Looking for Collaborative Moments: Lessons from a Workshop on Mental Vulnerability and Photography

Abstract:Although collaborative experimental methods are gaining ground in anthropology, there is little research on the forms such collaborations take. This article begins to explore the question of form with assistance from two recent analyses of "moments" within collaborative projects by Hastrup (2018) and Korsby and Stavrianakis (2018) respectively. The article discusses the potential for knowledge production in such moments, using examples from a collaborative project in the form of a workshop initiated by the researcher and carried out with two photographers and a group of four young interlocutors in a city in Denmark. The ambition of the workshop was to articulate and understand the emergent phenomenon "mental vulnerability" in novel ways through the experimental production of photographs and text. The article shows how, by working collaboratively with both visual and textual modes of expression, new experiential (understood as emotional, sensorial, atmospheric or even magical) points of entrance for understanding mental vulnerability could be reached momentarily. The aim of the article is firstly to convey ethnographic insights from the project and secondly to discuss the epistemological potentials of moments in collaborative research.