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 seminar introduces students to ethnographies that take place in environments where the boundaries between water and land get blurred, in bodies, deltas, river embankments, swamps, mangrove wetlands, 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 to understand temporality, circulation, and flow and challenge linear development projects from a feminist perspective. The course fosters attunement to more-than-human life and materialities of soil, water, and land/seascape through ethnographic practices of walking and drawing, among others.