Office for Scientific Flotsam and Jetsam: The Shifting Grounds of an Incubation

• In Event: Making and Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel - I

Abstract

This will be a presentation on a making and doing project. There is no possibility to bring the actual project to the conference. We will account of an exhibition project whose initial aim was to document the issues academic refugees face. But this project ultimately ended being a not about refugees, but refugees being physically present and talking with strangers about their lives, and secondly, a new organisation founded with refugees, to organize ways how to integrate them into the academic world of their host country.
We will describe the following shifts of the project: First the very focus of the exhibition shifted from migrants to refugees. Second, the space and location of the exhibition shifted from being mobile at the periphery of Vienna to a shipping container in the center of the city. Third, our notion of whom we were researching and how we would collaborate with the refugees shifted. Fourth, the methods of representation shifted from ethnography and video interviews to self-representation by interaction. Fifth, the materials visible in the exhibition shifted from being documents about the asylum seekers to being documents from them to spur interaction, as well as being a usable work space. Finally, our roles shifted from being curators and researchers to being managers and social workers.

Authors

• Michael Guggenheim, Goldsmiths, University of London

• Judith Kröll, Center

• Bernd Kräftner, University of Applied Arts Vienna