Property + Materiality 2025

View from an elevated concrete highway over a watery landscape with trees emerging out of calm water. Thick clouds hang overhead.

November 20, 2025
Multistudio Offices, New Orleans

LaShandra Sullivan (Northwestern University), Kregg Hetherington (Concordia University), Jamie Cross (University of Glasgow), Meghan Morris (Temple University), Andrea Ballestero (USC), and Michael Ralph (Multistudio)

During the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, the Ethnography Studio and the architecture studio Multistudio hosted a collaborative workshop to think about the relationship between property and materiality. This event was supported by the EMERGE network.

Fifteen participants, from PhD students to junior scholars, considered the concept of property through the lens of their own research and in conversation with discussants Michael Ralph (Multistudio), LaShandra Sullivan (Northwestern University), Kregg Hetherington (Concordia University), Jamie Cross (University of Glasgow), Meghan Morris (Temple University), and Andrea Ballestero (USC). Participants shared short texts and multimodal objects they found or produced through their research, the latter of which are shared below.

People sitting and standing in a conference room, listening to one person speak. The poster of the event is displayed on a large TV screen.

In the workshop, we investigated how the materiality of property mobilizes objects, spaces, and infrastructures into relations of ownership, access, and exclusion. Where does property exist? In a thing or as an idea? What are the values, assumptions, or benefits of ownership? With these starting questions, we gathered to think about different forms of appropriating and caring for the physical world.

Jamie Cross sits in front of a screen and talks.

Andrea Ballestero stands in front of a screen and speaks.

The discussion was divided into three panels. The first panel, Layered Property, included the work of Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes, Luis Gómez-Ordóñez , Emma Jahoda-Brown, Kimberly Chu, and Madeline Augusta Turner. We discussed the aspirations of the linearity of property for enclosure and division, opening up the possibilities of having different ideas of property lines and the porosity of their boundaries. Because property is an abstract construct, it can be difficult to treat it as a material object when it is not embodied in any physical form. One possible answer to this is to work on the historization of property: how did this object/element/matter become property? As Kregg Hetherington reminded us, “property is always a historical claim.”

LeShandra Sullivan sits at a conference table and speaks.

Kregg Hetherington sits in front of a screen talking, with LeShandra Sullivan and Jamie Cross sitting to either side, listening thoughtfully.

The second panel, Property in Motion, commented on the work of Emma Pask, Aline Bravo, Leanne Loo, Adrian Godboldt, and Bailey Miller. When property is in motion, how can we demand accountability? If property elements are uncountable and/or mobile, it poses challenges to approaching them as research objects and to our positionality in relation to them. Meghan Morris invited us to ask how we make ourselves in the making of property. Erosion and fluidity emerged as powerful methods and concepts to approach unstable or uncountable properties. These open different questions in terms of property limits, flow, and aspirations: What counts as property if it is never fully realized as property? Can we expand our analysis to non-compartmentilized objects?

Michael Ralph speaks while sitting amongst other workshop attendees.

The third panel, Property and Adaptation, analyzed the work of Sita Mamidipudi, Parag Jyoti Saikia, Adela Zhang, Amelia Veitch, and Nan Kim. In this panel, we problematized property and its forms of legibility. The belief in the stability of certain kinds of property forms impacts larger claims about property. Two reflections were suggested. First, to extend our analysis by not only approaching how we built property but also how we deconstruct property ideas. Second, to trace the bundles and networks of power that sustain those property claims. This makes us inquire: who has the entitlement to decide over property?

Workshop participants stand in a kitchen area with coffee and chat happily with each other.

Poster for a workshop on property and materiality. The background image is a view from an elevated concrete highway over a watery landscape with trees emerging out of calm water. Thick clouds hang overhead.

Excerpts from participants’ submissions

Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes (Data & Society Research Institute): Data Centers in The Dalles, OR

Hands place miniature books on a collage-like map.

Luis Gómez-Ordóñez (Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois Chicago I School of Psychology, National University Costa Rica): Intimate Plantation Archaeologies

On the right, an old photo of four men standing on the tires of a red tractor. It's captioned, "Farm 'El pelón de la bajura.' Bagaces, Costa Rica, 1989." On the left, a poem. It reads, "Your friends come from a legion close to the wind / as if the years flew by / to meet you / as if in every ploughed furrow of the earth / there is a tunnel of time, / a path to the secrets of the field, / to your handmake pranks / against the tyranny / of workdays and foremen, / against the mechanical time of the tractors, / I see you there, weaving smiles / transhipping fruits that were to be exported / to the houses of the small villages / I see smiles / and I think that you are alive / in the light of each one of those faces".

Emma Jahoda-Brown (University of Southern California): Heavier Than Air

A table showing air quality monitoring data at different sites in California.

A road with shrubby hills in the background and behind them, something white.

Kimberly Chu (Princeton University): Humans in the Ecosystem /
Monkeys in the Neighborhood

A small monkey holding a piece of yellow fruit while sitting in a tree, cropped in a circle with black around it as if one were looking through a telescope.

Madeline Augusta Turner (Stanford University): Soil Horizons

Collage landscape with trees, hills, and a big cloudy sky. The caption says, "Oued Karmous (collage exercise in layering, image + soil-based ink & paper, by author)".

Emma Pask (The College of William and Mary): Pesticides

An old black-and-white photograph of indistinct shapes.

Adrian Godboldt (University of Massachusetts, Amherst): Surveying the Cloud

A photo of a zoning hearing notice, behind a barbed wire fence. The caption says, "Figure 1: Zoning hearing notice regarding proposed increases to building heights in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Adrian Godboldt (2025)."

Photo of a corner auto shop with a city landscape in the background and a bright blue sky. Next to the shop is a full tree, under which a figure sits in the shade. The caption reads, "Figure 2: An old automotive business in northern downtown Phoenix, where an individual rests in its shadow. Photo by Adrian Godboldt (2025).

Bailey Miller-Straus (Princeton University): Counting with Satellites:
The Material Value of Rubble

Satellite images and maps, and a diagram about rubble.

Sita Mamidipudi (University of Pennsylvania): Unseeing: Leasing Water and Flooding Land

Pamphlet with non-Roman script. The caption says, "Multimodal Object 1: Lease document issued to artisanal salt-manufacturers."

A dry dirt landscape with trees and tents a ways back in front of a shore, with a grey-blue sky. In the foreground, a sign is suspended between two sticks. The caption reads, "Multimodal Object 2: Signboard put up by a fishworkers' cooperative claiming rights to prawn harvesting on that shore."

Parag Jyoti Saikia (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): Socio-Temporalities of Hydropeaking

Sign in multiple languages cautioning about water release from a nearby dam.

Adela Zhang (Brown University): Materializing Property Claims

A dirt road with grassy hills in the background and a dark grey cloudy sky. Next to the road, a couple tents. The caption reads, "Figure 1: Chozas being built on land disputed between a comunidad campesina and an ex-hacendado. Photo taken by author."

Tents on a grassy hillside in front of a terraced valley. The caption reads, "Figure 2: Land occupation using tents, April 2022. Photo from RPP Noticias."

Amelia Veitch (Yale University, Agrarian Studies): Abandonment as neglect

On the left, an aerial photo of a costal scene with white houses and farmland. On the right, a photo of metal posts in a tall grassy field with a body of water in the background.

Nan Kim (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee): Rethinking Property Through Plutonium’s Unstable Materiality

Blue and black map of the world with red and white lines depicting the routes "recycled" plutonium takes around the world.