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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.