Tag: Multispecies Ethnography
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
Six Specimens, Many Classifications
This is a field note part of Fragmented Ecologies. Every week at Samper Mendoza, I return to the same stalls and yet find new plants, new names, and new configurations. The market never repeats itself. This time, I began classifying—not scientifically, but fragmentographically. I selected six specimens: flor blanca, ruda, pepinillos, uña de gato, calaguala, and pasiflora. Each one…
-
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…
-
Watching Animals do Nothing
On March 12, 2025, I’ll present a talk titled “Watching Animals ‘Do Nothing’: Mapping Captivity’s Stillness in Berlin” as part of the panel I am co-hosting—“Multispecies Mapping: Diffracting the Critical through More-than-human Cartographies”—at STS-hub.de 2025: Diffracting the Critical in Berlin. This contribution is part of my recently finished research project “Infrastructuring Multispecies encounters: an ethnography of more-than-human urban assemblages in…
-
Partial Encounters
As the year comes to an end, I’m delighted to share that my new paper, Partial Encounters: Exploring More-Than-Human Entanglements in Berlin’s Animal Enclosures, has just been published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (SAGE, 2024). The article emerges from my DFG-funded project “Infrastructuring Multispecies Encounters”, in which I explored the everyday relations that take shape around petting zoos,…
-
Infrastructuring Multispecies Encounters
Starting February 2023 – Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) In February 2023, I will begin a postdoctoral project titled Infrastructuring Multispecies Encounters, an ethnographic exploration of Berlin’s petting zoos as sites where humans and animals co-produce urban space. The project asks what happens when cities…