EMCAI Meeting – Friday 22 May – 12.30-14.00 CET

This will be a discussion session dedicated to re-enactment as a research strategy,  building on what came up during our meeting in February 2026. 

Re-enactment sits at an uneasy intersection between EM and CA traditions. For EM scholars, the power of EM lies in creating breaching conditions or tutorial problems (Garfinkel 1967, 2002) that make the invisible machinery of social order visible: a logic that opens the door to staged or reconstructed situations. For CA, research is grounded in the analysis of naturally occurring talk and interaction, where any departure from “the real thing” risks distorting the very phenomena under study. This tension is what makes re-enactment a productive but sometimes divisive topic across the two traditions. The ambition is to figure out what makes re-enactment as research strategy valuable or thorny by considering several questions (with some re-enactment data to support): 

• What is re-enactment exactly?
• How to do it?
• Where (not) to use it and why?
• What is your own experience with re-enactment? 

We hope to have a lively discussion, wherein everyone feels free to support or challenge this research strategy.

To prepare for the session we suggest the following reading: 

Sormani, Philippe (2020): « Re-enactment as a research strategy », In: Borgdorff, H., Pinch, T. and Peters, P. (Eds.), Dialogues between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies. London & New York, pp. 184-200.