March 6 and 7, 2026 
University of Southern California

Alexander Robinson (USC) and Julien Emile-Geay (USC)

The 2026 Studio Days brings ethnographers together for a series of hands-on sessions focused on ethnographic engagements with models. The 2026 Studio Days will include ten participants and USC faculty as interlocutors whose work centers on digital, mathematical, and architectural models.

What makes a model a tool or object of ethnographic research? What can models allow us to envision or prevent us from seeing? What are the limitations and possibilities of models in ethnographic projects? The Studio Days will be a place for researchers to exercise answers to these questions working collectively and individually around their own projects. It will be facilitated by Prof. Andrea Ballestero and will feature scholars whose daily work is grounded on models: their making, use, improvement, and ultimate discarding. 

Beyond theorizing what models are, the Studio Days will function as a workshop for building upon projects that are already utilizing models as tools and objects of ethnographic research. While meant as a place for open-ended inquiry, the Studio Days will require participants to bring with them an established, even if early, research project where they have found or are building models of a variety of sorts. Models have been theorized as operating pragmatically; being more or less useful rather than more or less true (Sismondo, 1999). They help create objects of attention through conceptual, quantitative and material means intended to create resonance between our knowledge and the conditions of the world (Ballestero, 2023). As parts of larger chains of reference, models can create an object which is subject to thought but demonstrates the uncertainties and complexities of reality (Gårding, 1999; Petersen, 2023). 

There are conceptual models, computational models, and physical models, all of which can be seen as practices related to materiality in relation to their experimental results (Parker, 2009). We will consider two domains of model making and use: the material and the digital. From conversations with other scholars and each other, we will think towards a protocol for engaging models to further expand, make sense of, or interact with our objects of study.

If you have any questions, please reach out to the Ethnography Studio Team ethnographystudio@gmail.com 

References

Ballestero, Andrea. “Casual Planetarities: Choreographies, Resonance, and the Geologic Presence of People and Aquifers,” Environmental Humanities 15, no. 3 (2023): 266-83.

Gårding, Lars. “Models in Science and Otherwise,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 143, no. 1 (1999): 3–11.

Parker, Wendy S. “Does Matter Really Matter? Computer Simulations, Experiments, and Materiality,” Synthese 169, no. 3 (2009): 483–496.

Petersen, Arthur C. “Models,” in Climate, God and Uncertainty: A Transcendental Naturalistic Approach Beyond Bruno Latour. University College London Press, 2023. 

Sismondo, Sergio. “Models, Simulations, and Their Objects”. Science in Context 12 no. 2 (1999): 247–260.