Our present is defined by uncertainty – social, political, economic, and ecological – and how we understand and relate to such uncertainty shapes how we forge our futures. In recent years, ethnographers across many disciplines have increasingly begun to delve into this uncertainty, researching possible and speculative worlds. But how do we transform our ethnographic practices into concrete actions of global citizenship and social justice that engage individuals and communities? This workshop explores multimodal and multisensory performance ethnography as an approach for imagining and intervening in futures. Through provocations, videos, sounds, and performative exercises, workshop participants will explore performance ethnography as a way of envisioning anthropology’s moral responsibility.
Workshop co-conveners: Rana El Kadi, Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, and Rajat Nayyar from Emergent Futures CoLab
Emergent Futures CoLab
This transdisciplinary collective emerged in March 2020. They seek to address the sense that urgent action must be taken in response to events that are currently emerging and shaping our worlds. As our political, economic and environmental futures become increasingly uncertain, we are concerned with what it means to research, create art and take action in this climate of felt urgency.
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston is an anthropologist, performance theorist, theatre director and playwright. She is a Associate Professor of Theatre, lecturing Theatre & Performance Studies and Social Anthropology at York University. Her research interests include performance ethnography, ethnographic storytelling, ethnographic (non)fiction, multimodal ethnography, physical and political theatre and performance. She is a Co-Curator of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (CIE).
Rajat Nayyar is an anthropologist and filmmaker who is currently a SSHRC Vanier Scholar and a PhD Candidate in Theater at York University. He is the co-founder of Emergent Futures CoLab (EFC) through which he curates Talking Uncertainty, an online talk series/podcast that features future-focussed scholars and artists from around the world. He is also the current convenor of Futures Anthropology Network of European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and a co-editor of the Performance Ethnography section of Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (CIE). His recent article ‘Granular Activisms’ was published in the fall 2022 issue Visual Anthropology Review (VAR).
Rana El Kadi holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Alberta, Canada. She is a Lecturer and Research Associate with the Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Disability Studies and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Guelph, affiliated with Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice. Rana is also Co-Founder and Curator at Emergent Futures CoLab (EFC). Her research interests lie in mad/neurodivergent/disability arts, accessibility, imaginative and multimodal ethnography, radical research ethics, and cripped research methodologies and pedagogies. Rana is currently Co-Investigator on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant on access in the arts and a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant on developmentally disabled people’s experiences of neurodivergence and their artistic communities of practice within and in the afterlife of institutions.
The Workshop will be held in English.
