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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.