Reading, Reflecting, Connecting

In November, the DARE team convened on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth in Scotland for our first annual reading retreat. While the more-common writing retreat model provides protected space for academics to work on producing written outputs, the reading retreat had a different goal: to create a shared space away from daily distractions to resource ourselves, connect with each other and share ideas through reading, discussion and spending time together.  We did this through a set of daily activities designed to support us both as individuals and as a collective: reading, letter-writing, talk-walks, and creating. 

Each of us chose readings to resource us on the retreat, guided thematically by DARE’s conceptual pillars: data, care and learning (you can see what we read at the end of this blog). Each day, we took pleasure in dedicated time for individual reading, but with a view to sharing insights with the rest of the team. We did this with care and intention through letter-writing, and collectively listening to what was written in the letters at the end of each day. The hand-written letters were a response to the prompt: “Dear team mate, what would you have me know about [day’s topic]?” As well as providing distilled personal insights and nuggets of received wisdom, this union of reading and letter-writing was fun. For example, when was the last time someone wrote a letter to you about something you really wanted to learn about? Do you know what your colleagues’ handwriting looks like? Getting to know someone through their handwriting is rare these days. And how does the choice of medium – gold-embossed writing paper, a page torn from an exercise book, a pink origami animal letter – shape how you engage with the message? 

Understanding reading, thinking, writing and talking as embodied practices, we also attended to our bodies’ needs to move and create. The venue for our reading retreat backed onto the long sandy beaches of the East Lothian coastline. Each day, we ventured out into the brisk (and largely bright) sea air for a talk-walk, taking inspiration from the walking seminars at the University of Amsterdam (and taken up by a number of STS groups since, including in Lancaster, Oxford, Linköping and Copenhagen). Each talk-walk was loosely themed on a topic to help us think about our current work in a way which connected reading to fieldwork and writing, with selected posts from the Somatosphere ‘Writing Life’ series for pre-walk accompaniment. We discussed how we navigate our ethnographic fieldwork, the stories, puzzles and questions, tensions and surprises we encounter; we talked to each other about starting to write and how we go about that; and we chewed over the many translations that our research practices involve.  When the weather was less clement, or our energy levels low, we also chose sometimes to talk while getting busy with our hands in creative activities inside.      

Some colleagues have expressed surprise and bemusement about the very idea of holding a reading retreat, which might be considered self-indulgent, decadent even. No writing goals? No outputs? No papers? Indeed not. Because while the DARE project has an ambitious set of publications in mind, we also recognise the importance of cultivating other kinds of goods that are not driven by performance metrics. In a wonderful blog titled 'Producing the Good(s): Artists’ Sanity Strategies for Academic Writers’, Catelijne Coopmans touches on this very topic, inviting us to shift our perspective on academic writing from outcomes to what is meaningful and enjoyable in our work. Movement, community and delight are qualities she highlights which might bring us back to ourselves. It is precisely these qualities that our reading retreat sought to nurture and which we will continue to tend to as we continue our work on the project. 

What team members read at the DARE reading retreat 2026

DATA

Beer, D. (2019) The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception. London: Sage

Busch, L. (2017) Looking in the Wrong (La)place? The Promise and Perils of Becoming Big Data. Science, Technology, & Human Values 42(4): 657-678

Castelle, M. (2013) Relational and Non-Relational Models in the Entextualization of Bureaucracy. Computational Culture (3)

Coopmans, C. (2018) Respect for Numbers: Lively Forms and Accountable Engaging in Multiple Registers of STS. Science & Technology Studies 31(4): 109-126

Coopmans, C., Vertesi J., Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. (eds) (2014) Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press

Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019) Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject. Television & New Media 20(4): 336-349

Douglas‐Jones, R., Walford, A., & Seaver, N. (2021) Introduction: Towards an anthropology of data. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27(S1): 9-25

Engelmann, L. (2022) Digital epidemiology, deep phenotyping and the enduring fantasy of pathological omniscience. Big Data & Society 9(1)

Frank, L. (1988) Database Theory and Practice. Wokingham: Addison-Wesley

Rajtar, M. (2023) ‘Small’ data, isolated populations, and new categories of rare diseases in Finland and Poland. Anthropology & Medicine 30(1): 1-16

CARE

Atkinson, P. (1995) Medical Talk and Medical Work: The Liturgy of the Clinic. London: Sage 

Fredengren, C., & Åsberg, C. (2020). Checking in with deep time: Intragenerational care in registers of feminist posthumanities, the case of gärstadsverken. In R. Harrison and C. Sterling (Eds) Deterritorializing the Future. Open Humanities Press, pp 56 - 95

Mol, A. (2008) The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge

Pols, J. (2012) Care at a Distance: On the Closeness of Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

Pols, J., & Moser, I. (2009). Cold technologies versus warm care? On affective and social relations with and through care technologies. Alter, 3(2), 159-178.

LEARNING

Canguilhem, G. (2008) Knowledge of Life. New York: Fordham University Press

Chilvers, J. (2013) Reflexive Engagement? Actors, Learning, and Reflexivity in Public Dialogue on Science and Technology. Science Communication 35(3): 283-310. 

Cresswell, K., Sheikh, A., Franklin, B. D., Krasuska, M., Nguyen, H. T., Hinder, S., Lane, W., Mozaffar, H., Mason, K., Eason, S., Potts, H., & Williams, R. (2021). Interorganizational knowledge sharing to establish digital health learning ecosystems: Qualitative evaluation of a national digital health transformation program in England. Journal of Medical Internet Research 23(8): e23372-e23372

Dupuy, J.-P. (2009) On the Origins of Cognitive Science: The Mechanization of the Mind. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Ingold, T. (2018) Anthropology and/as Education. London: Routledge

Ingold, T. (2001) From the transmission of representations to the education of attention. In H. Whitehouse (ed) (2001) The Debated Mind. Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography. London: Routledge pp.113-153

Ingold, T. (2022) Evolution without Inheritance. Current Anthropology 63 (Suppl 25): S32-S55

Yarrow, T. (2019) Architects: Portraits of a Practice. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press