Curatorium came together as a collective of anthropologists, First Nations scholars
and performers, scientists, designers, environmental philosophers, historians, filmmakers, artists, and activists excited by the idea that the academic journal article persists unchallenged only because a critical mass of alternative exemplars does not yet exist.
We imagined that should such a collection exist, it might demonstrate how and why
the journal form deserves to be reimagined and, perhaps even, upended.
We built a website, completely independent of any institutional infrastructures, to host this experiment. Our hope was that by escaping the imaginative limitations of corporate publishing, we’d be free to explore different and more inclusive ways of thinking with
the worlds with which we research.
And so Epistemic Attunements - Regenerating Anthropology's Form took shape as a
one-off, and likely never-to-be-repeated, special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA).
This hybrid issue is curated into the themes of
FORM and
REACH. Working with the sensuous and relational knowledge practices that digital design and publishing make possible, we invited our contributors to think with a series of questions:
What does it become possible to know—and so to argue and to value—when writing
is reformulated as a practice of intermedial curation, assemblage, design, and composition?
What kinds of social relations come into view—what new demands for care, creativity, and critique arise—when scholarship finds novel form and expanded reach within the interactive contours of a purpose-made, digital-only publication?
How might such an approach foreground, engage, and amplify the imperatives
of Indigenous and other non-Eurocentric knowledge traditions?
How might such an approach enable an expression of communicative registers
that exist outside, beyond, and in excess, of human language?
What unites these questions is a commitment to formal experimentation in which aesthetics and ethics are profoundly intertwined. Because at the heart of this work
is an effort to attune anew to the expressive forms, tensions, and priorities of worlds undergoing immense, and often brutal, transformation. As these articles collectively argue, how we create and share knowledge matters in ways that institutionalised
forms of knowledge production has yet to fully reckon with.
Here the screen becomes the site for composing new possibilities for becoming knowledgeable together. Working together with our authors, we learned to appreciate
the the art of building arguments that unfold temporally as well as spatially. Through processes of co-design, we began referring to our readers as ‘attuners’ so marking
them, and now you, explicitly as active participants in the making of meaning.
And so we embraced digital composition as a chance to create an experiential analytic encounter that builds and thickens as you attune to an argument and analysis unfolding
as you scroll and click.
We do not attempt to place you inside the screen, or within another world. Rather, we
aim to activate an internal animating dynamic that makes the argument come alive in your body as well as through the relationships activated across images, texts, and sounds.
Each article in this collection is twinned with an author’s commentary that reflects on the experience of working in these new ways. These commentaries appear in the conventional pages of TAJA. You may have found your way here through the conventional infrastructure of TAJA, or perhaps you landed here via the wild world of the internet. Either way, we encourage you to find your own way into the practices of attunement on offer here.
Let these pieces unfold in the ways that you need them to. Or in the ways that they
ask. Read them in any order you like. Read the commentaries, first or last. Keep clicking backwards and forwards, allowing curiosity to guide you. The impetus for this project
was always to set in an invitation, an invitation to you, to step into this body of work and to find your own way through—to attune. And so, perhaps, to come to know differently.
It is our strong belief that the shaky, shifting conditions of the worlds that we worry about might benefit from researchers taking another look at the relationship between form and content in this age of digital life, ecological death, and other endangered futures.
Our efforts here then are to imagine into being an anthropology finally capable of embracing forms of expression that genuinely include our collaborators and interlocutors as critically engaged authors and audiences in their own right.
We have been motivated, perhaps naively, by the potential and possibility of working with and remaking existing structures so that we might model a path in a direction that others might be inspired to follow.
Our hope, at the very least, is that in exploring this special issue, questions of your own will emerge, questions worth opening further towards new horizons and new epistemic attunements of your own making.
