Hansjörg Dilger, Kristina Mashimi und Omar Kasmani (Freie Universität Berlin), Paola Ivanov (Ethnologisches Museum Berlin), Jonas Bens und Laibor Kalanga Moko (Universität Hamburg)

Sprache: Englisch

This session brings together members of two subprojects within the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies to reflect on more than a decade of methodological work on affect across diverse regional, institutional, and thematic contexts. In particular, the session invites discussion on methodological creativity as an affective, relational, and politically situated practice, asking how methods themselves become sites of affective engagement, ethical negotiation, and knowledge production – and what it means to work experimentally with affect in times of social and political uncertainty.

The contributions span research on lived dimensions and the governance of religious diversity, ethnographic engagements with the International Criminal Court and the Humboldt Forum, and debates around restitution and decolonial struggles. Across these contexts, participants trace a shared methodological trajectory from more conventional ethnographic approaches toward increasingly experimental practices, including autoethnography, working with dreams, film and movement as methods, and long-term processes of sustained engagement with interlocutors, including more novel forms of collaboration with artists, activists, and community members that challenge established boundaries between research, participation, and intervention. Finally, contributors reflect on conducting affective research under increasingly challenging political conditions, shaped by authoritarian shifts, political repression, and environmental crisis, with Tanzania serving as a key empirical example.