Exhausted by academic writing that mistakes joyless seriousness for rigour? Suffocated by the writing voice you’ve somehow adopted against your will? Ready to drop the scholarly ego and step into the pool of potential plentitudes a.k.a. collective writing?
Here we go!
Invitation to join a series of (virtual and in-person) gatherings:
In times when academic writing feels more and more powerless, and when we feel our voices have to replicate the violent abstractions that have been enacted upon us, we insist on reclaiming joy in our thinking and knowledge production. Our brains can do more than standard formatting; by dancing with our neuroticisms and relinquishing authorial control, we can interrupt rigid patterns of thinking and feeling, opening space for both the perception of existing but overlooked connections and the creation of new ones. At a moment of rising authoritarianism and polarising discourses, we reclaim the transformative power of anthropological thinking/writing.
In the spirit of liberating our brains from the misery of the internalised check-lists adopted when performing the ascetic academic, we invite anthropologists and the anthropologically-adjacent to take part in the process of reworking our relationship to anthropological key concepts. Not through canon-encased abstract and too-clever-by-half (re)definitions, but rather through making unruly connections between concepts and cases. We want to start with our anthropological material and collectively explore its conceptual and theoretical potential, expanding our capacity to relate to concepts, places and happenings that have not been thought together before. Bring your ethnographic vignettes, artefacts, sensory materials or whatever it is you think with and through (and which you would be willing to lose control over).
We hold on to the belief that anthropology can make important public interventions, but we need to attempt new forms of doing so. An anthropology by stealth, an anthropology with a friendly toothless grin, an anthropology that finds itself floating in your soup, an anthropology that is also relatable to those (un)lucky enough to not be professional anthropologists.
A definitionless dictionary calls for conceptual rigour rooted in shared creation. As such, our invitation is to think & write collectively through joy.
How to apply
Deadline: 22 February 2026 via cicek@allegralaboratory.net
Please send:
- An anthropological fragment: short text, photo, drawing, sound recording, archival document, cultural artifact, etc. Photos, sounds, artefacts should be accompanied by a short text contextualising their origin. The fragment does not need to relate to joy (the joy will be in our collective process).
- Five concepts you think need to be rethought and some sentences on why they need to be rethought in relation to the current political moment. The concepts do not need to relate to the fragment.
Please do not send us your CV.
The process of getting to know each other and writing together doesn’t necessarily have to be, but might be a little weird. Please commit to the experiment and come to the meetings in an appropriately unruly spirit.
Ethnographies of Joy: A Definitionless Dictionary in the Shadow of Impending Global Fascism
