The Companion Series
Studio Ethnography has always been about learning — from places, materials, and the rhythms of making. Yet every method, every form of attention, also carries traces of others: teachers, collaborators, designers, architects, and thinkers whose gestures and ideas quietly inhabit the work. The Companions Series turns toward these figures and conversations. It gathers what ethnography can learn from disciplines that think through form — from the precision of Nordic design and the architectural imagination of Alberto Saldarriaga to the narrative experiments of writers like Georges Perec and the speculative fabulations of Donna Haraway.
Each entry unfolds as a dialogue rather than a reflection, tracing the pedagogies, attitudes, and practices that have informed my own. These are not biographies or homages but exercises in translation: attempts to understand how another person’s way of making, drawing, or sensing can reorient the ethnographic craft. Companionship here means learning alongside — thinking through someone else’s tools, inhabiting their methods, and letting their work reshape one’s own. Together, these encounters form a small school of attention, an expanding studio where ethnography learns to listen, see, and make otherwise.
