The term open formats refers to the experimentation with meeting formats as pedagogical spaces for the apprenticeship of ethnographic experimentation. Meetings are, together with papers and books, perhaps the quintessential mechanism for the circulation of academic knowledge. And yet, despite their relevance, we usually resort to the most conventional formats: paper presentations, round tables, etc. Nevertheless, anthropology has recently recognised the need to explore other ways of sharing our knowledge and thinking together. Their openness, however, does not only refer to their exploratory character: they are also open because of the effort put into documenting these ‘experiments in meeting’ so that they may travel, be learnt and reproduced elsewhere.
Source: The lab is not blah (#Colleex)