Experimental Methods Workshop Series.
Longings are connective forces between here and there. Increasing attentiveness to them can help foster deeper understanding between individuals and communities. In ethnographic research, creative practice, social work, or just in regular everyday life, making space for longing adds a new dimension to our encounters with each other. It teaches how longings and their interactions are integral to the processes of being, belonging, and becoming.
Ethnographic attention to longing
Longing embodies both stillness and movement: it sits at the crossroads of time, space, imagination, affect. It feeds on opportunity and entrapment, positionality and affordance. We can see it as an affect, a practice, a resource, an act of resistance, a form of creativity, a relationship. Engaging longing in ethnographic interactions and relations can open our understanding to new dimensions of movements – physical and metaphysical, tangible and intangible ones. It can help us inquire about how those movements relate, co-depend, produce each other – or also how they are kept apart. This workshop series introduces a set of methodological practices that engage with longing on different levels of ethnographic interaction. These include landscapes of longing, dialogues with longing, museum of longing, a parade of longings, scales of longings. The introduced methodological approximation of longing can be adapted for research and teaching contexts.
Focusing on one of the introduced practices in more depth, in workshops usually invite a group of interested individuals to experience how longing can be made productive for an exploration of internal and external movements and of the human and non-human spatialities these movements create. The hands-on experience is followed up by a discussion and reflection.
The goal of this workshop series is to encourage participants to include longing actively and creatively in their everyday life, their artistic practice, their (ethnographic) research practice, and to initiate a process of thinking about methodological possibilities suited to the own field site and personal researcher skills.
Workshop design and execution: Hannah Wadle, PhD.
Workshops organised among others:
In Birmingham, on 10.04.2025, as LAB at conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists in the UK „Critical Junctions: Anthropology on the Move“
Lausanne, on 1.12.2020, for the ERC Project ARTIVISM (Prof. M. Salzbrunn) as contribution to: Seminaire de Master: Migration dans l’art, art dans la migration et artistes migrant.
Please reach out, if you are interested in hosting a workshop at your institute or research centre: hannah.wadle (ät) amu.edu.pl.