Sensing Sideways: co-editors' dialogic introduction to artist-ledapproaches to public pedagogy in the Asia Pacific region

Some affective trajectories in ethnographic fieldwork continuously blur the lines separating fieldwork as a personal and a professional undertaking. Field researchers often carry out the multiple tasks of sharing intimate information and engaging in caring relationship with those being studied while balancing their familial, conjugal, sexual, and amical relationships, whether they were separated by physical distance or not. The emotional impacts can be remarkably intricate and ineffable. Moreover, they are often left unexplored or even silenced in the written representation of research outcomes. Intimate attachments and caring experiences in fieldwork are however affective manifestations of relatedness.

This introduction explores the role of researchers’ emotions and affects in understanding “the field.” Anthropologists have widely discussed and debated fieldwork reflexivity in terms of fieldwork ethics, methodological practices, colonial traditions inscribed in ethnographic encounters, and modes of ethnographic representation. This chapter focuses on methodological implications that bring to awareness the potentials of researchers’ affects and emotions that less hinder than enable processes of anthropological and social scientific knowledge construction. It extends on classic and recent contributions from psychological and feminist anthropology and aims to provide intellectual space for methodological and epistemological debates, and expound the potentials and the limits of affectively aware scholarship.

Following from a series of conversations that have been taking placesporadically between us1 in the past years, the current contributionserves as another opportunity to address ways of living multiple institu-tional lives. In our respective contexts, these pertain to different types ofinstitutions, ranging from art school/academy, to university, to art orcultural organization/collective. Here we explore ways of traversing theboundaries and frictions between radical classroom practices and theinstitutional processes and frameworks that we speak and act withinand against in the context of European higher arts education; all theseenvironments are deeply entrenched in coloniality.

Various parts of Southeast Asia are faced with intensifying social and political challenges. Amid these troubling times, academics, especially those working on human rights, conflict, and peace, are confronted with the task of finding better means to communicate their knowledge with all its nuances and complexities.

Many scholars working on emotion cultures in Indonesian societies have asserted the integralrole of malu (shame or shame-like emotions) in people’s everyday interactions (Geertz 1973;Keeler 1983; Stodulka 2009; Beatty 2005; Boellstorff and Lindquist 2004; Fessler 2004). Oneof the most prominent studies on this topic is conducted by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler (2013) whodraws on the “Indonesian-model of shame” based on findings in her ethnographic fieldworkamong the Makassar, in South Sulawesi Indonesia.