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Lab short abstract

A practical, experimental workshop to develop heterotopic interventions for a polarised world. The Lab will offer participants conceptual and concrete tools drawn from arts-based research to imagine otherwise, heal rifts, overcome silences and engage new audiences in their own research settings.

Lab long abstract

This Lab will be a practical, experimental workshop aiming to develop heterotopic interventions for a polarised world. In a 105-minute mix of plenary and small-group exercises, up to 25 participants will be invited to bring questions and research challenges from their own fieldsites and to think through how to create temporary heterotopic spaces within their research contexts to offer alternatives where polarisation or crisis have foreclosed imagination and fixed people into rigid positions.

Building on the facilitators’ respective long-term engagements with poets, writers, and artists across diverse fieldsites (Iran/Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iceland, Denmark, the UK and China) and experience of running poetry workshops, the Lab will explore how the arts function as distinct epistemic practices. Our ethnographic work demonstrates how creative practices can generate heterotopic spaces within research encounters where experiences that resist straightforward articulation (the interior, the inchoate, the invisible, the metaphysical) can be expressed; elsewheres and elsewhiles can be inhabited; and possible futures can be imagined. Literary texts (and kindred art forms) have the potential to hold conflicting views and create nuanced emotional states and atmospheres in the receiver.

The Lab will offer conceptual and concrete tools drawn from arts-based research (e.g. poetic devices, speculative or future-oriented writing, or other creative prompts) to imagine possibilities for witnessing, reimagining and healing

oriented to collaborative research methods and/or alternative forms of ethnographic writing and representation. Participants do not need to be working on or with artistic practices themselves. The Lab will be in hybrid format and participants must pre-register here: https://rb.gy/gtf1nt