Critical Research Spaces as Scholarship: an Ethnography Lab as an Apparatus for the Experimental, the Imaginary, and the Relational

ABSTRACT The creation of critical research spaces, such as ethnography labs, studios, and other collaborative research environments, requires attention and attunement in anthropology to focus on the kinds of imaginative and generative spaces where creative ethnographic research can unfold as scholarship . This article reflects on the recent design, construction, and implementation process of the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan (UBCO), serving as an argument that an ethnography lab is a scholarly apparatus for the experimental, the imaginary, and the relational. While this critical research space situates sensory ethnography as its methodological orientation, as a lab, it also foregrounds how digital and analog tools feature in collaborations with infrastructure and field research through processes of experimentation and prototyping with the lab as an apparatus while attending to policy, people, and the imaginary. This article argues that creating a research lab in anthropology is scholarship.