Wet Ethnographies

Catalog description

Recent experimental ethnographies explore the relationship between research and writing, textual strategies, and the politics of ethnography. Experimental methods provide tools to think and write about projects of coloniality and capital and how they shape the material environment. This course introduces students to experimental ethnographies that take place in environments where the boundaries between water and land get blurred in deltas, river embankments, swamps, mangroves, and reclamation areas that carry signs of both enabling and challenging former and continuing colonial projects of empire or capital. We will critically read and examine ethnographic works that tackle “wetness” and “fluidity” as theoretical tools for understanding fluidity, circulation, and flow to challenge linear development projects from a feminist ethnographic perspective. The course will focus on practicing attunement to more than human life and materialities of soil, water, and land/seascape through experimental ethnographic methods.