The one-day seminar Self-Fashioning in Flux: The Entanglement of Interiorities with Political and Economic Changes, organised by Ori Mautner and Liangliang Zhang, took place on 10 March 2020 at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Here Ori and Liangliang reflect on the event.

“This one-day seminar examined self-formation projects in relation to contemporary socio-political transformations by engaging researchers working in diverse contexts: Alaska, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, El Salvador, United Kingdom, and various parts of the PRC. We brought together presenters and discussants from the disciplines of Education, Sociology and Social Anthropology, who represented Cambridge and UCL. Through three panels and a keynote presentation by Dr Joanna Cook (UCL), we collaboratively investigated the ways in which ethical subjectivities are implicated in 

• Migration and ongoing processes of managing unstable relationships between new and old homes, locality and translocality, hope and nostalgia in Alaska, Hong Kong and El Salvador
• Self-fashioning endeavours and their encompassment in projects aimed at religious revival and/or national-individual realisation in Israel and in the PRC
• The deployment of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (MCBT) as an authoritative pathway for mental health upkeep in the UK, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses’ tendentious choice of rejecting life-saving blood transfusion in Kyrgyzstan 
• The challenging transduction of mindfulness practice into an object of evidence-based policy making in the UK

Through this interdisciplinary collaborative exercise, we attempted to re-centre the self and its attendant ethopoetic processes in the investigation of larger economic and political conditions. We extricated the ways in which micropolitical projects of self-making are profoundly informed by grassroots actors’ conceptions of what constitutes a worthy and meaningful collective life. Thus, we demonstrated the ways in which ethics inhere in fundamental societal processes and afford unique pathways towards understanding the rapid transformations that confront multifarious life-worlds.

We experienced the atmosphere at the seminar to be friendlyyet intellectually stimulating. This, we believe, found expression in the respondents’ constructive and critical engagement with the richness of the ethnographic materials presented by the speakers, as well as in the joint reflection on these materials’ broader theoretical and comparative significance. We would like to thank the Max-Cam Centre for providing us the wonderful opportunity to develop our thinking on the seminar’s themes, and particularly to Connie Tang and Johannes Lenhard for their help in the organization. We wish to thank also King’s College for making available to us the College’s excellent facilities.”

List of Participants:

Speakers:

Mikkel Kenni Bruun – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Danny Cardoza – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Ori Mautner – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Claire Moll Namas – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Yifan Sun – Department of Education, University of Cambridge

Lee-Shan Tse – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Elizabeth Ann Walsh – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Liangliang Zhang – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Discussants:

Dr Joanna Cook – Department of Anthropology, University College London

Dr Asiya Islam – Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge

Dr Patrick McKearney – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Dr Kelly Robinson – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Dr Rachel Smith – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge