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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.