Politically dark times arise when the public realm is undermined “by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet” (Arendt 1995, vii). How does it occur that political practices, even though they are experienced as democratic, can unintentionally nourish authoritarianism? Following this question, the contribution accesses social philosophy through an ethnography of contemporary dance education. Utilizing an approach of aesthetic practices (Hetzel 2021) combined with political theory (Arendt 1998) the ethnography concretizes political action within an art form and transfers the findings to a broader societal and political context.

The ethnographic methodology combines a practice theory informed approach developed in dance studies (Hardt 2023) and life-world-analytical ethnography based in sociological phenomenology (Hitzler and Honer 2015). Based on long-term ethnographic field work focussing dance improvisation in my own amateur and professional dance education I am analyzing differences between the performativity of practices (e.g. authority) and their experience (e.g. supportive, participatory). These contrasting results are being theoretically saturated with theories of practices (Schatzki 2002), phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty 1966), sociology of the body (Gugutzer 2015) and Hannah Arendts political theory (Arendt 1998 and 1992).

The results show how experiences and performativity of practices within dance education can drift apart (1). Transferred to social philosophy it becomes understandable why and how experiences of political action are not always consistent with the their (bodily) performativity (2), providing a theoretical foundation for a self-critical evaluation of current political practices (3).

References

Arendt, Hannah 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah 1995. Men in Dark Times. New York und London: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Arendt, Hannah and Ronald Beiner 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gugutzer, Robert 2015. Soziologie des Körpers. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

Hardt, Yvonne 2023. Tanz und kulturelle Bildung erforschen - Eine Einführung. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

Hetzel, Andreas 2021. „Gehen als ästhetische Praxis“. In: Medienkultur als kritische Gesellschaftsanalyse – Festschrift für Rainer Winter, ed. Matthias Wieser und Elena Pilipets. Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag.

Hitzler, Ronald und Anne Honer 2015. „Life-World-Analytical Ethnography: A Phenomenology-Based Research Approach“. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 44(5): 544–62.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1966. Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.

Schatzki, Theodore R. 2002. The Site of the Social – a philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

This paper explores the potential of Bakhtinian dialogism explored through the medium of embodied artistic practice. Dialogism conceives subjectivity as polyphonic, constituted by multiple interacting voices. However, the focus of research has primarily been within verbal or textual contexts, with limited exploration in other formats. The NOTUS project (2024–2025) addressed this gap by examining how dialogical processes unfold in movement, creation, and shared reflection. Developed as an art–science–education collaboration between psychologists from the University of Neuchâtel, the contemporary dance company “La Méthode” and a Swiss High-School, the Notus Project unfolded through successive, interdependent phases: the co-creation of a choreographic piece for two dancers inspired by Bakhtin’s ideas of polyphony, bivocality, and dialogical becoming; and a series of participatory workshops with sixteen-year-old high-school students who attended the performance. These workshops, led jointly by the researchers and the artists, combined movement, writing, and collective discussion, allowing students to experience dialogism as a lived and embodied relation rather than a theoretical notion. In this paper, we focus on what occurs when dialogism is approached in and through action. We analyze how the artistic creation generated “dialogical artefacts”, like texts, gestures, and metaphors mediating between scientific and aesthetic logics, and how students, in turn, interpreted and re-enacted dialogical principles in their own bodily and verbal productions. This analysis proposes a reinterpretation of dialogism as a theory of discourse and an embodied epistemology, where meaning, biography and identity emerge through reciprocal movement between bodies, voices and perspectives, at the intersection of scientific and artistic logics.

In this paper, I present the ongoing art-research documentary project SPOOL. SPOOL evolves across two entangled levels. On the one hand, it is a film that explores the intersection of the temporalities of everyday life with Parkinson’s disease and the temporalities of basic stem cell research into the brain. As such, SPOOL is a practice of public science communication. Communication of stem cell research is often aimed at teaching ‘the public’ what stem cells are, mirroring a broader movement in science communication practices, in which social scientists and artists are enlisted to translate technoscientific developments (Calvert, 2024). SPOOL aims, instead, to develop alternative narratives of chronic illness experiences and scientific advances, contributing to dissemination events that foster open, empathic conversations about the challenges and hopes of living with chronic conditions while awaiting new treatments. On the other hand, SPOOL is embedded within a qualitative research project and brings together people living with Parkinson’s disease, dance instructors, and natural and social scientists. In this sense, SPOOL becomes a research methodology itself—becoming a “dialogic site” for gathering people who might not otherwise meet, to explore temporalities of Parkinson’s.

Whether considered as science communication, research practice, or both, filmmaking in SPOOL can be understood as enacting certain worlds and politics (Verstappen & Davies, 2024). SPOOL’s practice invites, therefore, reflective critical analysis of the values and ideals that underpin its dissemination and research dimensions. I explore how SPOOL can be theorized as an art-research practice centered around local, experimental collaborations (Estalella & Criado, 2018). I do so in part to explore how concepts from critical psychological theories and science and technology studies (STS) can be brought into dialogue to theorize collaborative practices that explore and represent science in public venues.

Bibliography

Calvert, J. (2024). A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14594.001.0001

Estalella, A., & Criado, T. S. (Eds.). (2018). Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices (1st ed.). Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvw04cwb

Verstappen, S., & Davies, S. R. (2024). Ethnographic film as world‐making: Connecting visual anthropology with Science and Technology Studies. Visual Anthropology Review, var.12338. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12338