| Description | - In recent decades, the phenomenon of burnout has received extensive research within social sciences and medicine understood as a psychological syndrome due to work-related stress. However, other formulations of burnout exist that came to light during the pandemic, particularly those not tied to waged-work and the increasing sense of burnout as a ‘social mood’ rather than only an individual affliction. In a post-pandemic world there is an urgency to broadening the understanding of burnout as it has evolved over the past three years. This study takes the experience of burnout as an entry point into a multi-faceted analysis of contemporary culture. Limitations of previous studies relegating burnout to only the psychological or workplace-based leave gaps calling for a research of the phenomenon’s psychosomatic aspects that take seriously the body as a producer of knowledge, and interrogations into its different iterations and variety of circumstances it is arising from–immigrant burnout or institutional burnout to name but two. This study uses artistic and transdisciplinary research methods to expand readings of burnout and understand its evolving status post-pandemic and as an en masse or collective feeling. Practice-based and theory-merged research methodologies, tools, instruments and devices are described reflectively in the contexts, happenings, and interventions of their application. The result is both an expanded understanding of the burnout phenomenon and the potential of transdisciplinary approaches to increase and deepen understanding, account for the previously unaccounted details, and open up new insights and ways of knowing. This fresh look at burnout provides new entry points to understanding a growing sense of social exhaustion that implicates body, mind, and a range of cultural, economic, and socio-political factors that is no longer limited to work-place complaints or psychological syndrome.
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