In the Chapter Autoethnography of the Inbetweenness: Between Art and Anthropology, I explore my experiences of being between the disciplines of art and anthropology, particularly my approach to anthropology which is influenced by my artistic training. In the first section of the Chapter, I reflect on how the social sciences and humanities have renewed their engagement with creative and artistic practices, and are working across disciplines to undertake more exploratory research and methods that move beyond text as a format of knowledge production. I question issues of validation and the recognition of creative practices within social sciences research, illustrated by my own process of doing a PhD in anthropology through an artistic lens. I analyze the history of the close relationship between art and anthropology in the 1980s, reflecting on why, in the past, this juxtaposition was largely considered an invalid form of knowledge production. This is followed by reflections on today’s multimodality within the social sciences that leads to, in many cases, the instrumentalization of artistic partners and culture producers.

In the second section, I take my process of understanding Liminality, one of the anthropological concepts on which the PhD manuscript is based, as a case study. Through autoethnography, I intend to analyze the critiques of Liminality from anthropology and why, from the arts, it has been a concept that has evolved in potential ways in contributing towards spatial/temporal approach in migration studies and border regimes. These different perspectives on the same concept have led me to reflect on the problems and potentiality of the collaboration between art and anthropology, which today becomes a potential value in the multimodal social sciences approach. In this Chapter I am rethinking the positionality of art within academic projects in the social sciences and anthropology.