Ethnographies of Joy: A Definitionless Dictionary in the Shadow of Impending Global Fascism

Invitation to join a series of (virtual and in-person) gatherings

Exhausted by academic writing that mistakes joyless seriousness for rigour? Suffocated by the writing voice you’ve somehow adopted against your will? Ready to drop the scholarly ego and step into the pool of potential plentitudes a.k.a. collective writing?

Here we go!

You are warmly invited to join us in the formation of the open-ended & open-access scholarly endeavor Ethnographies of Joy: A Definitionless Dictionary in the Shadow of Impending Global Fascism…

In times when academic writing feels more and more powerless, and when we feel our voices have to replicate the violent abstractions that have been enacted upon us, we insist on reclaiming joy in our thinking and knowledge production. Our brains can do more than standard formatting; by dancing with our neuroticisms and relinquishing authorial control, we can interrupt rigid patterns of thinking and feeling, opening space for both the perception of existing but overlooked connections and the creation of new ones. At a moment of rising authoritarianism and polarising discourses, we reclaim the transformative power of anthropological thinking/writing.

In the spirit of liberating our brains from the misery of the internalized check-lists adopted when performing the ascetic academic, we invite anthropologists and the anthropologically-adjacent to take part in the process of reworking our relationship to anthropological key concepts.

In the spirit of liberating our brains from the misery of the internalised check-lists adopted when performing the ascetic academic, we invite anthropologists and the anthropologically-adjacent to take part in the process of reworking our relationship to anthropological key concepts. Not through canon-encased abstract and too-clever-by-half (re)definitions, but rather through making unruly connections between concepts and cases. We want to start with our anthropological material and collectively explore its conceptual and theoretical potential, expanding our capacity to relate to concepts, places and happenings that have not been thought together before. Bring your ethnographic vignettes, artefacts, sensory materials or whatever it is you think with and through (and which you would be willing to lose control over).

We hold on to the belief that anthropology can make important public interventions, but we need to attempt new forms of doing so. An anthropology by stealth, an anthropology with a friendly toothless grin, an anthropology that finds itself floating in your soup, an anthropology that is also relatable to those (un)lucky enough to not be professional anthropologists.

A definitionless dictionary calls for conceptual rigour rooted in shared creation. As such, our invitation is to think & write collectively through joy. More concretely:

Online workshop #1 Monday, March 2. 16:00 – 18:00  CET

1.  Introducing ‘why JOY, why now, why a Definitionless Dictionary’ – AllegraLab
2. Getting to know each other. Not: your narrative CV performed whilst we pretend to listen but actually read our emails. Rather: how you relate to what you propose we work on (including channeling of the fragments)
3. A collective mapping of proposed concepts by drawing unruly connections.
4. Collecting possible ideas about how we shape the collective writing sessions ahead.

Online workshop #2 Monday, April 13. 16:00 – 18:00 CET

1. A talk by Fiona Murphy (Dublin City University and Creative Anthropology Network) to get the juices flowing.
2. An open discussion on how joyful and creative collective writing could possibly be.
3. A small group exercise where we work together on some of our submitted data, trying on concepts for size.

Online workshop #3 Monday, May 11. 16:00 – 18:00 CET 

1. Collective writing experiment
2. Brainstorming in small groups about what and how we want to write on the fragment we worked on during the previous meeting.
3. Two collective writing blocks of 25min
4. Collecting ideas about how to shape the schedule of the writing retreat in a Polish country manor.

In-person workshop in Poland July 18-19-20-21. A festival of joy.

The almost secured location is near Poznan (for those attending EASA 2026). At the meeting we will begin the production of the open-access Definitionless Dictionary in earnest through creative/experimental means. Our aim is to create and finalise dictionary entries, and to decide what physical and digital forms we wish it to take.

Costs: Accommodation and food for the in person workshop is 300 euros.

Funding: Get in contact with us if you need funding. EASA funding to LAWNET enables us to cover travel and accommodation/food costs for participants without institutional funding.

EASA roundtable: We connect the workshop with the EASA conference taking place in Poznan on July 21–24 where we convene a round-table Ethnographies of Joy: Snippets from a Definitionless Dictionary. Volunteers among us will present their experience of collective writing as well as the entry they co-created.

How to apply

Deadline: 22 February 2026 via cicek@allegralaboratory.net

Please send:

1.  An anthropological fragment: short text, photo, drawing, sound recording, archival document, cultural artifact, etc. Photos, sounds, artefacts should be accompanied by a short text contextualising their origin. The fragment does not need to relate to joy (the joy will be in our collective process).
2. Five concepts you think need to be rethought and some sentences on why they need to be rethought in relation to the current political moment. The concepts do not need to relate to the fragment.

Please do not send us your CV.

The process of getting to know each other and writing together doesn’t necessarily have to be, but might be a little weird. Please commit to the experiment and come to the meetings in an appropriately unruly spirit.

Featured Image: Still from Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, 1956).