with Cyan D’Anjou and Sunghoon Song

Founding Lab Fall Term Project

This is an account of methodological discovery and exploration, triggered by an identity crisis I was navigating around the time I went to Linz for the Summer School, and which sparked the friendship with Cyan, my teammate. It further develops topics I discussed or worked on, during the first part of the Founding Lab, such as transparency in the digital age, in the Brain-Computer Interface topic group; social interactions in interdisciplinary teams, the topic of my speech for the Conference Task Force; the robotic aspirations, and reason-emotion split, discussed in the play “Uncanny Valley.”

Anamnesis means “a calling to mind”, and this word is employed in three different contexts. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the task of socioanalysis a labour of anamnesis — of bringing to mind one’s own knowledge of the world, and one’s self-awareness concerning the conditions for this knowledge. In clinical psychology, anamnesis refers to the patient’s recollection of events that are relevant to their case history. In the Christian tradition, Anamnesis is the remembrance of Jesus’s sacrifice through the Eucharist. These three contexts provide different devices to articulate the pieces that make up the final output.

“Go to the limits of your longing” is a map of the shared intellectual journey that Cyan and I went through when developing the philosophical framework for our project, how it intertwines with our personal life and emotional processes, and my growth as a Sociologist. Using post-its, it narrates our journey from trying to develop a project that would validate our feelings, towards aggregating perspectives and insight into a framework that would put the characteristics we were conscious about to the service of science and creativity. The map employs personal insight from our conversations, therapy sessions and meetings with my Professor and other peers.

“Zettelkasten” is a recreation of the Christian Eucharist, and it represents my personal process during the Founding Lab. The box of cards stands for the bread, representing my labour, with bite-sized versions of notes I took, essays I wrote, and the over 100 references I read for this project. Homemade calendula and wild pansy syrups represent my heart, and they are shared with visitors using a dropper.

“Things of Boundaries: a Case Study of Interdisciplinarity” is an ongoing study on different ideas of interdisciplinarity and different professional and academic trajectories of Founding Lab students, fellows and staff members. We investigate how different actors view their own life journeys towards working in interdisciplinary settings, and hypothesise how their views reveal their social position, and whether we find radically different ideas of what interdisciplinarity is. In progress.

The most important result from this project is actually a by-product of the intellectual exploration that was undertaken. By the trust of my collaborators and facilitators, and my Professor’s validation, I was able to see myself as a Sociologist for the first time since my current research started, in mid-2019. The third output, the paper about interdisciplinarity, is articulated through the sociological framework developed throughout the project, employing relational analysis (with the work of Harrison White and Ann Mische), with insight from reflexive and lyrical approaches (after the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Andrew Abbott). Although I recognise how my background in architecture influences my approach to research design, I was able to curate a methodology to leverage my skills and unique social position to the service of the social sciences.