I am writing these notes on the heels of yet another preventable police killing, this time in West Philadelphia. Neighbors’ video footage show police having drawn their guns on (and aiming at) 27-year old Walter Wallace while his own mother was attempting to deescalate the situation and to usher him away from the police. The police had originally arrived at the 6100 block of Locust Street in response to a report of a man with a knife in his hand. Neighbors yelled at them not to shoot, yelled that they knew Walter Wallace, and Wallace’s father later told journalists his son had been struggling with mental health issues. I, like so many others, am exhausted by the constant (re)cycling of anti-black violence, the murders by police of black men, women, and children, the inadequate responses of our political leaders, and the constant disavowal and deferral of the structural and institutional systems that perpetuate gross inequalities and disregard. I am frustrated by the constant loop in which the safety and accountability that we seek is met with the imposition of security, regulation, and surveillance. As we mourn and protest, let us also create spaces of joy and care. And please, as a first step, let us vote! Penn Leads the Vote, Penn voter initiative #Vote That Jawn, Philly-specific youth get-out-the-vote initiative Rock the Vote, National youth get-out-the-vote initiative Comprehensive Information about Voting in PA Know your Voting Rights
Deborah A. Thomas
R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology
Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography
Upcoming Events
MEMORIALIZING OTHERWISE | November 19th, Noon
Join us for our November Third Thursday event, "Memorializing Otherwise" on November 19th at Noon. Is it possible to publicly narrate the past, and document the present, in ways that move beyond permanence and monumentalization? What would it mean to think in terms of materiality not in relation to landscape but instead in terms of embodiment? Participants Ken Lum, Deborah Anzinger, and Gabrielle Goliath will address these questions and others in conversation with participants.
As always, Third Thursdays are free and open to the public ⇢ Register Here
doomsday | field notes
“It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?”
– Sun Ra
How do you archive something that hasn’t happened yet? What would an archive of the end of the world look like? On December 3rd at 5 PM EST, Center for Experimental Ethnography fellow Christina Knight and choreographer Jessi Knight of knightworks dance theater will discuss their forthcoming short film, “doomsday: field notes,” a fictional work documenting a mysterious set of ritual practices discovered by an anthropologist from the future. In the film, fragments of dance, glimpses of community building, and invocations of black feminist writing reveal a “doomsday church” invested in charting a black future. For this conversation, knightworks will share their creative and collaborative process, screen clips of the work-in-progress, and discuss their investments in the black speculative.
Christina Knight is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College. Knight's work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently completing a book manuscript that focuses on represents of the Middle Passage in contemporary American visual art and performance. Knight is also at work on a new project that examines the influences of drag culture on contemporary black art. Jessi Knight is a dancer, teacher, and choreographer from Pittsboro, N.C. After graduating from Duke University with a self-designed dance degree with an emphasis in music and education, Jessi embarked on a teaching and choreographing career that has afforded her the opportunity to teach, choreograph and perform both locally and nationally. She spent four years in Denver, Colorado as a member of the internationally acclaimed Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and currently resides in North Carolina where she continues to choreograph and perform on a project by project basis for her company knightworks dance theater.
HEARING HEAT| An Anthropocene Acoustemology
Hearing Heat
Steven Feld, CEE Fellow, Fall 2020
Tuesday, December 8th at 5 PM EST
Hearing Heat listens to histories of listening to cicadas in Papua New Guinea, Japan, and Greece. Through a swelling intensification of intermedial recontextualizations, cicadas are amplified as a companion species thermosonic technology that bears ongoing witness to “the climate of history” in anthropocene atrocities ranging from rainforest destruction to nuclear escalation to precarious heat waves.
This intermedial performance piece is designed for installation of 6-8 rooms with variously positioned speakers and screens presenting an experimental interplay of voice(s), acoustic biospheres, poesis, musical composition, film and television soundtracks, graphic design and notation, sonographic spectra, sculpture and physical objects. The physical installation version of the piece will be recrafted for CEE online experience as a fifty-minute film in the form of an “exhibit walk-through tour,” with discussion to follow.
SCREENING SCHOLARSHIP MEDIA FESTIVAL | Call For Submissions
The Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA) is pleased to announce that the 2021 Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) is now calling for submissions! The Festival will be held on April 16-18, 2021, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania and taking a hybrid format, with screenings and panels taking place online but allowing for in-person, socially distanced events or programs.
Extending 2020’s theme, we invite additional submissions from scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers, and educators of all backgrounds that creatively explore the theme of “Rupture and Repair.” The theme encompasses a range of projects and perspectives about how we navigate pain, violence, struggle, trauma, and/or loss. CAMRA encourages submissions that explore different forms of rupture or breakage, be they physical, structural, environmental, emotional, symbolic, or spiritual in nature, as well as the many forms of, and approaches to, repair.
What are the possibilities and limitations of taking on creative or experimental modes of research and practice in relation to these topics? How do we depict and discuss pain and suffering sensitively and ethically? How do we represent things that appear to be unrepresentable? And how might multimodality offer new visions for repair, recovery, and reconciliation?
More information about the submissions process can be found on theCAMRA website. Submissions are due by December 4, 2020.
Month in Review
3RD THURSDAY | Pandemic Pedagogies
On October 15th, scholars, students, and members of the public joined together for our second Third Thursday gathering of the semester. We were privileged to discuss the course adjustments made in light of the pandemic, and lessons that CEE-Affiliated Faculty, John J. Jackson, Sharon Hayes, Jasmine Johnson, and Amitanshu Das have learned from them.
In this conversation, Sharon Hayes highlighted the ways she has been "prioritizing presence" throughout the course of the virtual semester, and Jasmine Johnson echoed this sentiment as she continues to navigate the "deep intimacy between constraint and possibility" that the pandemic has presented. The panelists emphasized how the pandemic has inspired them to find new ways to inject energy into what they do as instructors. We look forward to continued conversations about prioritizing "liveness" and promoting collaboration in remote multimodal explorations.
BIRTHING RESISTANCE | Stories of Hospital Prison
Sketch of Naomi and her stamp
Co-hosted by anthropologist Alissa Jordan and birth activist China Tolliver, this podcast combines creative ethnographic storytelling, dramatic rereadings of personal narratives, and analytic reflection to understand the emergence of “hospital-prisons” in Haiti and around the world. We focus on two Haitian mothers—Likna and Naomi—and their experiences of birthing in Euro-American mission hospitals where they were then imprisoned. Held captive with their infants, and neither provided food, water, or toiletries, these hospitals leveraged Naomi, Likna, and their companions as corporeal collateral to force families and communities to pay outstanding debts for obstetric surgeries.
Called global public health’s “open secret” (Cowgill & Ntatumbe 2019) the practice of hospital detention is widespread across hospitals in well over 52 countries of the world. It overwhelmingly impacts black women, indigenous women, and women of color and their babies during birth journeys. In spite of its ubiquity, the amount of academic articles written on the practice could fit in a single hand, while local journalists from Kinshasa to Nairobi, and Madhya Pradesh to Bogota have published volumes of accounts on mothers (and others) experiences of clinical captivity.
This podcast draws on commentaries and first-person storytelling by Haitian mothers, a Haitian human rights organizer, a senior AP health journalist, and an activist nurse, in order to attend to the everyday strategies of resistance that women and families wield against the practice. We connect these stories to broader conversations on birth justice and racial capitalism. Listen on SoundCloud.
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT | Regina Austin
Documentaries and the Law video, "Fewer Stays, Fewer Days: The Bronx Defenders and How Holistic Defense Reduces Mass Incarceration"
Regina Austin, CEE Affiliate and William A. Schnader Professor of Law, is the director for a multimodal course titled "Documentaries and the Law". The course trains lawyers to understand both the law and the creative process, as documentary films increasingly influence what people know and think about law. Given that documentary filmmaking provides opportunities to mount visual legal arguments that are relatively affordable, accessible, and reliable, the course seeks to instill students with an understanding of the rudiments of nonfiction film storytelling.
Austin’s scholarship focuses on the impact of law on cultural conflicts arising from race, gender, and class inequality, with much of it revolving around the critical analysis of ethnographies and law-genre documentary films and photography. The Penn Program on Documentaries & the Law hosts screenings of law-genre documentaries, maintains a national archive of clemency videos as a resource for capital defense attorneys, and produces mitigation videos on behalf of young, first-time defendants in cooperation with the Defender Association of Philadelphia. The videos produced in this course are available on Youtube.
Come Spring, Austin will also be instructing a new course: "Critical Multimodal Qualitative Research Across the Professions". Stay tuned for more information about this interdisciplinary multimodal course.
ETHNOGRAPHIC CARTOGRAPHY | Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo
As part of his doctoral research on human-aquifer relations and the pollution of space in Mexico, Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo interrogates the affective, aesthetic, and political affordances of maps. In order to do this, he has been exploring critical collective counter cartographiesas a potential site of important anthropological analysis. Building on the well-established critique of maps as objects implicated in the exercise of power—be that colonial or otherwise—he follows the lead of mapping collectives in Latin America to reclaim the field of cartography.
For other mapping collectives, counter mapping is the continuous attempt to deconstruct traditional narratives of Latin American territories. For them, the map is simultaneously a method, a theory, and an everyday practice. They see in maps a powerful social space to bring intellectually rigorous thought to public spaces making knowledge and research more accessible to everyone. Following this, they work with other social organizations in Mexico and Central America to develop workshops to use traditional mapping methods and important baseline mapping layers in the development of critical collective counter cartographies.
Working in close collaboration with existing mapping collectives such as GeoComunes, JEN, and Iconoclasistas, as well as graduate students from the Department of Anthropology at Penn and the Penn School of Design, Pablo developed a series of maps on water pollution and industrial agricultural practices in Yucatan. Building on the ideas of forensic architecture, they generated a framework for analyzing pollution through the examination of infrastructure types associated with the growing agricultural industry in the region.
Overall the map illustrates the basic problem at hand for Pablo's doctoral research, the intensity of water pollution in the region and the need to find ways to narrate the troubled human-aquifer relations in Yucatan. Over the next months, Pablo plans to continue developing the tools and methodologies that needed for the virtual collective mapping workshops he is organizing in Yucatan.
EVENTS OF INTEREST IMultimodal Programs
Radical Remedies: Shorts from Detroit Narrative Agency Thursday, Nov. 19th 7PM EST
Detroit Narrative Agency created the Radical Remedies rapid response video project to urgently address the dual pandemics of anti-blackness and COVID-19, posing the question—What do resilience, resistance, joy, grief, and collective care look like during this time? Join Scribe Video Center for a specially curated selection of responses from Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people of color within Detroit and the greater Michigan region. This evening will also be the launch of Scribe’s own call for media works. Participants will be joined by Ryan Pearson, Director of Programs at DNA. Learn more on Scribe's website.
Atlas of Affects Through December 2020
"Atlas of Affects," an exhibition in the Slought galleries of material traces, media artifacts, artistic projects, written texts, and other representations of the pandemic, opened in September. By "affect," Slought refers to a personal experience—such as fear, anger, disgust, shame, desire, joy, or love—that is reflective of societal trends and political realities.
Perhaps the most universal response to the experience of confinement, mass death, and state violence is the desire to document it, represent it, and, in so doing, remember the offense. By invoking the geography and spatiality of the atlas—rather than the indexical logic of the library or card catalogue—Slought gestures to the ways in which the pandemic has unleashed global processes of loss and dispossession that are at once non-linear and unending. Although this archive will, like all archives, be necessarily incomplete, we hope it will nevertheless provide a sense of clarity and aid in mapping both the banal and the traumatic dimensions of everyday life.
Image 1: Fabric bound in rubber bands and tied in thread sits soaking in indigo dye. Image 2: A piece of freshly unbound indigo-dyed cotton that will be used to make the sail in Emily Carris-Duncan, Joanne Douglas, and Grace Sanders-Johnson's Spring 2020 Course. (Photo courtesy Grace Sanders Johnson)
On behalf of the CEE, I want to welcome you to our theme year “Futures Unbound!” With the events of the past six months turning everything on its head, and as we mourn lives lost and precarious prospects, we also want to signal the potentiality of new and changed futures in which we are untethered from the norms of the past, unbound from the strictures of the present. We want to chart new possibilities for living together and imagining new worlds, and we look forward to doing this with all of YOU! For those of you who are new to the CEE, I encourage you to reach out to us, and to subscribe to our newsletter. Since our events this fall will all be virtual, this is how you will stay in the loop!
I know that for most of you, this wasn’t the summer you had planned…Graduate students and faculty who were hoping to conduct research had to retool toward virtual projects, or just postpone activities; new courses had to be re-imagined for online platforms; and quarantine put a damper on many of the usual activities we would enjoy. Some bright points were the Blackstar Film Festival, which just ended after an incredible array of synchronous panels and film screenings, and even a closing dance party; and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, which issued a call for proposals in the wake of the outburst of Black Lives Matter protests to support black artists. And we know that many of you found new ways to be engaged, indeed to experiment, with staying involved, staying close, and staying connected.
We are excited to be joined this fall by our new fellows, Steven Feld and Christina Knight, and by some new graduate students who will no doubt push us all further in our approaches to multi-modality (you can find more information about them, and their courses, below). We also look forward to our Third Thursdays this fall, which – in addition to introducing us to our new fellows (September 17th) – will invite conversation about pedagogy in the time of pandemics (October 15th), and will solicit a greater engagement with one of our South African partners (November 19th). More information about Third Thursdays, as well as our other events, will be forthcoming.
For now, we just want to welcome everyone “back to campus,” whatever that means for you, and to invite you back into a community of committed experimentation, something we all need right now!
Deborah A. Thomas
R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology
Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography
FALL FELLOWS
Dr. Christina Knight
Christina Knight is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College. Before joining the Haverford faculty, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Bowdoin College as well as a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow.
Knight’s work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently completing a book manuscript that focuses on representations of the Middle Passage in contemporary American visual art and performance. Knight is also at work on a new project that examines the influences of drag culture on contemporary black art. Additionally, she is the director of knightworks dance theater,which she co-founded with her sister in 2013. LEARN MORE
Dr. Steven Feld
StevenFeld, Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fé, New Mexico, is a filmmaker/photographer, sound artist/musician, and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of New Mexico. After studies in music, film, and photography, he received the Ph.D in Anthropological Linguistics at Indiana University in 1979.
From 1976 he began a research project in the Bosavi rainforest of Papua New Guinea. Results include the monographSound and Sentiment(republished 2012 in a 3rd and 30th anniversary edition), a co-authoredBosavi-English-Tok Pisin Dictionary, and essays, some published in his co-edited books Music Grooves and Senses of Place. From this work he also produced photographic, film, and audio projects including the recent photobook/CD/BluRay Voices of the Rainforest. Key theoretical themes developed in this work are the anthropology of sound and voice, and acoustemology (acoustic epistemology).LEARN MORE
FELLOWS COURSES
BLACK SPECULATIVE FUTURES taught by Christina Knight
Tuesdays 1:30-4:30
Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar’s exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work.
ANTHROMEDIALITIES: EXPERIMENTAL THEORY AND PRACTICE taught by Steven Feld
Wednesdays 2:00-5:00
In recent years much has been made of the “beyond text” turn in anthropology, specifically the need to re-evaluate the singular authority of “writing culture.” Several new approaches advocate for non-textual medialities, with representations originating in both sonovisual media and performance. Less, however, has been theorized and advocated about intermediality and the multicompositional practices of transmediality and plurimediality, specifically their more transgressive multisensory epistemology. This course will examine these radical approaches to interacting textual, visual, sonic and performative mediations, theorizing their epistemic and ethical implications, collaborative potentials, affordances in narrative and non-narrative representation, and political and aesthetic investments. Students will both critically engage histories of transmedial anthropology, and produce projects that are multicompositional..
VIAD + CEE
The CEE and The Visual Identities in Arts and Design Research Group at the University of Johannesburg are forging exciting transatlantic connections. It is our hope that this partnership will open avenues of creative exchange and dialogue between the faculty and students at our respective centers.
Established in 2007, the VIAD research group is dedicated to deepening research around the overarching thematic of identity construction through forms of visual practice, visual culture and visual representation, and specifically in relation to African and Afrodiasporic histories and experiences. Focal areas of research at VIAD include Cultural Identities; Bodily/Embodied Identities; Designing/Designed Identities, and projects that interlink textual, conversational and creative outputs. From 2014-2020, VIAD is paying particular attention to research that falls under the rubric of personal addresses, creative agencies and political resistances in the post-colony.KEEP READING...
NEW AFFILIATED FACULTY
Krystal Strong
Assistant Professor of Education, Literacy, Culture, and International Education
Dr. Strong is an assistant professor in the Education, Culture, and Society program, a member of the graduate group in Anthropology, and a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies.She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was named a Fulbright-Hays Fellow, a Spencer Dissertation Fellow, a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, and a University of California Dissertation Fellow. In 2017, she was awarded the Council on Anthropology and Education’s Presidential Early Career Fellowship. Her work has been published in the Journal of African Cultural Studies and Urban Education. LEARN MORE
Toorjo Ghose
Associate Professor of Social Policy and Practice
Dr. Ghose’s work focuses on structural interventions in the areas of incarceration, substance use, homelessness and HIV, both at the domestic and international levels. His research examines the manner in which contextual factors such as housing, community mobilization, access to mental health care, and organizational characteristics influence substance use and HIV risk. He is currently collaborating with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, New York, The World Bank, and the United Nations on initiatives to end AIDS by 2030 through structural interventions that address the social drivers of risk in marginalized communities around the world.LEARN MORE
RESEARCH UPDATES FROM THE FIELD
Rethinking Multimodal Praxis in the Wake of COVID-19
Arlene Fernández, an awardee of CEE's Multimodal Research Grant, grapples with the task of reshaping the direction of her work in the wake of COVID-19. VIEW NOW
Students Making Films about Education in the Pandemic
Over summer, CEE sat down for a conversation about being a student and making ethnographic films about education in the midst of a pandemic with student-filmmakers Jean Chapiro & Maryann Dreas & Alejandra Villalobos (from Amit Das's course) WATCH NOW
Nora Gross (PhD), a 2020 graduate of the Penn Arts & Sciences Department of Sociology and CAMRA director 2019-2020, is on the film festival trek again! Dr. Gross's short documentary film, "Our Philadelphia" deals with Philadelphia teens experiences with grief in the aftermath of neighborhood gun violence. Three Philadelphia teens directed the film, teaming up with Dr. Gross as part of their highschool internships and senior projects. After graduating, the team continued to work together on the film, funded by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, and the Annenberg School for Communication. The final 15-minute film was edited by Draulhaus (an independent Philadelphia production company) and features music from young Philadelphia artists. View the film onYouTube., and read a full story on the film by BillyPenn presshere.
MARIS JONES
AWARDED SACHS GRANT
Photo by Giani Marisa Jones.
Congratulations to CEE Student Maris Jones for her project "Recipes for the Revolution: Meals Our Ancestors Made Possible", which was just awarded a Sachs Program for Arts Innovation Black Artists Support Grant. The project involves the development of an ancestor-guided cookbook to share life lessons and tools for care, survival, and resistance, asking "What does it mean to survive in the midst of palimpsestic traumas—anti-Blackness, Indigenous erasure, hurricanes, even a pandemic and quarantine? How do we transform the stains that trauma imprints on our memories into tools for survival?".KEEP READING
SCRIBE RADIO SHOW: ARCHIVAL REVIVAL
We invite the CEE Community to listen in to Archival Revival - Thursdays at 5:00 pm on WPEB 88.1 FM, West Philadelphia’s community radio station.
Archival Revival is a new audio documentary series produced by Scribe Video Center for broadcast on WPEB 88.1 FM. The radio program gives the West Philadelphia audience a chance to listen and re-listen to some of the people interviewed by Scribe over the years for documentary and oral history projects. Conversations are presented with the words and stories pretty much unaltered as they were originally recorded.
This Thursday, September 3, Archival Revival continues with an oral history of Louise Leaphart James, long time West Philadelphia resident, activist, writer, journalist, mother and a sister of John Africa, the founder of the MOVE organization. The interview was recorded in 2015. Tune in at 5:00pm.