A Student workshop with Kim Fortun
Hosted by the Ethnography Studio
Rice Anthropology Department
October 8th: 9-11 am
Deadline for RSVP and material submission: October 2nd
Send materials to: aballes@rice.edu

What does it mean to say that an ethnographic work has the capacity to move? Move theoretical discussions, geographic locations, affective registers. When ethnographic writing is praised, it is often described as “moving.” This workshop interrogates movement as a marker of “good” anthropological and ethnographic thinking and writing. We are interested in an expansive sense of movement that includes shaking things up, destabilizing and offering fresh takes on the worlds that we investigate. But movement is not limited to forward trajectories. Moving also implies taking tangents, it includes vibrations, and often comes in the form of cataclysmic shakes.

To participate, students will submit a short description of their research and will select one text that has moved their own thinking and ethnographic practice. This text does not need to be representative of the students’ own work, theoretical identifications, or regional interests. It has to have had the capacity to move, though. Submissions will be pre-circulated amongst all participants in preparation for conversation with Prof. Kim Fortun.

The workshop is open to all graduate students. Undergraduate students working on ethnographies for their theses are also welcome, just send me an email (aballes@rice.edu) before submitting your materials so that we can discuss the details. All participants should submit by October 2nd:

• one paragraph description of your project
• one to two paragraph description of the ethnographic text selected (it can be an excerpt or a very short text, in which case please submit a pdf if available)
• description of the kind of movement that the you see the piece performing and any relation to your thinking about your own project (theoretical, physical, affective, intellectual, scalar, stopping you on your tracks)-three paragraph max.

Please send your submissions to my email (aballes@rice.edu) with “ethnographies that move” as  subject. We look forward to seeing you there!

Andrea Ballestero
Studio Convener

Baird Campbell and Eliot Storer
Student Co-coordinators