To celebrate the intellectual value and collaborative potential of ethnography, and the end of a vibrant year, the Ethnography Studio hosted its second-annual Ethnographic Salon. We enjoyed a night of conversation, visual presentations, music, and food, set in Rice’s Sculpture Garden. The evening’s theme was FACT, which our presenters explored through ethnographic and visual musings of facts’ contestations, movements, structures, and representations. Up for intellectual meditation was not a theory of facts per se, but rather multiple ways of attending to the circumstances and processes that reaffirm or call facts into question.
Starting off the night was a conversation between Danilyn Rutherford, incoming Wenner Gren President and Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz and Andrea Ballestero, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Ethnography Studio in the spirit of her article “Kinky Empiricism.”
A series of short visual presentations from Rice graduate students followed (see pictures below). Daniela Tijerina Benner, John Blatzheim, Charlie Lotterman, Annie Lowe, and Tommy Symmes, from the Linguistics, Anthropology, Religion, and English departments, contributed. We heard about evidences of toxicity, fabrications and forgeries, science and truth, and more. The evening was rounded out by further celebration and conversation, music, and second helpings of baklava.
Thank you to all who supported this event, including GradStarter, the Graduate Student Association, the Humanities Research Center, and the Department of Anthropology.
Look for the Ethnography Studio’s next workshop event sometime this fall!
The Ethnography Studio 