Tag: More-than-human Research
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Forthcoming Chapter: Toxic Afterlives
I am writing this theoretical chapter for the edited volume Uneven Toxic Worlds: Anthropological Engagements with Toxicity and Environmental Justice (edited by Camelia Dewan, Raffael Ippolito, and Peter C. Little). The chapter, titled “Toxic Afterlives: Specimenography and the Uneven Residues of Industrial Farming,” proposes specimenography as a conceptual and methodological framework for anthropology to engage with the slow persistence of contamination. It is…
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From the Infra-Ordinary to the Pocket Archive
If there’s a gravitational center to my small experiments with the urban, it’s Georges Perec’s insistence that attention belongs with what barely appears—the infra-ordinary. In his short essay “Approaches to What?” (in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1997), Perec asked what happens every day and recurs every day: “the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common.” Rather than…
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Multispecies Mapping: Exploring Practices of Fragmentation, Scale, and Care
Under review for Zoophilologica: Polish Journal of Animal Studies (Special Issue on “Multi-species Methods and Methodologies”). Paper’s authors: Tomás J. Usón, Santiago Orrego, Barbara Pietrzak, Jia Hui Lee, Nieves Usón, Sandra Jasper, and Clemens Winkler. This forthcoming paper brings together geographers, anthropologists, ecologists, and artists to explore multispecies mapping as both a method and a mode of thinking-with…
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Fragmented Floras
I’m pleased to share that my paper Fragmented Floras: Ontologies of Medicinal Plant Fragments in Bogotá’s Markets is currently under review. The text grows from my larger research project, Fragmented Ecologies, which investigates how fragments—of plants, substances, and stories—circulate as forms of knowledge, care, and classification in Bogotá’s urban markets. Drawing on fieldwork at Plaza Samper Mendoza—known as…
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The Market After the Market
This field note is part of Fragmented Ecologies. When the night ends at Samper Mendoza, the market doesn’t really close—it exhales. Around dawn, the aisles empty, the lights dim, and the ground begins to show what the commerce of care leaves behind. I arrive just as the sweepers begin their rounds. Plastic bags rustle. Brooms drag.…
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The Politics of Invasiveness
“The Politics of Invasiveness: A Research Route to Track the Controversy of Hippopotamuses Living in Colombia’s Wild” is a talk I will present on September 4 at the panel “Towards Pluriversal Urbanisms: Reimagining Postcolonial and More-than-human Futures” during the 2025 meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). This is an orphan research—a stand-alone, unfunded…
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Towards Pluriversal Urbanisms
Next week, I will co-host a panel with Christian Ritter at the 2025 meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). The panel, called “Towards Pluriversal Urbanisms: Reimagining Postcolonial and More-than-human Futures,” brings together STS scholars from diverse backgrounds and geographies to collaboratively explore the urban beyond the human and beyond the colonial.…
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The Long Goodbye at Samper Mendoza
This field note is part of Fragmented Ecologies. Friday, July 18, 2025. 7:32 am On Mondays and Thursdays after 10 pm, I walk into Plaza Samper Mendoza with a small notebook and a phone camera. It’s a popular nocturnal herb market in Bogotá, Colombia—rows of dried leaves, bundled roots, and bottled syrups. My project here is simple…
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Field Guide: Remote Sensing for Anthropocene Ethnography
Introduction This field guide introduces remote sensing as an ethnographic companion rather than a technical discipline. It is written for anthropologists, artists, and social researchers interested in studying the Anthropocene but unfamiliar with satellite imagery or geospatial analysis. Rather than offering step-by-step instructions to become remote-sensing specialists, it proposes ways of thinking with pixels, clouds, and spectral…
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Verbing the Urban
My latest paper, Verbing the Urban: Ethnographic Idealism and the Grammar of Becoming, currently under review, began with a simple but disorienting question: what if the city were not a collection of things, but a choreography of verbs? Drawing inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the essay develops what I call ethnographic idealism—a speculative method that…