A Living Space of Mediatorship
- Claire Vionnet
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
This year’s Annual Meeting of the Swiss Anthropological Association in Fribourg, our Interface panel brought together scholars whose work bridges research, pedagogy, and lived experience. Rather than treating care as an abstract concept, presenters demonstrated how embodied, creative, and reflexive practices enact mediatorship within diverse ethnographic settings.
The session offered a coherent and balanced dialogue across fields of inquiry, including theatre in Colombia, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, evolving practices in care in Switzerland and Germany, and collaborative filmmaking in Peru. It showed that mediatorship is not confined to conflict resolution alone, but extends to:
The ethics of accompaniment
Reflexive scholarship
Narrative repair
Transformative learning spaces
Relational accountability in research
The theme invited participants not only to analyze vulnerability, but to attend to it — intellectually, ethically, and relationally. What made the panel especially meaningful was the sense of shared lifework, through which researchers revealed the trajectories, commitments, and vulnerabilities that shape their scholarship. The atmosphere became one of dialogue rather than delivery, a reflexive space where intellectual rigor met personal engagement. In this gathering, Transformative Anthropology emerged not as a theoretical add-on, but as a dawning practice within the field — one that recognizes the researcher as participant, mediator, and cultivator of cultures of care.
As conversations continued beyond the formal session, it became clear that mediatorship is not only a research topic — it is a mode of being within academia itself. In a transforming world marked by fragility and uncertainty, this panel offered a hopeful reminder: cultures of care can be intentionally cultivated — in our research, in our teaching, and in our scholarly communities. The theme invited participants not only to analyze vulnerability, but to attend to it — intellectually, ethically, and relationally. It was within this spirit that the Interface Commission organized a panel dedicated to Mediatorship and Transformational Anthropology.
Convenors:
Susan Mossman Riva, Claire Vionnet, Eda Elif Tibet
"Mediatorship and Transformational Anthropology: Creating Cultures of Care in Learning and Research Communities"
Fribourg, February 7, 2026
(see previous Interface Blog post of November 3, 2025)
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