Tarot's archetypal imagery enables us to approach something ethnographers often engage timidly: the universality of certain situations across our fieldsites. Whilst anthropology has long emphasised cultural specificity and the dangers of universalising claims, the dystopian conditions many of us encounter—state violence, ecological collapse, economic predation—manifest across radically different contexts with striking resonances. By mapping ethnographic materials onto tarot archetypes, we'll create space to recognise these patterns without flattening difference and explore the global dimensions of local crises. Using tarot's structure, we'll explore how symbolic systems externalise forces that feel simultaneously intimate and cosmic.
This Lab brings visual anthropology into conversation with investigations into the social generativity of spiritual practice. Across diverse ethnographic contexts, communities narrate crisis through nonlinear forms such as dreams, visions, and supernatural stories. Creating tarot cards becomes a meditative process of distilling ethnographic complexity into symbolic form, mirroring divination's contemplative attention to pattern and transformation. The lab asks: What ontologies of crisis do our ethnographic materials point to when rendered symbolically? Can engaging our discipline spiritually offer antidotes to polarisation by creating spaces for contradiction, ambiguity, and transformation? The tarot becomes a tool for "controlled equivocation", allowing multiple, incompatible meanings to coexist without collapsing into relativism. Ultimately, the lab explores spirituality as a collaborative methodology that opens space for fiction as narrating reality and generates tools for future fieldwork or teaching as conversation starters and elicitation devices.
Lab short abstract
Foregrounding embodied participation with reflective learning we ask what it means to do anthropology through play. How might play & games function as sites of knowledge production, ethical encounter, and theoretical experimentation? What does embodied play reveal that other methods may obscure?
Lab long abstract
What happens when we approach play as a transversal anthropological method relevant to broader ethnographic contexts? This lab explores how playful engagements can reshape ethnographic practice and anthropological theory by attending to the bodily, affective, and relational aspects of polarisation. By reimagining anthropology itself as a collective, improvisational, and world-making practice, this lab offers an experimental, participatory exploration of how sport, play and games generate embodied understandings of social realities in a polarised world.
We invite participants to play together as a method of anthropological inquiry. Rather than observing play at a distance, participants will engage bodily and affectively in a series of simple games followed by facilitated collective reflection. To do this, we will use children’s games from around the world used in Sport for Development and Peace post-conflict contexts. While these games were taught to Sport for Development and Peace practitioners in development contexts around the world, the lab explicitly moves beyond the development context to one of anthropological enquiry.
The lab unfolds in two interlinked phases. First, participants take part in selected games that foreground social values embedded in play, such as cooperation, competition, rule-making and more. Second, participants collectively reflect on their experiences, translating sensations, emotions, misunderstandings and negotiations into ethnographic insight. This feedback session explores how play renders social boundaries tangible, felt and enacted, while also revealing how moments of tension may open unexpected possibilities for connection or reconfiguration. The lab is accessible to all abilities. Please wear trainers and comfortable clothing. Max 15 participants.
Lab short abstract
A practical, experimental workshop to develop heterotopic interventions for a polarised world. The Lab will offer participants conceptual and concrete tools drawn from arts-based research to imagine otherwise, heal rifts, overcome silences and engage new audiences in their own research settings.
Lab long abstract
This Lab will be a practical, experimental workshop aiming to develop heterotopic interventions for a polarised world. In a 105-minute mix of plenary and small-group exercises, up to 25 participants will be invited to bring questions and research challenges from their own fieldsites and to think through how to create temporary heterotopic spaces within their research contexts to offer alternatives where polarisation or crisis have foreclosed imagination and fixed people into rigid positions.
Building on the facilitators’ respective long-term engagements with poets, writers, and artists across diverse fieldsites (Iran/Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iceland, Denmark, the UK and China) and experience of running poetry workshops, the Lab will explore how the arts function as distinct epistemic practices. Our ethnographic work demonstrates how creative practices can generate heterotopic spaces within research encounters where experiences that resist straightforward articulation (the interior, the inchoate, the invisible, the metaphysical) can be expressed; elsewheres and elsewhiles can be inhabited; and possible futures can be imagined. Literary texts (and kindred art forms) have the potential to hold conflicting views and create nuanced emotional states and atmospheres in the receiver.
The Lab will offer conceptual and concrete tools drawn from arts-based research (e.g. poetic devices, speculative or future-oriented writing, or other creative prompts) to imagine possibilities for witnessing, reimagining and healing
oriented to collaborative research methods and/or alternative forms of ethnographic writing and representation. Participants do not need to be working on or with artistic practices themselves. The Lab will be in hybrid format and participants must pre-register here: https://rb.gy/gtf1nt
Lab short abstract
Following the work of Koycheva (2025) and Artz and Koycheva (2024) this hybrid lab workshops how founding a venture (whether for-profit or not-for-profit) extends the existing anthropological and ethnographic repertoire and recalibrates the role of anthropological critique in public life.
Lab long abstract
Whether aimed at making academics more entrepreneurial (Koycheva 2022; cf. Artz and Koycheva 2024; Dimov 2020) or entrepreneurs more scientific in their approach (Dimov 2024), venturing can surface and develop possibilities from research. This indoor hybrid lab brings this conversation to anthropology to ask: how can founding a venture advance anthropological intervention in a polarized world? Conceptualized as a method (Sarasvathy and Venkataraman 2011), entrepreneurship is virtually absent from the anthropological toolbox for knowledge formation, knowledge formalization, and intervention in the world. Lab participants reconceptualize founding as an anthropological method; confront the limits of critique in its standard academic form; generated speculative but grounded ventures as theory in action; reflect on anthropology’s role in public, economic, and political life through venturing.
Modules
1: Opening Provocation: Founding as Method (30 minutes)
How to think with “startup” logics.
2: Friction Mapping (20 minutes)
How to articulate a problem
3: Decision-making under pressure (35 minutes)
How to answer What is absolutely non-negotiable?
4: From Critique to Foundable Intervention (35 minutes)
Creating a “founding proposition”.
5: Group Reflection: What Changed When Critique Had to Be Built? (10 minutes)
6: Form Design Sprint (35 minutes)
How will the venture exist in the world?
7: Demo Minute (30 minutes)
1-minute pitch to founder-anthropologists and local Poznan startup operators
8: Closing Synthesis: What Is Anthropology Capable of When It Founds? (15 minutes)
Collective reflection
Max 12 participants, by selection only. EASA Accessibility compliant. Apply here: https://forms.gle/ycmbo8cPfr4ARMug9
Lab short abstract
The Lab offers hands-on examples of decolonial pedagogy from around the world applied to anthropological education, including creative and performative tasks, deep listening, sound recording, wondering walks with and for autistic students, and sign language pedagogy in mixed Deaf–hearing classrooms
Lab long abstract
It is possibly a truism to point out the connection between the polarization of debates in many contemporary societies, especially in the ‘West’ and the dualism that characterizes their dominant ontologies. In addition to the well-trodden debates about binaries such as mind-body, body-world, nature-culture, able-disabled, certain universalizing dualisms are also deeply entwined in epistemic coloniality.
Coloniality is at heart also a universalizing epistemic project operationalized around sets of binaries. On one side of the divide is rational, androcentric, ocularcentric, logo/scriptocentric thought, on the other side everything else including subjectivity, body sensorium and any epistemologies that do not align with colonial narratives.
Decolonial approaches include exploring pluriversal possibilities. In pedagogical terms, pluriversality entails not simply diversifying content, but rethinking the epistemic conditions through which knowledge is produced, authorized, and learned. Pluriversal educational practices offer a way towards dislodging polarized views of contemporary social issues, thus they have the potential to counter the entrenchment of antagonistic and adversarial framings.
In this Lab, the convenors will offer exercises and hands-on practices of decolonial pedagogies applied to anthropological education. These will include creative and performative approaches, sonic methods like deep listening, sound recording and playlist exercises, wondering walks as ways of teaching with and for autistic students, and sign language pedagogy in mixed Deaf–hearing classrooms. The seven examples, from different parts of the world (Brazil, Italy, Germany, Malta, Mexico, the USA) give evidence of the plurality of decolonial anthropological pedagogies already in practice today.
Lab short abstract
This lab addresses polarization around student GenAI-use through survey insights, World Café discussions, and best-practice examples. Providing ample room for mutual exchange, this lab will be the start of a teaching guide and future position paper on teaching anthropology at the age of GenAI.
Lab long abstract
The use of GenA.I. by students has become polarising at universities, forcing instructors to consider limiting its use, banning A.I., reconceptualizing teaching, and/or training students on how to use it critically. The consequence is a generalised suspicion and pressure in the classroom, creating didactic, epistemic and political uncertainties that can disadvantage students who are navigating time challenges, language barriers, or (other) effects of neurodiversity.
Our first activity conducts an interactive exercise to gauge participants’ positionality and teaching experiences in the era of GenAI. We will then introduce the results of a recent survey of BA and MA students in anthropology, which indicated that 76% of students thought that the use of GenA.I. for assignments was problematic and should be limited, yet many still seem to rely on it. Taking this as a starting point, this lab aims to spark a cross-university conversation about instructors' concerns regarding students’ use of GenAI, the gaps between values and practice that instructors navigate.
The second activity features a World Café, where participants collectively uncover and confront assumptions, anecdotes, and experiences with GenAI in the classroom, and share best practice assessment and teaching examples like zines, photography and process-based portfolios. To wrap up, we will discuss how anthropological understandings can inform pedagogies, including abolitionist frameworks, and how we can create learning environments shifting focus to critical engagement for students and lecturers alike.
This lab will result in a position paper and a pedagogical toolkit on the future of teaching anthropology and GenAI.
Lab short abstract
This Lab explores activist research as caring infrastructure. Through collaborative discussion and examples from our own work, participants will rethink anthropology’s role in supporting social movements and in building common infrastructures that sustain collective action in difficult times.
Lab long abstract
Anthropology has long oscillated between applied interventions and withdrawal from engagement. While rooted in colonial knowledge production, it has also inspired powerful solidarities. Even today as global crises accelerate, ‘old guard’ institutions and figures in the discipline distance themselves from activism, while a new generation of anthropological organisations, platforms, and individuals increasingly engages in prefigurative action. While democratic erosion, climate breakdown, and rising inequalities demand renewed forms of engaged research, the question remains: if/how can anthropology become a part of broader infrastructures of solidarity and care, not extracting knowledge but co-producing research-informed social change in our fields, institutions, and communities.
This Lab invites participants to rethink what a “meaningful” anthropological intervention looks like in a polarised world. Drawing on our own activist research and collaborations we foreground research as caring infrastructure — work that can sustain movements, nurture political confidence, and help build common resources. Examples include networked commons such as LeftEast (Taylor & Ivancheva, 2025), where collective editorial labor and translation (ELMO), and Zapatista-inspired encuentros created the affective and material solidarity infrastructure across the postsocialist Left. Likewise, SustainAction's research of social movements experiments with collaborative “kitchen‑work” (SustainAction, 2025) methodologies emphasizes care, relational labor, and transformative knowledge co-production with collective actors — working within/against/beyond academia to support civil society in times of polycrisis.
Through open discussion, improvisation, and co‑creation, this Lab asks if/how (your) ethnographic work can serve as infrastructure of solidarity/care. Can activist research reshape anthropological knowledge? What infrastructures of social movements and democratic futures can we collectively imagine?
Lab short abstract
This lab explores how material traces can be used as a methodological, ethical, and political tool in engaged and applied anthropology. Participants will work with real material traces - objects left by people on the move and found at the Polish–Belarusian border during solidarity interventions
Lab long abstract
This lab engages with material traces of migration from the Polish–Belarusian border. Participants will work with real objects once owned by people on the move and lost/abandoned/found on the Polish–Belarusian border. A holey shoe, a torn jacket, a bottle of perfume, a child’s toy: in the context of border violence and restrictive migration regimes, these ordinary items become silent witnesses to mobility, suffering, resilience, and everyday life under extreme precarity. Accompanied by recorded stories of people encountered in the forest, the objects are treated as relational artefacts carrying memory, experience, and political meaning.
Against the backdrop of polarised public and political debates on migration, the lab reflects on anthropology as a practice of witnessing, translation, and critical engagement. Polarisation is understood not only as a clash of opinions but as a process of boundary-making—between “us” and “them”, visibility and erasure, empathy and indifference. Working with material objects enables participants to engage these processes in concrete, embodied ways beyond abstract discourse.
Through collective analysis and creative exercises, participants reflect on what objects “say”, how they can be represented, and how anthropology can depolarize the narration about migration. Ethical dilemmas of representing suffering and vulnerability, and strategies for communicating border violence without reproducing harm and white saviourism, are central concerns.
Combining ethnographic reflection, critical discussion, and experimental forms of representation, the lab situates anthropology at the intersection of research, activism, and solidarity practices, and explores how engaged anthropology can contribute to imagining less polarised and more just futures.
Lab short abstract
A creative, hands-on lab, transforming Icelandic sheep fleece into yarn, engaging making-as-method to explore bodily/sensory forms of knowledge production. Through material play, learning, and making, we reflect collectively on the generative possibilities of thinking-with-materials.
Lab long abstract
This experimental lab uses Icelandic wool as a methodological provocation for the possibilities of anthropological thinking in a polarised world. Moving beyond discursive approaches, participants engage tactilely with fleece, roving, and yarn to generate knowledge about difference, tension, and connection within their own research fields and the field of anthropology more broadly.
The lab begins with unstructured sensory encounters: participants handle fibre forms freely, noticing impulses, gestures, and the reciprocal nature of material engagement. Through collective reflection, we consider how these interactions illuminate the polarities in our work—in the field, theoretical frameworks, within ourselves as researchers, in our academic institutions, and with non-academic parties.
Participants then learn pencil spinning, transforming loose fibre into yarn through movements of the body and simple tool use. This making process becomes a space for thinking-through-hands about polarity itself: twist and counter-twist, tension and release, individual fibres becoming collective structure. Working in pairs, participants then ply their spun fibres together, negotiating tension, direction, and the resistance of materials that must cooperate to become something new.
The lab offers a creative format that expands traditional anthropological practice by foregrounding craft knowledge, sensory engagement, and the generative possibilities of making-as-methodology. Participants leave with a material artifact of collaborative practice and methodological insights for engaging with polarisation.
Photographic documentation of the lab will be shared online for all conference participants to engage with.
Material requirements: fleece, roving, yarn, pencils (provided by facilitator).
Registration link: https://forms.gle/UxYFUqdtV8x9P1Pr8
Lab short abstract
Design and anthropology share a growing relationship rooted in power, acquisition, and neoliberal regimes. This Lab invites design anthropologists and practitioners to challenge disciplinary hierarchies and open critical, multimodal inquiries through polarized edible and wearable objects.
Lab long abstract
The Anthropology, Dates, Design Lab invites participants to rethink anthropological relations by means of design. By positioning designers not as auxiliary contributors but as interlocutors, we aim to broaden current debates on multimodal anthropology beyond methodological experimentation toward a more critically grounded form of practice. Dates and outfits of different varieties, sources, and marketing claims serve to anchor the critical discussion. Three out of every four Medjoul dates are produced in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. Examining the packaging and infrastructural design, consumers make engaged decisions in solidarity with Palestine, whose date farmers face tremendous hurdles in harvesting and exporting their produce under Israeli occupation. Design mediates polarised political narratives through everyday commodities. The Kufiyeh, a Palestinian symbol of identity and resistance, has been decontextualised by the global design industry and repackaged as an aesthetic commodity. Yet simultaneously, this appropriation and mass production have enabled activists to reclaim the garment for solidarity action. These cases of edible and wearable design bring into focus: How is design complicit in obfuscating settler colonialism while simultaneously creating space for resistance? What roles does design play in both increasing polarisation and in mobilising counter-narratives? What kind of anthropological perspectives can we map when critical design theory and practices come into play?
At the intersection of design and anthropology as a growing relationship rooted in histories of power, acquisition, and neoliberal regimes, This lab invites design anthropologists and practitioners to challenge disciplinary hierarchies and open critically grounded modes of multimodal inquiry for imagining different worlds.
Lab short abstract
This workshop for educators invites participants to consider the importance of ‘moving on’ as a discipline, community, and individuals from trauma incurred in the pursuit of ethnographic research. We will develop strategies and tools for supervisors to support both their supervisees and themselves.
Lab long abstract
This workshop for educators invites participants to consider the importance of ‘moving on’ as a discipline, a community, and individuals from trauma incurred in the pursuit of ethnographic research. Existing research (Pollard 2009; Freed, Procter, and Spector 2024) shows that experiences of trauma are ubiquitous among PhD students and early career researchers, and yet Anthropology as a discipline is doing little to support and create meaningful cultural change for its practitioners. Our own research shows that cultural and educational change is particularly necessary in order to inform, support, and treat experiences of trauma emerging from fieldwork, particularly within the supervisory relationship.
Supervisors play a critical role in modelling management of the impacts of trauma exposure resulting from academic work. The normalisation of discussions of trauma, however, relies on appropriate recognition of and support for their own potential trauma, which early generations of anthropologists may not have had. We also acknowledge the multiple responsibilities and unreasonable expectations placed on supervisors in the neoliberal academic context, and seek to create a supportive and compassionate space. In this lab we collaboratively develop strategies and tools for supervisors to support both their supervisees and themselves in moving on from an anthropology that silences, represses, or otherwise ignores the realities of fieldwork
Lab short abstract
This lab invites anthropologists to experiment with queer entropy as an analytic - an attempt to think with, and productively against, the physicist’s notion of entropy as disorder, irreversibility, and the drift of systems over time.
Lab long abstract
This lab explores connections between quantum entropy, queer and trans theory, and anthropological knowledge. We'll experiment with the conceiving of worlds as relationally disordered, drawing on Levi-Strauss’ ‘Entropology’ to explore partiality and randomness in the (un)making of social scientific explanation.
While entropy in physics describes measurable transformations of energy and information, we ask what happens when this concept is unsettled through queer and anthropological lenses. How might queer theory’s refusal of normative teleologies open understandings of entropic ethnographic worlds? How might conversations with physics offer analogies for aspects of fieldwork that resist coherence or closure? And how might such questions offer anthropological counterpoints to polarisation in knowledge practices and socio-political systems?
Building on Marilyn Strathern’s reminder that we only ever apprehend parts of systems, we will take up speculative storytelling, collage, ‘textual tearing’ and 'decomposition' as creative methodologies, prevailing against order and linearity in knowledge-making. As anthropological theorisation arises from the redescription of worlds, we will work together to produce experimental representations that decay and dissipate, forming and unforming together in the wording and envisioning of worlds.
Amidst this process we'll wonder about potentialities for novel understandings engendered via shared reflections on entropic analogies; the melting of ice as analogous to anthropologies of un-concealment, the rotting of matter nurturing mycelial pathways. Against this background, our lab will attend with living processes of queer entropy as innovative anthropological practice. The lab will serve as a generative space for developing a collaborative vocabulary that we propose will result in a co-edited publication.
Lab short abstract
Knowing fascism when it’s in your face: we invite you to a lab as a friends’ group chat in a collective doomscrolling sharing frenzy about the crises we are living in. With video reels, photos, memes, social media posts etc., friends present how they know what they know as autoethnography.
Lab long abstract
Knowing fascism, not as theory, but when it’s in your face: we invite you to a Lab as a friends’ group chat in a collective doomscrolling sharing frenzy about the crises we are living in. With video reels, photos, memes, social media posts etc., friends present how they know what they know as autoethnography. Suspending our usual theories, we ask participants to enact how “fascism” has mobilized activists confronting rightwing assaults today:
What are the signs of fascism, how does it proceed, and how do we know it is “here,” however defined? How do we counter the silences that its repression generates? How do people activate resistance? How are protest networks beginning to push back effectively? How do we maintain our own security? What tasks do we need to undertake, such as protecting the vulnerable, practicing solidarity with those attacked, dealing with our own traumas, and narrating our own visceral experiences of fascism? What roles do performance and graphics have in these accounts? How do we respond to fascist social media when it attacks us? How can these practices allow us to overcome polarization to convert antagonists into allies?
We ask participants to reflect on encountering polarizing authoritarianism and the affective dilemmas it poses. How is repression embodied, and what do you learn from it? How do you keep on going when the world is falling in on you? When can you convert (or not) antagonists into allies?
Lab short abstract
The Household Finance Lab is a collaborative space to explore borrowing, (non)repayment and default as key sites of accumulation, governance and state coercion. We will discuss and collage mundane paper artefacts as ways to examine economic polarisation and to imagine more equitable futures.
Lab long abstract
Thematic outline: Financial lending to households drives economic polarisation, and interrelated divisions of class, race, gender, citizenship and in/formality. State practices, including enforcement, regulation and algorithms, shape how households borrow, repay, default and imagine their financial futures. Connecting daily life with large-scale processes, this Lab takes empirical artefacts as analytical gateways for exploring financial exploitation and domination. Thus we treat the state as an assemblage of practices and artefacts, debt as a moral and political relation rather than purely economic, and household finance as a site where state power and capital accumulation coalesce and are encountered. We will envision less coercive, more equitable financial systems, drawing on interlocutors’ hopes, already-existing alternatives and our own imaginations.
Format: Participants should be researchers focusing on household finance and/or debt. Each participant brings one empirical artefact related to household finance – a paper document, or print-out – for instance, contracts, amortisation schedules, legal documents, spreadsheets, letters/SMS/emails to debtors, central bank communications, court decisions, credit scores. Each participant presents (10mins) on the artefact’s context and everyday usages (including subversions and non-usage). We proceed onto small group (3-4) discussion and collaging. Participants are pre-assigned discussant for one another, opening discussion with a 5-minute response structured around 3 questions:
1) What state capacities, modes of accumulation, and moral claims are associated with this artefact(s)?
2) How do they compare with other settings?
3) What alternatives can we envision?
We will collage the paper artefacts in small groups. After the Lab we will digitally exhibit the collaged artefacts.