Reflexive essays

All Items

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  Natan Diacon-Furtado, Water Justice Lab Youth Scientist Fellows and Staff

  Playing with Ancestral Waters: Community Portals along the Mahicannituck (Lower Hudson River) Watershed

  Community Portal (2024–) is an instrument for embodied collaborative listening with local and ancestral waters. The Mahicannituck (lower Hudson River), a tidal estuary connecting upstate New York and the Atlantic Ocean, serves as an inspiration and site for this work. The cyclical movement of its waters constitutes a flow towards and away from Indigenous, colonial, cultural, and industrial legacies. This hybrid essay shares fragments of Community Portal’s co-development within these waters and across three participatory design playtests conducted by a community of artists, educators, and high-school-aged youth science fellows. Utilized in game design to elicit user feedback during development, playtesting is presented here as a methodology for the collaborative community design and development of assistive tools that adaptively re-use and re-imagine colonial technologies of science and media. Playtesting with and in these waters presents an opportunity for further collaborative development of technologies that unite social practice, science, and engineering, a process that this essay terms ‘visionary engineering.’

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  Natalie Schiller

  Homemade Hips. Shades of Play within Artistic Research

  With this essay, I creatively and critically celebrate a fusion and confusion of notions of play. Here, I invite you, the reader, to dive into the realm and possibilities of what I call ‘shades of play.’ I base my exploration of shades of play on my performance, The Washing Machine, the Scythe, and I (2025). This work is part of my artistic research series homemade hips, where I entangle ideas of hips and domesticity. Now, together we (you and I) will slip, sweat, shake, and cut while discovering the manner of shades of play.

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  Anisha Anantpurkar, Pasha Tretyakova

  Epilogue. Liberation Session (?)

  This epilogue may have some of you confused. Trying to stay true to our impulse to play, it is a result of reading and working playfully. What can playing with the contributions generate for us? This whimsical, unhinged, creative piece is one thing. Dream Believe Achieve, we suppose.

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  Terje Toomistu

  Playing Along with the Scene: Co-Creation, Curating, and Play as a Methodological Orientation

  This essay reflects on how play can function as a fruitful methodological orientation in ethnographic research. It draws on my engagement with Bling, an annual Estonian house-music festival known for its immersive environments and ethos of playful co-creation. I first encountered Bling not as a researcher but as a participant, drawn to its joyful atmosphere shaped by music, dance, costumes, and art. Through dancing, building, cooking, and sharing space with others, I became closely involved with the scene surrounding the event. Such participation—what I call playing along with the scene—entailed immersion through affective attunement and collaborative engagement. Only later did I recognize that this immersion had shaped my method of inquiry, as playing along with the scene had created the conditions that gradually informed what became the research. Without a predefined research frame, I set up a video booth at the 2021 festival, inviting participants to record reflections from within the pulse of the event. These recordings later formed the basis for the short documentary That Estonian Bling Thing (2024) and the 100 m² ‘BLING’ section of the exhibition Who Claims the Night? (Estonian National Museum, 2024–2025), co-created with community artists. Drawing on sensory ethnography, the anthropology of experience, and my involvement with the scene, I demonstrate how play, as a mode of immersion in lived experience, can orient ethnographic inquiry. In this process, authority is redistributed, and knowledge emerges not simply about a scene but with it—through affective attunement, co-creation, and the generative force of play.

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  Marie Bjerre Odgaard

  Playful Indifference in a Hyper-Engaged Field

  This article starts with a provocation: can and should we be playfully indifferent to the differences that keep us from being able to trust each other? Can we imagine playing together in fieldwork and beyond in ways that allow our differences to not be made an object of scrutiny? Beginning from a seemingly minor yet weighty utterance—‘I trust you’ by a friend and mentor in Amman, Jordan—I reflect on the preoccupation with difference that can emerge when writing ethnographically about queer life and relations in contexts where visible gender and sexual ‘difference’ is both charged and potentially dangerous. This leads me to consider anthropology’s ambiguous role in both studying and defending the importance of social and cultural difference, and the role of identity politics in decolonial iterations of anthropology. Drawing on Madhavi Menon (2015) and especially Naisargi N. Davé’s (2023) recent theorization of indifference as a queer virtue, alongside María Lugones’s (1987) notion of playfulness as an openness to world-travelling, I develop the concept of ‘playful indifference’ both as a response to the politics of queer relation-building among artists and activists in Amman and as a suggestion as to how we might mobilize playfulness in order to remain open to trusting relations and the possibility of becoming otherwise (Povinelli, 2012). Playful indifference is proposed as a relational ethic and a politics of solidarity that observes, but also willfully disregards, paranoid hyper-attention to positionality and moralizing impulses of difference-making.

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  Katie Grant, Maxwell Hyett

  Collaborative Nuance: Citation, Difference, and the Friendship of Roland Barthes and Michel Deguy

  The works of Roland Barthes and Michel Deguy are each marked by the inclusion of friends and lovers, expressing a shared resistance to the norms of impersonal, impartial critique and scholarship. Following Barthes and Deguy’s affectionate position, this article troubles the limits of scholarly citational practices by identifying latent collaboration in the sources and language shared among friends. The incomplete record of Barthes and Deguy’s friendship is complemented by a brief sketch of their pursuits of nuanced, indecisive writing, especially evident in the handling of pre-texts like lecture notes and conference talks. The ongoing exchange between this article’s co-authors—preceding and including this collaboration, and, similar to that between the two French thinkers, written and spoken in various forms and proximities—explains and performs the generative nature of Barthes and Deguy’s joint commitment to difference, as shared expertise and political alignment are bracketed in favor of social postures and the possibility of playful connection. A reading of Barthes’s late attraction to the haiku and Deguy’s commentary on this development puts forth poetic or fictive language that is distinct from the arguments and language systems of philosophy, a significant matter as they each pursue nuance in mourning. Taking these systems to be presently and perhaps necessarily incomplete, the co-authors gesture to a collaborative practice that is drifting and active, privileging the social over ‘loyalty to the idea’ as the basis of creativity and community.

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  Christina Bell, Gina Levitan

  There Are Some Things Just Not Worth Doing Alone: A Reflection on Peer Mentorship among Librarians That Centers the Whole Person

  In this reflexive essay, we assert that truly collaborative work is built from supportive peer networks that are about more than professional development or successfully navigating the field, particularly in academic librarianship. Academic support departments and services like the library, tutoring, and the writing center have long encouraged students to develop supportive, collaborative relationships as part of their success. We now seek to consider how we can encourage similar structures for professionals that extend beyond the demands of professional growth to an ethos of professional care. This reflexive essay will present our experiences creating and sustaining such supportive peer networks at several levels of our careers. We will discuss what has and has not worked for each of us in both staff and faculty positions and how we propose that early career scholars cultivate their networks for sustainable, ongoing care and success.

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  Isabel Bredenbröker, Tajinder Kaur

  Dis_ability, Ethnographic Methods, and Collaborations over Distance: Intersectional Complications

  Based on their chapter ‘On giving, taking, and receiving care: Fieldwork and dis_ability,’ collaboratively written for a handbook entitled Inclusive Ethnography (Procter and Spector 2024), India-based anthropologist Tajinder Kaur and Germany-based anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker reflect on writing about dis_ability and ethnographic methods from their respective points of view and experience. Their conversation, conducted entirely in writing into a shared Google Doc over a period of two months, takes core methodological takeaway points of the chapter as a starting point to think about how we can write and think together over distance: Isabel and Tajinder have never met in person. What challenges do we face when writing and thinking from intersectionally different perspectives for a global academic publishing market? What solidarities can be learned anew and differently through these kinds of collaborations? These challenges, particularly when combined with disability studies and anthropology, require special attention. Working together, Kaur and Bredenbröker show that writing across intersectional differences—whether in lived experiences, geopolitical contexts, or disciplinary approaches—requires an ethics of care that goes beyond strategies of knowledge production.

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  Sela K. Adjei, Douglas J. Falen

  Promises and Challenges of Collaborative Teaching: Crossing Cultural and Academic Boundaries

  This is a retrospective essay about the experience of collaborative teaching across cultural and academic boundaries. The authors reflect on their miscommunication and the process of reconciliation as a model for the promises and challenges of decolonial collaboration. While obstacles remain to collaboration between African scholars and those in other countries, the authors argue that an open-minded approach allowing for vulnerability and personal growth presents a hopeful option for overcoming barriers and exposing students to new ways of learning in the face of enduring inequalities and differences. The authors offer an account of the history of their interactions, beginning with some uncomfortable exchanges and failed collaboration, but leading to more encouraging, collaborative teaching and scholarly endeavors that give them hope for centering African perspectives, challenging hierarchies, and providing meaningful learning to students in Africa and Europe/North America.

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  Elly Selby

  That Which Withers in the Age of Digital Production: Towards a New Model of Authorship

  While authorship has historically tethered individuals to works for both credit and responsibility, its foundations in originality, genius, and singular authority have eroded in the face of technological, cultural, and disciplinary disruptions. Poststructuralist critiques reframed authorship as interpretation and circulation, while digital networks and user-generated content democratized participation, only to reintroduce anxieties around ownership and protection in the era of AI. Against this backdrop, I propose a reconceptualization of authorship as a social process involving humans and nonhumans, rather than an evaluation of form. ‘Relational Authorship,’ a new concept introduced in this article, departs from traditional authorial criteria of style, signature, and veracity by emphasizing accountability within distributed production. This article examines these outmoded formal criteria to establish the necessity of this new model of authorship. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, poststructuralism, and post-humanist thought, the model situates authorship as socially and materially embedded, where contributions extend across audiences, institutions, and algorithmic systems. While in disciplines such as architecture authorial hierarchies are sustained through frameworks of liability and regulations, Relational Authorship critically considers how responsibility might be reconfigured in the company of humans, machines, and the networks that bind them.

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  Angela Stiegler

  Friends with Benefits: On Working with Ambiguity in Artistic Friendship-Collaborations

  Friends with benefits was the title by which we—a group of three artist friends, Samuel Fischer-Glaser and Yulia Lokshina as well as this essay’s author—were invited to an exhibition in an artist-run space in Munich, Germany. The result was a 20-minute video installation that we framed as a music video for our imaginary vegan punk band by the same name: friends with benefits (2018/2023). We used this title as a name for our collaboration addressing the entanglements and sexual connotations that go along with it and expanded it to a diverse understanding of artistic collaboration. In this essay, we deal with what it means to be artists working in capitalist times and during multiple crises. We suggest a method for artistic collaborative work in Germany today. We embrace our working and living together, maneuvering continuously through problems and conflicts that emerge with the proximity of both work and life, friendship and love. Our common artistic strategies of collaboration include methods such as reading our own or others’ writings to each other, producing videos and re-using material already produced, a procedure we call ‘arte povera,’ and adding new layers of interpretation to it, thus exercising what in German is popularly known as ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ (literally: defamiliarizating effect). By reading and speaking in different registers, we gave the video material from 2018 a 2023 sound layer, in which we used our voices to perform different ideas of authorship and artisthood. By confronting ourselves with popular and problematic positions and by embodying them, we claim this as an ‘inconvenient’ method to develop critical thinking. Some of these voices that resound lead back to Munich as a site of avantgarde cultural production of New German Cinema as well as of two legendary and controversial figures of that movement, the director and actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) and the actor Klaus Kinski (1926–1991). We also present ourselves as fictional musician characters that go on tour with their latest hit: Nie wieder Tier (‘Animal Never Again’). Through this setup, we ‘hope’ to approach ‘problematic’ situations in the present and address the symptoms of a still post-war German culture and the continuities of fascism. 

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  Pasha Tretyakova

  Homework—Hopework

  What is possible when a home is not home because home is love and love contains hope? Do you not have hope? Does your place of origin hang around your neck like a problem? In the wake of the war that Russia has been perpetrating in Ukraine, with the full-scale invasion beginning on 24 February 2022, the author negotiates in this autoethnographic essay with performative elements what it means to see, love, lose, and have hope in your home. 

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  Nicola Kozicharow

  Russian Colonial Sickness and Decolonial Recovery: Revelations of Autotheoretical Practice

  This autotheoretical essay explores self-decolonization as a personal, embodied process through the author's experience of displacement and chronic illness. Russia’s full-scale invasion of and ongoing genocide in Ukraine have drawn the world’s attention to the brutal history of Russian colonialism. The fact the author was largely unfamiliar with this history blew a hole in the foundation of her scholarly expertise and sense of self. Amid long months of sickness at the author's family home in the US, she sought to exorcize imperial myths from and find decolonial truths in her knowledge and family story. Learning from the lived experiences of Ukrainians and discussions with her father on Ukrainian identity was transformative, demonstrating the pedagogical power of listening to voices erased by colonialism.

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  Melanie Garland

  Attempting to Decolonize Oneself: Sonorities between the ‘West’ and the ‘South’

  The two parts of this contribution—poetic sonority and essay—are poetic and theoretical experiments in response to the challenge of decolonizing the self. In particular, the author is interested in contrasting and intersecting past-present histories of the European diaspora in the global ‘South,’ drawing on her own family history marked by mestizaje and hybridity. Through voice narrative and sound archives, this sound piece challenges linear narrative by playing with the idea of fragments. In it, traces of oceans and seas overlap, reflecting through sound and theory the histories of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean and North Seas, as containers and corridors of entangled past-present colonial histories. The piece opens new ground for interpreting hybrid cultures, a possible starting point for decolonizing oneself when standing between the so-called Global ‘West’ and ‘South.’

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  Keren Poliah , Vashti Suwa Gbolagun , John Yuen Ka Keung, Hannah Helm, David Junior Gilbert

  An Act of Love: Three Experiences of Self-Decolonization in the Academic Community of the United Kingdom

  This narrative essay presents testimonies that uncover the fragmented identity of members of minoritized ethnic groups in the academic context of the United Kingdom. It discusses outcomes of a project which, as part of an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) scholarship from the Doctoral School of the University of Salford, gathered testimonies and stories of international postgraduate doctoral researchers highlighting that the process of decolonization should start from within. Demonstrating how deeply coloniality pervades lands and people, these narratives unveil realities of not fitting in, performing unconventionality, and placing marginalized voices at the forefront. The authors of this essay narrate their journeys towards recognizing their commitment to decolonizing themselves, and underline how this process can provoke change in others.

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  Sofia Gavrilova

  Autoethnographic Reflections on One’s Own Imperialism

  The essay mixes the genre of autoethnographic reflections with an attempt to conceptualize the challenge that members of the Russian academic community in exile are facing on both individual and collective levels. It frames the questions of responsibility, guilt, and identity transformation, and traces the evolution of my personal responses to them as an attempt to document and conceptualize the unavoidable shift in the research field, agenda, positionality, and methods that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought to Slavic/area studies.

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  Libby King

  Suppose We See Ourselves

  Narrative form is often taken for granted, a set of storytelling rules that go unnoticed and unseen; similarly, colonialism benefits from an internal invisibility that resists observation. This autotheory essay considers the interplay between colonialism and invisibility, and explores how narrative form can act as a cultural intervention. The essay suggests that autoforms—such as autotheory, fictocriticism, autofiction, and autoethnography—expose invisible cultural rules and intrinsically alter the way content is understood. It is especially concerned with how colonialism uses authorship to limit internal observation and critique and suggests that by refiguring the ‘I’ and the ‘we,’ autoforms expose these invisible internal rules. It argues that autoforms actively reconfigure the boundaries around many of the early twenty-first century’s major cultural conversations about representation and appropriation, lived experience and expertise, and public space and private space, as well as notions of identity, othering, consciousness, and embodiment. The paper approaches form not just as narrative structure, but also as a tool, a technique, a strategy, and an intervention that inherently impacts content and changes how the cultural landscape is seen and navigated. Through comparing the yellow soils of southern Australia and Gaza, the grammar of Derrida and Wittgenstein, and the path of water and rivers, the essay explores how the form we use to tell stories is often as important as the content.