Laboratories - research-based interactive group sessions
Taking inspiration from the enormous success of the laboratories organised at the most recent European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) biennial conference in Tallinn, Estonia, ASA15 has provided space for producing and presenting ethnographic works that depart from the convention of the text-based presentation. The laboratories will provide occasions for experimentation, encouraging ‘symbiotic’ knowledge exchange through a range of visual, acoustic and performative methods. The intention of the laboratories is to explore methodological and epistemological possibilities of carrying out and presenting anthropological research collaboratively, through dynamic and reciprocal exchange.
Laboratories may:
- explore non-textual and non-linear presentations of anthropological knowledge
- entail collaborative forms of presentation as an alternative to the individualistic approach to the scholarly presentation
- offer experiential presentations that are characterised by action and participation
- produce an immersive environment where people share insights and skills, and experiment without a definitive idea of what might emerge.
The selection committee bore the following criteria in mind:
- Interactive activity: The laboratory should be a site where there is an activity or process, rather than a presentation of research findings.
- Collaboration: laboratories should have a collaborative dimension – preferably though not limited to a form of collaboration between an anthropologist and another practitioner (eg designers, sound artists, engineers, activists, performance artists, urban planners, architects).
- Embedded: proposals that find ways to embed themselves into the conference's events and milieu. For example, proposals should take into account how the laboratories will have an impact on the physical site or on the delegates' experience of the conference.
- Ethnography: proposals should show a commitment to the complexities of ethnography as it regards the ways of articulating the human experience in the world.
There will be two laboratories:
L03 Mutual anthropologies: developing some reciprocal approaches to research
