This syllabus accompanies sorrego.net as its conceptual and pedagogical infrastructure—a kind of backstage architecture for the projects, writings, and visual experiments gathered on the site. It is not a course to be followed sequentially, but a map of influences and affinities, a landscape of learning in which theory, ethnography, and art continuously intersect. It traces the intellectual and aesthetic genealogies that sustain my practice, offering a glimpse into the readings, thinkers, and methods that have shaped my approach to urban, multispecies, and environmental ethnography.
Rather than prescribing a fixed curriculum, the syllabus proposes an open cabinet of drawers that can be explored in any order. Each drawer unfolds a distinct yet connected theme—fragments, specimens, infrastructures, taxonomies, and methods of care—offering ways to move between analysis and poetics, between the grounded and the speculative. The intention is to make visible the conceptual scaffolding behind ongoing experiments in writing, drawing, and curating as ethnographic forms of inquiry.
At its core, this collection is an invitation to think with the fragmentary, to take incompleteness as a condition of research, and to practice ethnography as an act of composition. The readings gathered here span anthropology, STS, philosophy, geography, and art, forming a constellation of references that enable other ways of assembling knowledge. Each text, much like each project on this site, acts as a fragmentary specimen—an entry point into a broader ecology of thought and method.
Ultimately, the syllabus is both a tool and a proposition: a resource for those who wish to experiment with forms of knowing that emerge from attention, care, and encounter. It offers paths for learning through failure, through multimodality, and through more-than-human entanglements. To navigate it is to enter an open-ended ethnographic space—one where fragments, infrastructures, and species are not objects of study, but companions in the making of alternative worlds.
Urban Ethnography and the City as Field
Overview
This drawer introduces the city as an ethnographic field—a site where infrastructures, gestures, atmospheres, and relations assemble and unravel. Students are invited to learn not only to observe cities but to compose with them, using multimodal methods that combine sensory ethnography, critical theory, and speculative documentation.
The module bridges classic urban anthropology (Simmel, Lefebvre, Low) with experimental urban STS (Simone, Farías, McFarlane), and new multispecies and feminist STS approaches (Haraway, Puig de la Bellacasa, Neimanis). It invites participants to inhabit the city as both a field and a collaborator.
Concept
Urban ethnography traces how everyday life, infrastructures, and social relations shape the material, sensory, and political forms of the city. It requires both immersion and estrangement—moving through the city as a living archive of negotiations, adaptations, and frictions. The field is not a bounded site but an evolving network of encounters, temporalities, and atmospheres. Classic urban anthropology established methods of participant observation and grounded theory in dense, contested spaces; contemporary work extends these approaches to infrastructural, planetary, and more-than-human scales.
In this drawer, the city is not a static object of study but a field of becoming—a site of composition where the ethnographer listens to materials, movements, and minor gestures that make up urban life.
Key ideas
Urban fieldwork • The right to the city • Assemblages • Precarity • Care • Infrastructures • Public space • Atmospheres • Planetary urbanization.
Key readings
Foundational and Classical Works
– Auyero, Javier. Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
– Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
– Farías, Ignacio, and Thomas Bender, eds. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London: Routledge, 2010.
– Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 [1974].
– Low, Setha M. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
– Ong, Aihwa, and Stephen J. Collier, eds. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
– Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by Kurt H. Wolff, 409–424. New York: Free Press, 1950 [1903].
– Simone, AbdouMaliq. City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads. New York: Routledge, 2010.
– Valverde, Mariana. Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance in an Age of Diversity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
– Vaughan, Laura. Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography. London: UCL Press, 2018.
Contemporary and Expanded Urban Ethnography
– Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift. Seeing Like a City. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.
– Blok, Anders, and Ignacio Farías, eds. Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies, Atmospheres. London: Routledge, 2016.
– Harvey, Penny, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita, eds. Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. London: Routledge, 2016.
– Holston, James. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
– Low, Setha M., and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, eds. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
– McFarlane, Colin. Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
– Robinson, Jennifer. Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge, 2006.
– Simone, AbdouMaliq, and Edgar Pieterse. New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.
Recent Directions (2020–2025)
– Angelo, Hillary, and David Wachsmuth. “Why Does Everyone Think Cities Can Save the Planet?” Urban Studies 57, no. 11 (2020): 249–270.
– Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
– Biehl, João, and Peter Locke, eds. Ethnographic Unworldings: Urban Life and the Politics of Abandonment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023.
– Orrego, Santiago. 2022. “Turning a Traffic Light into an Epistemological Device: An ANT Proposal to Disassemble and Stabilize Urban Life into Regions of Usefulness.” Social Epistemology 36 (3): 311–327.
– Peach, Lois, Debbie L. Watson, Ingrid Skeels, Shani Ali, Paul Bradley, Samira Musse, and Tom D. Allport. 2025. “Multi-species Encounters in the City: A More-Than-Human Perspective on Children’s Arts-Based Exploration of Urban Natural Spaces.” Children’s Geographies 23 (2)
– Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2022. The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Exercise
Choose an ordinary urban corner—an intersection, market stall, or broken sidewalk. Observe it for one hour. Write down every small negotiation—human, animal, material—that sustains its functioning. Then, sketch it as a “situational diagram,” tracing flows of care, decay, and improvisation.
Urban Mapping and Cartographic Thinking
Concept
Mapping is not a neutral act of representation but a political, aesthetic, and affective practice. It shapes how we perceive territory, belonging, and the relationships between bodies and space. Urban mapping transforms the map from an instrument of measurement into a device of inquiry—an ethnographic gesture that traces coexistence, care, and contestation. In this sense, maps become stories, negotiations, and performances: they reveal how urban life is organized and imagined through lines, layers, and absences.
Drawing from radical geography, social cartography, and multimodal ethnography, this drawer explores how maps can serve as collaborative, sensory, and speculative tools to rethink the politics of visibility in the city. Whether created collectively on paper, through open-source software, or by tracing affective routes and residues, maps here operate as ethnographic artifacts—provisional, situated, and alive.
Key Ideas
Critical cartography • Social mapping • Spatial justice • Collective representation • Counter-mapping • Speculative cartographies • Sensory and affective mapping • Geovisual ethnography
Key Readings
Foundational and Classical Works
– Bunge, William, Nik Heynen, and Trevor Barnes. Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution. University of Georgia Press, 1971.
– Crampton, Jeremy W. Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
– Harley, J. B. “Deconstructing the Map.” Cartographica 26, no. 2 (1989): 1–20.
– Harley, J. B., and David Woodward, eds. The History of Cartography, Vols. 1–3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987–2007.
– Harley, J. B. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
– Hillier, Amy. “Why Social Work Needs Mapping.” Journal of Social Work Education 43, no. 2 (2007): 205–222.
– Iconoclasistas. Manual of Collective Mapping. Buenos Aires: Iconoclasistas, 2013.
– Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [1970].
– Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
– Pickles, John. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. London: Routledge, 2004.
– Vaughan, Laura. Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography. London: UCL Press, 2018.
– Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press, 1992.
– Wood, Denis, and John Fels. The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Critical and Contemporary Works
– Casebeer, Daniel. “Mapping Dispositions for Social Justice: Towards a Cartography of Reflection.” Reflective Practice 17, no. 3 (2016): 357–368.
– Crampton, Jeremy W., and John Krygier. “An Introduction to Critical Cartography.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4, no. 1 (2005): 11–33.
– Dodge, Martin, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins, eds. The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
– Garrido, Guillermo. “Radical Geography and Advocacy Mapping: The Case of the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (1968–1972).” Journal of Planning History 20, no. 4 (2021): 291–307.
– Mattern, Shannon. Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
– Mattern, Shannon. “Mapping’s Intelligent Agents.” Places Journal, April 2019. https://doi.org/10.22269/190401.
– Oslender, Ulrich. 2021. “Decolonizing Cartography and Ontological Conflict: Counter-Mapping in Colombia and ‘Cartographies Otherwise’.” Political Geography 89: 102444.
– Suša, Rad, and Vanessa Andreotti. “Social Cartography in Educational Research.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press, 2019.
– Vaughan, Laura, ed. Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street. London: UCL Press, 2015.
Recent Directions (2020–2025)
– Albet, Abel, Chris Lukinbeal, and Agnieszka Leszczynski eds. The Digital Geographies Handbook. London: Sagę, 2020.
– Bender, Hendrik, and Max Kanderske. 2022. “Co-operative Aerial Images: A Geomedia History of the View from Above.” New Media & Society 24 (11): 2468–2492.
– Bennett, Mia M., Janice K. Chen, Luis F. Alvarez León, and Colin J. Gleason. 2022. “The Politics of Pixels: A Review and Agenda for Critical Remote Sensing.” Progress in Human Geography 46 (3): 729–752.
– Bennett, Mia M., Colin J. Gleason, Beth Tellman, Luis F. Alvarez León, Hannah K. Friedrich, Ufuoma Ovienmhada, and Andrew J. Mathews. 2024. “Bringing Satellites Down to Earth: Six Steps to More Ethical Remote Sensing.” Global Environmental Change Advances 2: 100003.
– Duggan, Michael, and Daniel Gutiérrez-Ujaque. 2025. “Counter-Mapping as Praxis: Participation, Pedagogy, and Creativity.” Progress in Human Geography (published online June 14, 2025).
– Thatcher, Jim, Craig M. Dalton, and Luke Bergmann. Data Power: Radical Geographies of Control and Resistance. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
– Rekacewicz, Philippe, Tobias Mandler, Daniel Cordero, Pablo A. A. Echague, Anita Hardon, Bea Pauchano, Saira Pelagio, Maria Rios Sandoval, and Michael L. Tan. 2025. “Mapping Everyday Urban Political Ecologies: Experiential Cartography as Embodied Methodology.” Urban Political Ecology 1 (1–2): 88–117.
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Exercise
Conduct a counter-mapping of a place you know well—your neighborhood, a farm, or a street. Rather than representing fixed boundaries, trace affective or ecological relations: where smells, noises, or gestures accumulate; where infrastructures break or overflow. Use any medium—hand-drawn map, diagram, or digital visualization—and accompany it with a short ethnographic caption explaining what your map refuses, displaces, or reveals.
Fragments and Fragmentography
Concept
Fragmentography begins with the broken, the partial, the residual. It approaches ethnography not as a pursuit of wholeness but as a practice of assembling incomplete traces—fieldnotes, voices, smells, ruins, and remains—into constellations of meaning. The fragment resists totalization: it gestures, it interrupts, it remembers. To think fragmentographically is to linger in the unfinished, to acknowledge that knowledge often arrives in splinters, stains, and affective debris.
This approach draws inspiration from montage, archival poetics, and feminist and multispecies ethnographies that refuse the smoothness of positivist representation. Fragments are not errors in method but epistemic gestures—each one an invitation to recompose worlds without closure. Writing with fragments means collecting without enclosing, curating without fixing, and tracing relations through partial and ephemeral connections. Fragmentography thus operates as both method and ethos. It pays attention to what remains: residues, repetitions, and the infraordinary. It treats incompleteness as an ethical stance—refusing mastery, foregrounding care, and sustaining curiosity toward the partial and the decaying.
Key Ideas
Fragmentation • Montage • Incompleteness • Residue • Ruin • Archival poetics • Partial connections • Aesthetics of the broken • The infraordinary • Curatorial ethnography
Key Readings
Foundational and Classical Works
– Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005 [1951].
– Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
– Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
– Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 83–109. New York: Schocken, 1968.
– Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
– De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
– Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
– Perec, Georges. 2010. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Translated by Marc Lowenthal. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press.
– Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin, 1997 [1974].
– Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007 [1993].
Anthropological and Contemporary References
– Ballestero, Andrea, and Brit Ross Winthereik, eds. Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
– Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
– Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
– Jackson, Michael. Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
– Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
– Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
– Stewart, Kathleen. Atmospheric Attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (2011): 445–453.
– Taussig, Michael. I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
– Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
– Stewart, Susan, and Harriet F. Senie, eds. Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy. New York: IconEditions, 1992.
Recent Directions (2020–2025)
– Ballestero, Andrea. A Future History of Water. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
– Fortun, Kim, Mike Fortun, and George E. Marcus. “Experimental Ethnography for Precarious Times.” Cultural Anthropology 35, no. 4 (2020): 558–565.
– Pandian, Anand. A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
– Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
– Raffles, Hugh. The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time. New York: Pantheon, 2020.
– Stewart, Kathleen. “Worlding Through Fragments.” In Experimental Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis, edited by Andrea Ballestero and Brit Winthereik, 215–226. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
– Myers, Natasha, and Carla Hustak. “An Anthropological Cabinet of Curiosities: Sensing Fragments Otherwise.” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 3 (2020): 734–748.
– Gómez-Barris, Macarena. At the Sea’s Edge: Liquid Fragments in the Decolonial Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2025.
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Exercise
Compose a fragmentarium: gather five incomplete traces from your fieldwork—a line from a conversation, a photograph corner, a smell, a discarded object, a misremembered phrase. Arrange them without hierarchy or commentary. Let their juxtaposition produce an emergent, unfinished story. Then write a brief reflection (150 words) on what remains unsaid between them.
Specimenography and the Cabinet Form
Concept
Specimenography is both a method and a philosophy of ethnographic curation. It asks what happens when fragments are treated as specimens—objects not of possession but of attention. To “specimenize” is to stabilize the fleeting without fixing it, to name without mastering, to classify while remaining aware of the violence and tenderness embedded in such acts. The cabinet, in this sense, is not a colonial container but an epistemic stage: a site where relations among things, names, and observers are continuously composed and undone.
Drawing on the histories of collecting, natural history, and museology, specimenography transforms curatorial gestures—labeling, arranging, categorizing—into analytical and ethical tools. It seeks to curate the broken, the decomposing, the excessive, and the overlooked. In its practice, ethnography becomes a mode of caring for remains: a writing of attention that oscillates between taxonomic rigor and poetic hesitation.
As a speculative curatorial form, specimenography proposes that the archive is alive, that the cabinet breathes, and that the act of classification can be reparative when guided by situated ethics. It offers an alternative to extractive scientific traditions by turning the ethnographer into a caretaker of fragments rather than their owner. Each specimen—whether a note, smell, sound, or residue—becomes a lens through which to rethink the relations between materiality, method, and memory.
Key Ideas
Specimen • Curation • Classification • Labeling • Collection • Archive • Display • Care • Taxonomy • Situated knowledge • Poetic epistemology
Key Readings
Historical and Classical Foundations
– Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995.
– Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007.
– Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1970.
– Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
– Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
– Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
– Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
– Pearce, Susan. Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992.
– Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1992.
– Haraway, Donna J. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599.
– Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Contemporary Theoretical and Methodological Expansions
– Ballestero, Andrea, and Brit Ross Winthereik, eds. Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
– Blaser, Mario. “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of People in Spite of Europe.” Current Anthropology 54, no. 5 (2013): 547–568.
– Lange, Britta. Animals as Specimens: An Archaeology of Knowledge. Berlin: Reimer, 2019.
– Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Strathern, Marilyn. Partial Connections. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991.
– Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, 2007.
– Riles, Annelise. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
– Hicks, Dan, and Mary C. Beaudry, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
– Macdonald, Sharon. Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. London: Routledge, 2013.
– Bennett, Tony, Fiona Cameron, Nélia Dias, Ben Dibley, Rodney Harrison, Ira Jacknis, and Conal McCarthy, eds. Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
– Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Recent Directions (2020–2025)
– Boscagli, Maurizia. Metamorphoses: Recycling, Reuse, and Remediation in Contemporary Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.
– Harrison, Rodney, and Esther Breithoff. Afterlives of the Museum: Objects, Archives, and Care. London: Routledge, 2021.
– Myers, Natasha. “Curating the Planthroposcene: Vegetal Life and the Politics of Display.” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 1 (2020): 1–22.
– Stevenson, Alice. Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums. London: UCL Press, 2021.
– Despret, Vinciane. Living as a Bird. Translated by Helen Morrison. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
– Wüst, Cornelia, and Viviane Saglier, eds. Ethnographic Museums and Colonial Legacies. Berlin: Reimer, 2022.
– Demos, T. J. Radical Museology and the Anthropocene. London: Sternberg Press, 2023.
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Exercise
Select one fragment—an object, residue, or sound—from your fieldwork. Treat it as a specimen. Write a label for it, including the following: (1) name or invented taxonomy, (2) place and time of collection, (3) relational context, and (4) an interpretive or poetic note. Then, imagine how this specimen would be displayed in a “living cabinet” that resists closure—what other elements, images, or sounds would it need to coexist with?
More-Than-Human Worlds and Alterecology
Concept
Alterecology begins where ecology is no longer taken for granted as a neutral science of relations, but reimagined as a situated ethics of coexistence. It is an inquiry into the material and moral entanglements of life and death across species, infrastructures, and environments. To think alterecologically is to pay attention to the leftovers and afterlives of more-than-human relations—to the pigs whose residues fertilize fields, the plants that circulate through markets, the animals that make infrastructures livable.
More-than-human ethnography expands the field beyond the human sensorium. It listens to the affective and ecological relations that sustain shared worlds—relations often mediated by labor, waste, care, and contamination. These approaches refuse both romantic biophilia and technological mastery, insisting instead on an ethics of partial connection and mutual vulnerability. This drawer gathers the conceptual and methodological threads that inform an alterecological practice: a way of writing, drawing, and curating that situates ethnography within ecological ruin, care, and regeneration. It also reflects on the limits of anthropocentric perception and the need to develop forms of description that render multispecies entanglements ethically legible without reducing them to metaphor or data.
Key Ideas
Alterecology • Multispecies ethnography • Care • Contamination • Waste • Coexistence • Afterlife • Ethics of encounter • More-than-human infrastructures • Relational ontology
Key Readings
Foundational and Classical Works
– Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
– Despret, Vinciane. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
– Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
– Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
– Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000.
– Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human-. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
– Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
– Ogden, Laura, Billy Hall, and Kimiko Tanita. “Animals, Plants, and People: Extending Entanglements in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4, no. 1 (2013): 35–53.
– Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993.
– Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Contemporary Expansions and Theoretical Currents
– Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
– Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
– Choy, Timothy. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
– Despret, Vinciane, and Michel Meuret, eds. Cosmos, Cows, and Care: Practices of Multispecies Living. Paris: Quae, 2018.
– Kirksey, Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545–576.
– Myers, Natasha. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
– Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More-than-Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
-Rose, Deborah Bird. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
-Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–22.
– van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Recent Directions (2020–2025)
– Chao, Sophie, and Lindy Li Mark, eds. The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
– Franklin, Sarah, and Stefan Helmreich, eds. Anthropology Inside Out: Multispecies and Molecular Turns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
– Hodgetts, Timothy, and Jamie Lorimer. Animals’ Assemblages: Multispecies Urbanisms in Practice. London: Routledge, 2020.
– Orrego, Santiago. 2025. “Partial Encounters: Exploring More-Than-Human Entanglements in Berlin’s Animal Enclosures.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 54 (3): 336–63.
– Parreñas, Juno Salazar. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
– Paxson, Heather, and Natasha Myers. “A Multispecies Ethics for the Anthropocene.” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 3 (2020): 735–755.
– Probyn, Elspeth. Eating the Ocean: Toward a Multispecies Politics of Food. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
– van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. The Multispecies World: Stories of Ecological Care and Collapse. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024.
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Exercise
Draw a multispecies cartography of your field site. Identify the species, materials, infrastructures, and practices that sustain or disturb each other. Annotate it not only with names but with verbs—feeding, leaking, fertilizing, smelling, decomposing. Then, write a short ethnographic vignette (150–200 words) describing one of these interspecies exchanges. Focus on its textures, ethics, and vulnerabilities rather than its outcomes.
Infrastructures, Care, and the Infraordinary
Concept
Infrastructures hold the world together—but often quietly, precariously, and unevenly. They are the pipes, pavements, routines, and gestures that make life possible while remaining invisible until they break down. To study infrastructures ethnographically is to trace not only technical systems but also the social and ethical labors that sustain them.
This drawer focuses on care as the minor, distributed work that keeps infrastructures alive. From patched sidewalks and leaking pipes to improvised animal shelters and makeshift maintenance networks, these fragile systems reveal that repair is never purely technical but deeply social. Infrastructures thus become spaces of care and coexistence, where breakdown exposes relations of dependency and creativity.
The infraordinary—a concept drawn from Georges Perec—invites a shift in scale: from spectacular infrastructures to the everyday acts of mending, cleaning, and adjusting that quietly compose urban and ecological life. Thinking infrastructurally through the infraordinary means paying attention to small gestures of maintenance and to the ways people and materials improvise when things fall apart.
Key Ideas
Infrastructure • Care • Repair • Maintenance • Breakdown • Improvisation • Infraordinary • Attention • Precarity • Everyday ethics • Urban materiality
Key Readings
Foundational and Classical Works
– Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
– Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
– Graham, Stephen, and Nigel Thrift. “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance.” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 1–25.
– Jackson, Steven J. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot, 221–240. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
– Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–343.
– Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Bloomsbury, 2004 [1992].
– Mol, Annemarie. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge, 2008.
– Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin, 1997 [1974].
– Perec, Georges. “Approaches to What?” In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 205–210. London: Penguin, 1997 [1973].
– Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–391.
– Mol, Annemarie. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge, 2008.
– Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More-than-Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
– Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.” Information Systems Research 7, no. 1 (1996): 111–134.
– Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Contemporary Expansions
– Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
– Chu, Julie Y. Do You See What I Hear? Infrastructure and Sensory Politics in Urban China. Social Text 37, no. 4 (2019): 97–120.
– Denis, Jérôme, and David Pontille. Maintenance and Repair in Science and Technology Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022 [French original 2015].
– Fennell, Catherine. Last Project Standing: Civics and Sympathy in Post-Welfare Chicago. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
– Harvey, Penny, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita, eds. Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. London: Routledge, 2016.
– Mattern, Shannon. Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
– Mattern, Shannon. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
– Sánchez Criado, Tomás, and Adolfo Estalella, eds. Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices. New York: Berghahn, 2018.
– Strebel, Ignaz, Henrik Ernstson, and Nina V. Laurie, eds. Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene. London: Routledge, 2019.
– Streule, Monika, and Christian Schmid. “Infrastructural Urbanization: Ethnographies of Material, Political, and Planetary Processes.” Ethnos 85, no. 4 (2020): 676–697.
Recent Directions (2020–2025)
– Chatzidakis, Andreas, Jo Littler, and Catherine Rottenberg. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso, 2020.
– Denis, Jérôme, and David Pontille. “The Fragility of Maintenance: On the Politics of Keeping Things Alive.” Social Studies of Science 51, no. 2 (2021): 300–320.
– Jackson, Shannon, and Nicholas Ridout. Maintenance: Art, Care, and Performance in the 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
– Jackson, Steven J., and Laewoo Kang, eds. Broken World Thinking: Infrastructures and the Politics of Maintenance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024.
– Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
– Rankin, Katharine N., and Faranak Miraftab, eds. Insurgent Infrastructures: Reimagining Urban Futures from the Global South. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023.
– Tsing, Anna, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, eds. Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene. Stanford: Stanford Digital Projects, 2020.
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Exercise
Select a small site of repair—a sidewalk patch, an improvised barrier, a leaking pipe, a cage, or a garden fence. Document it through writing or drawing. Describe who or what maintains it, what materials it involves, and what forms of attention it requires. Focus on gestures of maintenance rather than failure. Then, write a 150-word reflection on what kinds of care, time, or ethics are condensed in this repair.
Experimental Ethnography and Multimodality
Concept
Experimental ethnography begins where method becomes medium. It treats writing, drawing, mapping, film, and sound not as modes of representation but as forms of inquiry—ways of thinking through materials, gestures, and affects. To experiment ethnographically is to blur the line between analysis and making, fieldwork and composition, ethnography and art.
This approach assumes that knowledge is not only written but also sensed, crafted, and performed. It extends anthropology into an aesthetic field, one in which texture, tone, and form matter as much as argument. In multimodal practice, ethnography is no longer confined to text but circulates through drawings, installations, performances, and digital platforms—each medium generating its own epistemic possibilities.
Experimental ethnography thus asks: How might the essay, the zine, or the risograph print become analytical devices? How can the page itself become a field site? Rather than seeking closure or coherence, it celebrates drift, montage, and open-endedness. Its ethics lie in attentiveness—toward collaborators, materials, and the sensorial ecologies that shape research.
Key Ideas
Experimentation • Multimodality • Ethnographic form • Aesthetic inquiry • Method-as-medium • Sensory ethnography • Reflexivity • Montage • Fieldwork devices • Ethnographic poetics
Key Readings
Foundational and Classical Works
– Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
– Grimshaw, Anna, and Amanda Ravetz. Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.
– Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge, 2013.
– MacDougall, David. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
– Marcus, George E., and Fred R. Myers, eds. The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
– Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. 3rd ed. London: Sage, 2013 [2001].
– Pink, Sarah. Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2015.
– Schneider, Arnd, and Christopher Wright, eds. Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, 2006.
– Strathern, Marilyn. Partial Connections. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991.
– Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
– Taussig, Michael. I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
– Taussig, Michael. What Color Is the Sacred? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Contemporary Expansions and Experimental Practices
– Ballestero, Andrea, and Brit Ross Winthereik, eds. Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
– Biehl, João, and Peter Locke, eds. Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
– Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. The Prototype: More-Than-Human Design Experiments. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021.
– Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel, and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, eds. Multimodal Anthropology. London: Routledge, 2019.
– Estalella, Adolfo, and Tomás Sánchez Criado, eds. Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices. New York: Berghahn, 2018.
– Faubion, James D., ed. Anthropological Futures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
– Grimshaw, Anna, and Amanda Ravetz. The Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.
– Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
– Lury, Celia, and Nina Wakeford, eds. Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social. London: Routledge, 2012.
– Myers, Natasha. “How to Grow Livable Worlds: Ten (Not So Easy) Steps.” HAnnR: The Anthropology Review 5 (2020): 53–68.
– Stewart, Kathleen, and Lauren Berlant. The Hundreds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Recent Directions (2020–2025)
– Ballestero, Andrea. “The Affordances of Form: Notes on Experimentation in Ethnographic Writing.” Cultural Anthropology 36, no. 4 (2021): 571–580.
– Ballestero, Andrea, and Emily Yates-Doerr. “Ethnography Otherwise: Experiments, Interruptions, and Invitations.” American Anthropologist 125, no. 1 (2023): 20–33.
– Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel. Digital Ethnography: Anthropology’s Multimodal Futures. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023.
– Fortun, Kim, and George E. Marcus. “Prototyping the Ethnographic: Methods for Turbulent Times.” American Ethnologist 48, no. 3 (2021): 302–314.
– Marcus, George E., ed. How Today’s Ethnographers Think: From Fieldwork to Methodography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024.
– McDonald, Heather, and Greg Downey, eds. The Routledge Companion to Multimodal Anthropology. London: Routledge, 2024.
– Neves Marques, Pedro, and Arnd Schneider, eds. Between Matter and Method: Experimental Ethnography in Art, Science, and Design. London: Sternberg Press, 2022.
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Exercise
Translate a single fieldnote across three media:
Text – a 100-word vignette.
Image – a drawing, diagram, or collage translating its affect or rhythm.
Object or sound – an artifact or recording that embodies its texture.
Then, reflect briefly (150 words) on how meaning and relation shift through each translation. What aspects of the field emerge—or disappear—when ethnography moves between media?
Taxonomy, Misclassification, and the Poetics of Error
Concept
Taxonomies order the world, but they also betray it. Every act of classification—scientific, bureaucratic, vernacular, or poetic—reveals the limits of what can be known. This drawer explores taxonomy as both an epistemological device and an aesthetic experiment: a system for naming and organizing that simultaneously exposes the instability of categories.
Misclassification, rather than being a failure, becomes a method. It is through the cracks of mistaken orderings that alternative logics of relation emerge. The ethnographer, when misnaming or mis-sensing, momentarily escapes the constraints of accuracy and enters a space of speculative knowing—where objects drift, senses blur, and relations proliferate.
To engage with taxonomy fragmentographically is to recognize its performative nature: that every label is a fiction, and every specimen a story. The poetics of error transforms classification into an act of care, curiosity, and fabulation. By attending to local, vernacular, and multispecies systems of naming, ethnography can expose the politics and pleasures of ordering life—and the generative potential of getting it wrong.
Key Ideas
Taxonomy • Classification • Misclassification • Error • Fabulation • Drift • Vernacular knowledge • Speculative method • Poetic epistemology • Controlled equivocation • Ontological pluralism
Key Readings
Foundational and Classical Works
– Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972 [1957].
– Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” In Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, 101–105. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.
– Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980].
– Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
– Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1970.
– Haraway, Donna J. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.
– Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
– Strathern, Marilyn. Partial Connections. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991.
Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 [1996].
– Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1 (2004): 3–22.
Contemporary and Theoretical Expansions
– Blaser, Mario. “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of People in Spite of Europe.” Current Anthropology 54, no. 5 (2013): 547–568.
– Despret, Vinciane. Our Emotional Makeup: Ethnopsychology and Selfhood. New York: Other Press, 2004.
– Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
– Ingold, Tim. The Life of Lines. London: Routledge, 2015.
– Morton, Timothy. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013.
– Myers, Natasha. “Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3, no. 2 (2017): 1–24.
– Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
– Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More-than-Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
– Tsing, Anna, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, eds. Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene. Stanford: Stanford Digital Projects, 2020.
– Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014.
Recent Directions (2020–2025)
– Ballestero, Andrea. “Classifying Otherwise: The Ethics of Ambiguous Categories.” American Anthropologist 126, no. 2 (2024): 289–301.
– Ferreira, Luísa, and João Sarmento. “Geo-Poetics of Error: Mapping the Misclassified.” Cultural Geographies 31, no. 1 (2024): 67–84.
– Helmreich, Stefan. Sounds Like Life: Sonic Taxonomies and the Anthropology of the Sensible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
– Kohn, Eduardo, and Mónica Sánchez. “The Grammar of the Unclassifiable: Signs, Species, and the Limits of Equivocation.” Cultural Anthropology 36, no. 4 (2021): 559–575.
– Lemoine, Thibault. Misclassifications: Ecologies of Error in the Digital Anthropocene. London: Routledge, 2023.
– Myers, Natasha. “Unclassifiable Life: Fabulation, Care, and the Arts of Not Knowing.” Environmental Humanities12, no. 2 (2020): 321–339.
– Pandian, Anand, and Stuart McLean, eds. Crude Futures: Anthropology and the Poetics of the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
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Exercise
Select six elements from your field—plants, textures, smells, objects, or sounds—and attempt to classify them into a speculative taxonomy. Use criteria that resist logic: tonal similarity, emotional resonance, rhythm, temperature, or decay. Then, deliberately misclassify each one once—creating a second taxonomy that contradicts the first. In a brief reflection (150 words), describe what new connections or meanings emerged from these errors.
Methods of Care, Failure, and Ethics
Concept
Failure is not the opposite of method—it is its condition. Every ethnographic encounter contains moments of uncertainty, exhaustion, and fragility. This drawer begins from those moments, approaching method as an act of care rather than control. Care, here, is not sentimental but infrastructural: a distributed labor of maintenance, adjustment, and repair that sustains both research and relationships.
Ethnography’s ethical dimension lies in its capacity to stay with failure—to resist productivity imperatives and embrace slowness, incompleteness, and doubt. Methods of care foreground attention, empathy, and vulnerability as legitimate epistemic tools. They ask how knowledge can emerge from being affected, from listening rather than extracting, from dwelling in breakdown rather than overcoming it.
To practice care methodologically is to take responsibility for what and how one studies; to cultivate a form of writing and collaboration that is accountable to more-than-human worlds. It is to make space for generosity, fatigue, and repair within the craft of inquiry—to accept that what falls apart also teaches us how to stay with the trouble.
Key Ideas
Care • Failure • Maintenance • Ethics • Vulnerability • Attention • Repair • Responsibility • Affective method • Situated knowledge • Method as relation
Key Readings
– Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
– Ballestero, Andrea. A Future History of Water. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
– Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
– Biehl, João, and Peter Locke, eds. Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
– Chatzidakis, Andreas, Jo Littler, and Catherine Rottenberg. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso, 2020.
– De Abreu, Maria José. “Affective Infrastructures: Pneumatic Christianity and the Politics of Sentimentality.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 32–57.
– De Laet, Marianne. “Doing Anthropology in Sound.” In A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies, edited by Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane, 108–123. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.
– Fortun, Kim, and George E. Marcus. “Prototyping the Ethnographic: Methods for Turbulent Times.” American Ethnologist 48, no. 3 (2021): 302–314.
– Jackson, Michael. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002.
– Jackson, Shannon, and Nicholas Ridout. Maintenance: Art, Care, and Performance in the 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
– Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–343.
– Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
– Mol, Annemarie. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge, 2008.
– Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
– Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More-than-Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
– Puig de la Bellacasa, María. “Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care.” Social Studies of Science 45, no. 5 (2015): 691–716.
– Shotwell, Alexis. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
– Stewart, Kathleen. “Worlding Through Fragments.” In Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis, edited by Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik, 215–226. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
– Taussig, Michael. Beauty and the Beast. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
– Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
– Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Recent Directions (2020–2025)
– Ballestero, Andrea, and Emily Yates-Doerr. “Ethnography Otherwise: Experiments, Interruptions, and Invitations.” American Anthropologist 125, no. 1 (2023): 20–33.
– Behar, Ruth. “Ethnography in the Key of Tenderness.” American Anthropologist 125, no. 2 (2023): 235–247.
– Denis, Jérôme, and David Pontille. “The Fragility of Maintenance: On the Politics of Keeping Things Alive.” Social Studies of Science 51, no. 2 (2021): 300–320.
– Rankin, Katharine N., and Faranak Miraftab, eds. Insurgent Infrastructures: Reimagining Urban Futures from the Global South. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023.
– Stevenson, Lisa, and Julie Livingston, eds. Life Support: The Politics of Care in Global Health. Durham: Duke University Press, 2024.
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Exercise
Write a “failure note.” Recall a research moment that did not go as planned—an interview that collapsed, a drawing that misrepresented, a map that drifted. Describe it without correction or justification. Then, reflect on what this failure revealed about your method, your relations, or your ethics. What forms of care emerged from the collapse?