where art & anthropology meet the scroll.

Working Title: Playing for Change: Using Visual Anthropology and Autoethnography to Co‑Design an EDI Game for Arts & Cultural Organisations

Proposed Research Question

How can visual anthropology and autoethnographic methods be used to design a participatory Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) game that supports more inclusive policy‑making and practice within arts and cultural organisations?

Statement of the Problem

Arts and cultural organisations across the UK continue to grapple with how to meaningfully embed Equality, Diversity & Inclusion in their structures, cultures, and everyday practices. While many institutions have adopted EDI frameworks, charters, and action plans, these often remain abstract, compliance‑driven, or disconnected from lived experience. Staff and freelancers — particularly those with marginalised identities — frequently report that EDI initiatives feel performative, overly bureaucratic, or emotionally burdensome (Bridging the Gap, 2026).

More ideation that includes a location similar to the shoot location for Studio Bulu's professional founder shots.

The final format of my dissertation will be a printed newspaper and this seems just perfect for a studio shoot - especially as I have a red JACQUEMUS jumper in this exact shade.

Studio Bulu is grounded in anthropological ways of seeing, treating culture not as an abstract idea but as something lived, negotiated and felt in everyday interactions. Drawing on social anthropology and visual ethnographic methods, the studio approaches organisations as cultural worlds with their own rituals, narratives, power dynamics and unspoken rules.

This perspective shapes how we listen, observe and design: we use ethnographic sensitivity to understand how people experience institutions, and reflexive practice to remain attentive to our own positionality within that process.

Licensed by Charlie Dave under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licence

Research on EDI in the cultural sector highlights persistent structural inequalities, particularly around race, disability, class, and gender. Studies by Arts Council England, the Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre, and academic researchers such as Sara Ahmed have shown that organisational cultures often resist change even when policy commitments exist. Ahmed’s concept of “non‑performativity” is particularly relevant: the idea that institutions can adopt the language of diversity without transforming underlying power relations.

Alongside this, visual anthropology has increasingly been used to explore organisational life, identity, and embodied experience. Sarah Pink’s work on Doing Visual Ethnography emphasises the value of sensory, participatory, and reflexive methods for understanding how people make meaning in their environments. Pink argues that visual methods can reveal tacit knowledge and emotional textures that traditional interviews may miss—an approach well‑suited to the complexities of EDI.