I am interested in the relationship between “place,” “installation ethnography,” and collaboration ethnography. I think the “place-ness” of installation ethnography in terms of taking up physical space provides interesting perspectives to the politics of “place”making. I am also interested in how collaboration across different “places” will shape the project.
The first draw is my chronic research interest. Delhi’s toxic air has been my research partner for some time. “Delhi”, “toxic”, and “air” by themselves open up inquiries of place, toxicity, porosity, and their uncertain combinations. First, air does not respect borders, yet we find concentrated toxicities at urban peripheries. Spheres of purified air only accessible to those who can spend money to buy it. Second, toxicity has long subverted the molecular imagination: what is PM2.5 but a strategy in visualising chemistry that travels as an assemblage and not as a crystallographic structure?
Nothing much; I hope I can make more sense of it mid-way through the class. One question is: what does it mean for me (based in an American anthropological department) to think about place when the citizenship of millions of my fellow Indians is completely uncertain? Who can focus on place as an analytic?
I find myself not being able to choose at the moment.
I am placing links here that I would like to explore further.The Environment & Society Portal is quite a fun and informative website for me. Its virtual exhibitions put together concepts, timelines, audiovisual material, and academic research in a way that allows me to make sense of parallel conversations occurring within a historical moment.
Some questions that I would like to reflect on:
I have no experience with film, web design, and theatre. However, like everyone, I do have experience in making community and solidarity across anthropologically-constructed divisions of race, class, caste and gender by affective kinships, cooking for people, and general everyday life. One of my questions is: What is the place of affect in a collaborative experimental ethnography classroom? What are the professional and personal limits of collaboration we must confront while being “experimental”?
Here are the photo essay evaluation materials that Vivian Choi shared (developed by the Writing with Light collective): https://web.archive.org/web/20190213161903/https://culanth.org/photo_essaysAlso note Craig Campbell's 2014 book: Agitating Images: Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia. (Campbell is in the Writing with Light editorial collective).&n
How people imagine the edges or horizons of this place depends on whether one is a tourist, an Antiguan working in the hotels, working as a taxi-driver, the mistress of a high governmental official, a school-teacher. For some people, the horizons of this place are the water’s edge of the beachfront hotel, for others, it is the beachfront hotel that obscures the view of the ocean, or sea, depending on which side of the island one is.
