4th Colleex workshop
The 4th Colleex workshop “Styles of Experimentation. Unsettling the Anthropological Syllabus” will take place this 16-19 October in Berlin at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
While submissions are closed, we wanted to share our work for those who might be interested in our network’s work. We’re also happy to report that nearly 50 participants will join us in Berlin, transforming what we imagined as a small workshop into a 3-day gathering for sharing and engaging with experimental work in anthropology. We’re very much looking forward to our meeting in October and hope many more EASA members will join the network.
CURRENT CONVENORS 2024-2028
Elisabeth Luggauer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlín), Maka Suarez (University of Oslo), Jonas Tinius (Saarland University), Adolfo Estalella (Complutense University of Madrid)
Workshop description
Experimentation is increasingly becoming a subject and relevant epistemic practice in anthropology. It sometimes unsettles traditional observational practices, opens pathways for radically novel forms of representation, and challenges anthropology’s fixation on a limited notion of anthropos. Ethnographic experimentation contributes meaningfully to a broader debate about the current state of anthropology, problematising its empirical forms of engagement, modes of representation, and analytical practices. While experimentation is not a universally applicable or representative practice within the discipline, it signals a significant response to what we see as challenges of and with the contemporary more broadly. In this fourth colleex workshop we want to follow up a fundamental strand of discussion in experimental and multimodal anthropology in recent years, the what now question. The pervasiveness of these discussions in anthropology invites us to move beyond the question of if in order to explore how to implement, examine, and teach ethnographic experimentation.
An answer to the previous challenging question points to anthropological curricula. If the practice of ethnographic experimentation is valuable for our discipline, the question that follows is how to teach and learn from it. We think that the unsettling experimentation that many of us have embraced demands from us an effort to unsettle the anthropological curriculum as well. The syllabus represents one of these grey albeit fundamental genres of academia, a bureaucratic document that is also a pedagogic programme and a creative opportunity. It is the instrument through which the canon is reinforced and precisely for this reason, it is an exceptional instrument to challenge hegemony and open spaces for alternatives. For this workshop, we want to take a step back to take a step forward and inquire into the radical histories of ethnographic experimentation and its pedagogical potential in and beyond the classroom.
To discuss these questions, we have partnered up with the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology and the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin to think about curricula, syllabi, and pedagogy in a city of continuous experimentation. Our central question, inspired by the transformations of the city of Berlin and its radical and oftentimes problematic engendering of transformed experiences of life, is: What would a syllabus for ethnographic experimentation look like? How could we scale this up to inform wider pedagogical curricula? To arrive at some temporary answers, we want to open up this collective creation of a possible syllabus and do a joint “syllabus critique”, asking, for example: How did multimodality and experimentation in anthropology develop? What role has collective creation played in anthropology and what happened to it? What kind of solidarity do questions of co-creation engender? What are the opportunities and limitations of institutionalising multimodal experimentation? How do we bring pedagogy beyond the university to bear and reshape academic curricula?
Our aim is not to create the multimodal syllabus during a three-day workshop, but to open the question radically of how and what to teach when we talk about experimentation and multimodality? To do so, we believe it is critical to reflect on the genealogies of the terms we use, and share the practice of an expanded pedagogy in anthropology.
IMAGE CREDITS:
Rubén D’Hers, Terminaciones Nerviosas, 2024 (Acrylic on canvas 167 x 117 cm. Unplugged refrigerator, piano strings, stones, bird feather, electrical bow, transducer, amplifier & computer controlled dc motors). Exhibition view, Villa Romana, Florence.