Send message to Convenors

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