I’ve been learning from places that were never meant to be classrooms: wandering through cities like New York, Copenhagen, Barcelona, and Mexico City; walking in small German towns; spending long hours in galleries, bookstores, and print studios; listening to music and watching designers work. These moments — dispersed, ordinary, and affective — have become part of my ethnographic education. They’ve taught me that form is not a final layer but a way of thinking, that every line, sound, and composition carries its own theory of attention.
As an ethnographer, I’ve started to carry these lessons back into my fieldwork. Working with zines, riso prints, and halftone textures has taught me that making is another form of inquiry. Experimenting with layout, rhythm, and error has become a way of asking ethnographic questions — about fragments, about care, about how to see. When I cut, print, or arrange, I’m also learning to attend: to dwell in the incomplete and the imprecise as spaces of understanding.
This series grows from that space — reflections from other places, crafts, and practices that have shaped my way of doing anthropology. I call it studio ethnography: a practice that learns from the arts, the literature, and the design not to represent the world differently, but to inhabit and study it otherwise. Each entry will come from an encounter — a printmaking session, a visit to a workshop, a moment of drawing, or a conversation with a material. Together, they trace how ethnography can unfold beyond the field and into the studio.
