CENTER FOR EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY
Empathic Thresholds | 2022-2023 theme
meet us
PEOPLE | FACULTY | FELLOWS | STUDENTS | SCHOLARS
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KRISTINA LYONSINTERIM DIRECTOR CONTACT:krlyons@SAS.UPENN.EDUKristina Lyons’ current research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, feminist science studies, and legal anthropology in Latin America. Her manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke 2020), moves across laboratories, greenhouses, forests, and farms in the capital city of Bogotá, Colombia and the Andean-Amazonian department of Putumayo. It weaves together an intimate ethnography of two kinds of practitioners – state soil scientists and peasant farmers – who attempt to cultivate alternatives to commercial coca crops and the military-led, growth-oriented development paradigms intended to substitute them. In 2015, Dr. Lyons directed a popular education documentary film project based on farmer-to-farmer alternative agricultural practices called Cultivating a Bien Vivir (Living Well) in the Amazon. Her current work focuses on the memory and mourning of water, hydrogeological processes, participatory forms of territorial planning, socio-natural disaster, and water-inspired relations and subjectivities.
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deborah a. thomas
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also core faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, holds a secondary appointment with the Graduate School of Education, and is a member of the graduate groups in English, Africana Studies, Comparative Literature, and the School of Social Policy and Practice.
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Thomas is the author of Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004), Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), and Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, and Repair (2019), and co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (2006). She also co-produced and co-directed the experimental documentary Four Days in May, co-curated the Bearing Witness Exhibit and co-directed the documentary Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens. Prior to her life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.
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JOHN JACKSON JR.
John L. Jackson, Jr., is the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice and Special Adviser to the Provost on Diversity at Penn. He is the author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political
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Correctness (Basic Civitas, 2008); Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Harvard University Press, 2013); Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion, co-written with Cora Daniels (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2014), and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment (NYU Press, 2016), co-written with Carolyn Rouse and Marla Frederick. He is also editor of Social Policy and Social Justice (2016), distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
His most recent film, co-directed with Deborah A. Thomas, is Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens (Third World Newsreel, 2012), and he is currently part of the production team completing Making Sweet Tea: The Lives and Loves of Southern Black Gay Men. An urban researcher, media ethnographer, anthropologist of religion, and theorist of race/ethnicity, Jackson’s work also critically explores how film and other non-traditional or multi-modal formats can be most effectively utilized in specifically scholarly research projects, and he is one of the founding members of CAMRA.
His most recent film, co-directed with Deborah A. Thomas, is Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens (Third World Newsreel, 2012), and he is currently part of the production team completing Making Sweet Tea: The Lives and Loves of Southern Black Gay Men. An urban researcher, media ethnographer, anthropologist of religion, and theorist of race/ethnicity, Jackson’s work also critically explores how film and other non-traditional or multi-modal formats can be most effectively utilized in specifically scholarly research projects, and he is one of the founding members of CAMRA.
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ASSOCIATE DIRECTORAlissa Jordan is a multimodal cultural anthropologist who received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on questions of bodily being, bodily security, and creativity across field sites in rural Haiti, urban Ghana, and in social digital spaces. She investigates these questions using methods of experimental writing, collaborative nonlinear filmmaking, sensory mapping, photography, museum exhibition, and digital experimentations. She is currently researching family experiences of birthing, care, and resistance in the context of hospitals that imprison patients for debt.
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Jezenia ROmero
cOMMUNITY OUTREACH & ADMINISTRATIVE FELLOW jezeniar@SAS.UPENN.EDU
Jezenia Romero is an artist with a background in music, publishing, and sculpture. Throughout her practice, she has taught DIY music production workshops with a variety of non-profit art and music mentoring organizations. Recent work includes the development and implementation of a Virtual Welding Simulation course for incarcerated folks at Rikers Island New York. Current works include an EP release from a new solo project and a documentary film about the 2019 Lower East Side Manhattan float parade performed by the NY/LA collective “COQUETA”.
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