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AURA-Alien Energy workshop: Material practices of scholarship (closed workshop)

Anthropogenic landscapes, climate change, waves, carbon, futures: the objects at the heart of the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene and Alien Energy projects do not fit well into scholarship-as-usual. They cross established disciplinary boundaries and call out for new modes of engagement, collaboration, and presentation. What are the overlapping methodological concerns into which our objects of study pull us?

Info about event

Time

Monday 17 November 2014,  at 11:30 - 17:00

Location

Moesgård Museum, conference room 301

Organizer

Heather Swanson, AURA and Brit Ross Winthereik, ITU

This workshop aims to focus on the material practices of our scholarship. With this workshop we aim to open a joint conversation about our ongoing empirical explorations and their relationship with our theoretical and analytical orientations. Both of our projects are enacting fields such as anthropology and STS differently: we are finding that classical disciplinary practices are not adequate for our current work. In response, we are turning to new forms and collaborations: art interventions, ‘critical makings,’ and engaged science. In this workshop, we want to create a space for reflection: What kinds of scholarship are we bringing into being through our new practices? In what ways might our work be – in the words of Marilyn Strathern – in an “awkward relationship” with established scholarly approaches and practices? What kinds of insights might emerge from such tensions and frictions? We hope to raise questions about how materially oriented methods for data collection, analysis, presentation and collaboration may enable us to live with established traditions, while both moving around and being moved.

 

The format of the workshop will be two sets of paired papers, aimed to create dialogues between our projects. A senior member from each project will open a discussion inspired by each pair.

 

Program

 

11.30-12.00     Welcome and sandwich (provided)

12.00-12.30     Elaine Gan, AURA art director:

Multispecies Coordinations

12.30-13.00     Brit Ross Winthereik, Alien Energy principal investigator:

Experimental Ethnography : Thinking through the Alien Energy             Digital Walking Stick

13.00-13.50     Discussion

Initial remarks: Anna Tsing, AURA project leader  

13.50-14.00     Break

14.00-14.30     Heather Swanson, AURA post-doctoral fellow:

Methods for More-than-Human Anthropology

14.30-15.00     Laura Watts, Alien Energy co-investigator and researcher:

                     The Work of a Defiant Ethnographer  

15.00-15.50     Discussion

Initial remarks: John Law, ITU visiting scholar  

15.50-16.00     Break

16.00-17.00     Walking seminar with museum as inspirational background

17.00-17.30     Closing remarks

 

18-                   Dinner in downtown Aarhus