Blurring the Lines: Building a Collaborative Dialogue from the Intersection of Creative Practice, Ethnography and Business

An EPIC2024 Salon hosted by Fatimah Richmond and Tamara Hale

Tuesday, August 20, 11:00am–12:00pm Pacific Time

How to Register

Overview

“Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, ‘edgemen,’ who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact or imagination. In their productions we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalized and fixed in structure.” – Victor Turner (“The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure”, 1969: 128)

Creativity and play are a core to what it means to be human, and a vital part of our shared humanity. But many business and organizational contexts don’t leave room for, and even disincentivize, creativity, play and exploration. In becoming successful, many of us learn to lean into goal-orientation, hyper-focus, efficiency and quantifiable outputs to the detriment of creativity. Many of us are former, lapsed or fledgling ‘creatives’ (makers, crafters, artists, writers etc.)

In this salon, we create a container for a conversation that aims to “blur” the lines between the fields of ethnography in business contexts and creativity and the arts. We ask questions such as: how can research or ethnography in business contexts be creative and playful? How do we bring creativity and play into research, both technically, and given the constraints we face? How can an orientation toward play and creativity inform our approach to organizational challenges, to collaboration, to influence and advocacy and allow us to make sense of the faultlines in our economic system? How do we cultivate a beginner’s brain and curiosity as a source of joy? We hope to create the beginning of a community conversation that ultimately inspires us to individually and collectively take creative risks in the production, presentation and performance of research and related activities and inviting reflection on the fissures between our professional and non-professional personas. We want to create an open invitation to participants to employ humor, play and intuition as ways to redraw inherited practices and boundaries and discover new generative capabilities.