14th EASA Biennial Conference
Anthropological legacies and human futures
Department of Human Science for Education 'Riccardo Massa' and Department of Sociology and Social Research
at University of Milano-Bicocca
20-23 July, 2016
Laboratories
Following EASA2014's successful experience with Laboratories, as spaces of communication characterized by experimentation, collaboration, interaction or improvisation, we will again hold Laboratories for EASA2016. In rethinking anthropological legacies and possible futures, techniques, methods, patterns of scientific communication and of research will be at stake and “at play”.
Laboratories are proposed as heterogeneous media of presentation where the results or the process of experimenting ethnography, of the object/subject of research and other patterns in sharing of knowledge, in the wider sense, take place within more flexible spaces and media of communications than text-based presentation.
Labs open up the possibility to communicate, investigate, perform and “debate” through experience-based, incorporated patterns of knowledge, social practices, performative and collaborative mis-en-scène (theatre, dance, music), patterns of communication that reproduce the resonance and immersion techniques in ethnography and in cultural dynamics through the production of heterogeneous texts. Contemporary conditions of global cultural flows ask for an active engagement with different means of knowledge/representation and with action research as spaces of experimentation.
This opens up the potentialities of installations, performances, audio-visual presentations, art and anthropology techniques and research, sensory experience, musical performance, radio and other new media role in research and in anthropology. Besides, methodologies of the Laboratories could focus on or allow other patterns of sharing, of involvement, of participation coming form the anthropological legacies but experimenting new ways and media, with attention to new subjects (as for example children, environmental non-human actors, new marginalities and peripheries of contemporary cultural flows) in tracing patterns of the future.
Further, Labs open up the possibility of more flexible and dynamic interdisciplinary research and communication through dialogical presentation, out of the applied/theoretical anthropology dichotomy: interdisciplinary research more and more request facing complexity of possible futures (as in the case of environmental change), the dialectic of more applied or militant research within academic format of research and communication, collective-based research and anthropological commitment in relation to more individual-based research.
