what is this all about

Last year, I was fortunate to spend time as a fellow at NIAS, where I was reading and thinking about ethnography is an entangled, embodied, and affective way to generate knowledge. Because of the nature of the crowd at NIAS, I got to discuss how ethnography works in practice with anthropologists, sociologists and historians, alongside artists and journalists. I was struck by similarities in the ways many of us move through our process of research and creation: being drawn in, getting stuck, working with and against our available materials, until we come to a creation point and can share it with others.

It also struck me that lines between fields like art, science, even journalism, are probably more fluid than institutional structures allow them to be. One fear a colleague expressed was that if projects like mine 'de-scientificized' ethnography, it endangers the position of anthropologists as valid in academia. More concretely, it makes it easier to reduce funding to anthropology by characterizing it as lacking in scientific basis. In this vein, I would rather not stop at ethnography; science more broadly deserves to consider how embodied practice plays a role in creating it, in ways that are fundamental to generating science. But one step at a time.

This workshop, therefore, comes out of these engagements along with the standing offer from NIAS to host workshops for last year's fellows. It builds on the activities of people in the room, who participated in those NIAS conversations, as well as other conversations before and since, that bring attention to the process of generating knowledge and creating art. I take these as interrelated and sometimes co-occurring. Having done some work as an artist (20 years ago in film production) prior to becoming an academic, I can recognize a similar struggle from conception until a point of breakthrough that happens (at least to me) in both pursuits.

Beyond blurring these institutional divisions, I have also organised this workshop because it seems to be increasingly fashionable to fund projects that 'co-create' by integrating artistic and scientific perspectives on a topic. I wonder if, by building more recognition about the hows and whys of the way artists and 'scientists' work the way they do, we might be able to design projects that bring those procedures and processes into harmony. Ultimately, to recognize how knowledge is being generated in the embodied practice of working together in a way where funders can recognize its value as well.