I conducted in-person and “tele-fieldwork” in Austin from October 2019-April of 2021, investigating local efforts to transition the city to renewable energy. I have also co-organized short, ethnographic field campuses in New Orleans (2019) and St. Louis (2018). I was the lead organizer for a field campus in Austin (2020) that was cancelled due to the pandemic.
Over the past 5 years, I have worked extensively in/with the Platform for Experimental Ethnography, using the platform to coordinate, undertake, and publish diverse projects. My first PECE project was STS Across Borders, where I helped lead an investigation into the history of STS-inflected anthropologies in the Anthropology Department at UC Irvine. The following year, I helped design and lead an experimental collaboration in ethnographic visualization called Visualizing Toxic Subjects (and later Visualizing Toxic Places).
My interest in data sharing took a while to… um… let’s say, cultivate. I came to UC Irvine with very static and somewhat traditional ideas about fieldwork, data, and ethnography. Because, to be honest, I was less interested in anything to do with method than I was in the history and future of anthropological theory. I am a big fan of (maybe even a junky for) shattering my contemporary worldview (or what Foucault called “getting free of oneself”), and I had always assumed that consuming and producing theory was the best way to achieve this “shattering” effect.
In my view, the future of anthropology lies less in the filling out of new ethnographic enclosures and more in increasing our capacity to open up what were once unthinkable lines of inquiry.
I usually used bundles to hold together artifacts that pertain to the same event: i.e. agendas, images, printouts, and/or field notes from a single resource planning working group meeting.
I am planning to eventually create a photo essay that tracks the development of Austin’s contemporary racial geography through time, from early paintings, maps, city plans, etc. to contemporary data visualizations.
A timeline of Austin’s energy infrastructure, resource planning updates, and official climate protection policy would be useful.
I have developed numerous PECE essays structured around the projects Scales and Systems analytic.
I am not sure what to tilte it... but I was thinking something that shifts the figure from the archive to the collective of archivists, something like "Austin EJ Archivist Collective." (Or, maybe just "Austin EJ Archive")This is the only public facing piece on the data this archive holds (for the moment): Petro-Ghosts and Just Transitions.
So far, I have been the sole contributor and curator. However, my intellectual curiosity in the archive has been increasing recently, as I have started to catch up with some of my colleagues’ in realizing its potential. I have and will continue to attempt to recruit other interested Austinites into this practice. I believe I will be better able to communicate its use. Not all of us are strong writers. Not all of us are comfortable with public speaking. The archive offers ways of articulating through collecting and curating.
