easa

Laboratories (labs) at EASA2018

Anthropologists are still often imagined as individuals moving ‘there’ to present their knowledge ‘here’ – usually in the form of a monograph or academic paper. At the same time anthropology is increasingly done at home or in collaborative settings. Moreover, fieldwork moves into spaces hitherto unexplored by the discipline, such as boardrooms and scientific laboratories. Happening in new ways and in new places, anthropological knowledge and how it is produced will change. From multi-sited ethnography to speculative fiction and the realms of the digital: Ethnography continues to move in different directions, expanding and stretching the concept in the process.

Laboratories offer participants the possibility to move beyond the paper format and explore aspects of our work that do not fit the traditional scholarly mould of 20-minute presentations in front of a more or less attentive audience. Rather than exhibiting already finished work, the conference Laboratories organise collective research activities that are open-ended and cultivate possibilities for surprise, novelty and learning. Orchestrating interventions in work-in-progress, participants’ involvement and sharing of insights and skills are put the forefront. In this sense, Laboratories exploit an important strength of anthropology: that its forms of knowledge-making are never settled. By moving out of the conference room, Laboratories allow for rethinking the spaces of anthropological knowledge production, as well as attending to the embodiment of knowledge and the sensorial character of experience.

The convenors of EASA2018 lab programme are excited to announce a diverse and creative set of laboratories for this year. The laboratories of this conference include hands-on sessions that aim at exploring, training or innovating anthropological methods, such as focus groups. Some experiment with forms of ethnographic expression through crafts, drama, and embodied experience. Dance, arts and physical and sensorial techniques such as meditation or movement as well as experimental use of media are all featured in this years’ labs. Moreover, through activities both inside the buildings of Stockholm University and outside on the university grounds, the laboratory sessions seek to nurture spaces in which it is possible to explore the challenges and potentials of dynamic interactions with collaborators in interdisciplinary environments, policy settings or through activism. Lastly, some laboratories foreground anthropology as a discipline, focusing on diversity and the accessibility to anthropological work.

Lab programme co-ordinators
Else Vogel, Johan Nilsson

View the labs  

Any queries with the above please email conference(at)easaonline.org