November 19, 2023 
Toronto, Canada

Katie Ulrich (USC and Rice University), Rachel Howard (University of Chicago), and the EMERGE Collective

The Ethnography Studio participated in a roundtable organized by the EMERGE collective at the 2023 AAA meeting in Toronto. In advance of the meeting, each lab/studio/center of EMERGE sent an artifact to another group, who was then responsible for “activating” that artifact. We all presented on these activations and discussed collaborative ethnographic practices during the roundtable.

The artifact that the Ethnography Studio received was an incredible zine made by the Concordia folks, titled “Pit Stop” and detailing their collective analysis of an old extraction pit in Montreal. Katie Ulrich and Rachel Howard activated this zine by creating a “zine echo,” a mini zine that overlayed images and text from the original Pit Stop zine with media from the 2023 Ethnographic Salon event on porosities. Through this practice of activation, numerous resonances emerged between the projects that had not been immediately conceivable. We wondered, was this merely serendipitous, or would the same thing have happened if another group had made a similar zine for their project? How do concepts travel and what is the nature of their portability? What does it mean to put individual projects in conversation with each other, versus having different people think about the same object?

Instructions for folding the zine (source: https://www.thewhiteroomonline.org.nz/make-a-zine.html):

The artifact that the Ethnography Studio had shared was the below image (by Kristen Sturdivant on Unsplash) that we used when thinking through the theme of our 2023 Ethnographic Salon, porosities. We sent this artifact to the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.

Indivar Jonnalagadda shared during the AAA roundtable how himself, Pablo Aguilera del Castillo, and others at Penn had in turn “absorbed” the image. They theorized the notion of “reci-porosity,” the inhabiting of collaborative and collective spaces within porous structures like the university, in such ways that can open up revaluations of the knowledge economy.