Speculative Ethnography 2025

An abstract rendering of what looks like wavy lines of paint, extending in nesting circles; it evokes electricity and energy.

March 31, 2025
University of Southern California

Steven Gonzalez (Goethe University Frankfurt)

On March 31st, the Ethnography Studio and the USC Department of Anthropology hosted a workshop with Dr. Steven Gonzalez (Goethe University Frankfurt) titled, “Speculative Ethnography: Cultivating Anthropological Imagination through Fiction & Artistic Practice.”

A speaker smiles while standing at a podium.

In the out-of-focus background, a speaker talks at a podium. In the in-focus foreground, a few hexagonal tiles sit on a table near colored pieces of paper.

Steven guided participants through three activities, some conducted in groups and others individually. The goal was to challenge conventional knowledge-making processes and explore alternative ethnographic representations that are more-than-empirical in their scope. The exercises focused on speculative ethnography and encouraged us to consider the role of fabulation in ethnography as well as the creative curatorial processes inherent in ethnographic practice.

About a dozen people sit in three rows of tables, writing on papers in front of them.

Thank you, Steven, for showing us the power of speculative ethnography as a form of counter-hegemony and resistance.

Poster for the Speculative Ethnography workshop. The background image is an abstract rendering of what looks like wavy lines of paint, extending in nesting circles; it evokes electricity and energy.

A photo of a person wearing a burgundy button-up shirt and smiling, with short brown hair.

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate is a postdoctoral researcher at the Fixing Futures Research Training Group at Goethe University. He received his PhD in the History, Anthropology, Science, Technology & Society (HASTS) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current book project, Cloud Ecologies, is an environmental ethnography of data centers in New England, Arizona, Puerto Rico, and Singapore. Committed to public engagement and accessible scholarship, his writing and research appears in venues including Wired, Aeon, Popular Science, Anthropology News, ABC News, BBC News, NPR and more. Steven holds an MA in Anthropology from Brandeis University and a BA in Feminist Anthropology from Keene State College. He is also a filmmaker and a speculative fiction writer (under the byline E.G. Condé).