Encountering anthropologists through body‐mapping: On risk‐taking, experimentation and solidarity in the neoliberal university

This article turns a workshop session and the university as a locus of knowledge production into objects of ethnographic investigation. The authors reflect on our experience co‐facilitating a body‐mapping session with a group of anthropologists of different backgrounds, ages and career stages—all women—from universities across Europe, during a workshop in 2023. Participants in the session were asked to draw their body on a piece of paper, and then to visualize bodily sensations and responses to a series of prompts regarding their research. While the body‐mapping method enjoys a rich activist and solidarity‐building tradition, some participants expressed discomfort and fear before and during the session. In this paper, we explore how power asymmetries in academic environments are gendered and embodied, and how attention to the body provides unique insight into the affective experiences and constraints of university work. We ask how stratified university spaces, which some experience as precarious and hostile, impact curiosity, experimentality, and vulnerability as dispositions crucial to innovation in and decolonization of anthropological knowledge—ultimately inhibiting the sorts of knowledge that anthropologists can access and produce in university settings.