From a syllabus to an ecology of learning
What began as A Syllabus on Fragments, Specimens, and More-Than-Human Methods has evolved into a broader pedagogical experiment—an ecology of learning that grows from my research practice.
Over time, I realized that the syllabus was not simply a list of readings but a living diagram of relations: a way of thinking about teaching as ethnographic composition. It became a framework for translating years of fieldwork, writing, and visual experimentation into a structure for learning.
This project takes the form of curricular ecologies—a set of interconnected clusters and courses that bring together my research on fragments, infrastructures, and more-than-human worlds. Each cluster is both a conceptual field and a pedagogical habitat: a place where theory, fieldwork, and creative practice coexist and evolve.
They are imagined as methodological and pedagogical experiments for a future Faculty of European Ethnology or Anthropology, and they also form the conceptual infrastructure of this website—the pedagogical counterpart to its curatorial and speculative components. In this sense, the site itself functions as an ecosystem of learning, where courses, projects, and experiments cross-pollinate.
Learning from what I wished to learn
Designing these clusters has been a reflective and affective process. I asked myself what I would have liked to learn as a student of anthropology:
- How can ethnography be taught not only as a method but as a form of world-making?
- How can teaching itself become fieldwork—a way of tracing relations, failures, and transformations?
The result is a set of four curricular ecologies, each composed of two courses—typically one at the BA and one at the MA level—that together trace a movement from observation to invention, from empirical curiosity to theoretical and curatorial reflection.
Cluster 1 — Urban Ethnography and the Infrastructures of Everyday Life
This cluster explores the city as an ethnographic and epistemic field—an infrastructure of relations, materials, and affects. Bridging classical urban theory with feminist, multispecies, and material-culture approaches, it trains students to observe, analyze, and curate everyday life. Through writing, mapping, and collective exhibitions, the courses move from noticing to theorizing the urban, cultivating ethnography as a form of empirical philosophy and curatorial attention. Access.
Cluster 2 — Experimental Ethnography and the Epistemologies of the Incomplete
Ethnography rarely begins with wholes—it starts with fragments. This cluster treats incompleteness, residue, and misclassification not as deficits but as openings for invention. Through reading, fieldwork, and studio practice, students learn to assemble the partial, attend to what remains, and experiment with classification systems that reveal the limits of order. It combines philosophy, anthropology, and the arts to cultivate an ethnography attuned to the fragmentary, the speculative, and the poetic possibilities of error. Access.
Cluster 3 — More-Than-Human Worlds and Alterecology
How can ethnography trace multispecies survival amid ecological ruin? This cluster investigates the ethical and ontological transformations that define life in the Anthropocene. Drawing on feminist STS and environmental anthropology, students learn to engage the entanglements of humans, animals, plants, and infrastructures as alterecological relations—forms of coexistence, decay, and care that exceed human exceptionalism. It reimagines ethnography as an ecological and speculative craft of attention. Access.
Cluster 4 — Experimental Ethnography and Multimodality
Here, method becomes medium. This cluster explores ethnography as a form of making, where writing, drawing, mapping, and sound become analytical gestures. Students learn to think through materials, gestures, and affects, cultivating ethnography as a multimodal craft that joins analysis with care. The courses emphasize experimentation, form, and ethics, inviting students to transform failure, fragility, and attention into sites of methodological insight. Access.
Toward an ecology of pedagogy
Together, these clusters form an evolving curricular ecology—a system of interdependent courses that grow from and feed back into ethnographic research. Each cluster is a node on a broader landscape of attention: urban, fragmentary, ecological, or multimodal.
All share a commitment to care, curiosity, and empirical philosophy—to understanding ethnography as both method and medium, analysis and relation. This curriculum is alive. It will keep changing as fieldwork, teaching, and collaboration unfold. It is offered here as an open system—a space to imagine how anthropology can be learned, practiced, and composed otherwise.