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Lab short abstract

How can we encounter, translate, and witness reality across divides? This experimental lab invites participants of all skill levels to join an ethnoGraphic experiment exploring collaborative modes of seeing, sketching, and engaging as a means to build bridges in an increasingly polarized world.

Lab long abstract

Acknowledging anthropology's ability to encounter, witness, and translate conflict in an increasingly polarized world, what can the discipline do to contribute to a more cohesive dialogue across difference? Multimodal ethnography has shown promise in creating space for such dialogue by highlighting embodiment, processuality, and relationality in its methods. More specifically, multimodal ethnographers engage with drawing as a sensorial, body-mediated experience (Taussig 2009; Causey 2012). For Taussig (2011), drawing juxtaposes documentation and imagination; for Ingold (2011), the medium allows the ethnographer to be fully "present," and Jain (2021) describes drawing not as an illustration of an idea, but the idea itself. Based on these prompts, lab convenors propose to conduct an ethnoGraphic experiment, inviting participants to draw in a collective, participatory and non-judgemental way, as a mode of being together, and as a means of gathering impressions, rather than forcing a point of view.

Guided by a series of prompts, we will explore what it means to create at the site of difference, to engage with contentious topics, and to invite both human, and non-human actors into the process of co-creation. Weather-permitting, part of this lab will take place outdoors. Lab convenors will ensure that the lab will be accessible to participants of all artistic levels, and physical abilities, and drawing supplies will be provided on site. The lab’s aspiration is to challenge our own attachments, viewpoints, and ideas about authorship in an open and sensitive manner as a critical opening into what it means to create together across difference.