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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?