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It’s more opinion than vision….

Tim's stuff...Beyond PECE, I don’t really spend my time using and engaging with digital archives or exhibits. Occasionally some art museum sites. At this stage, I try to spend as little time in front of a screen as possible. And when I am in front of a screen, I want to make archives. If there was, like, a weeklong intensive somewhere in the world where I could attend and spend a week reviewing archives, I’d for sure go. But I don’t do it independently.

Social media use; interest in creating and curating archives; my identity as an artist and storyteller; my negative experiences with the IRB, specifically being asked to use protocols designed for medical research; the hegemony of quantitative research fields and positivist disciplines; the data needs of community organizations, community members, and nonprofits – although I think as researchers we often make assumptions about what these desires, needs, and capacities are, and how we can respond.   

I've done some stuff...I started working on websites in 2004, with html, Dreamweaver, and Adobe Design tools. For my master’s thesis, I wrote, built, and archived a 100+ page website focused on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. I have also created and admined nearly a dozen wordpress sites since 2006 and used wikispaces for research from 2006-2013. Additionally, I was a content manager for Cultural Anthropology’s drupal-based site from 2007-2013 and led their website redesign project (2011-2013).

Aging-in-place and elderly care in Troy, NY (2006-2008); Coal disasters and air quality in East Tennessee (2009); multi-sited study of asthma care (2009-2017); perceptions of environmental governance in Philadelphia, including climate change (2013-2019); energy vulnerability and just transitions in the US mid atlantic (2017-ongoing) 

Early on there was a visual thesaurus (now behind a paywall) that was part dictionary, part conceptual mapping tool. I thought it had such potential for the collaborative visual mapping of ideas and practices.The Sugar plantations, Chemical Plants, COVID-19 tour on the Disaster-STS Network as an assemblage of people, stories, engagement and artfulness is such a rich and complex collaborative exhibition.  I found it stunning.The Formosa Plastics Global Archive organized by Tim Schütz and Shan-Ya Su is also such an impressive project and so-well executed.

First, I would point out that ethnographic method is used, co-opted and reinterpreted in many disciplines outside of anthropology. I see my work as engaging in educational ethnography. I have work around issues of informal learning, youth activism, and disability studies. More recently I position myself as an ethnographer within K-12 schools conducting fieldwork on governance and teaching during the complex, conjoined disasters of COVID-19 and our nation's racial reckoning.

Access to research, libraries, and/or journals is incredibly restricted. As I engage in research outside traditional academic pathways with other scholars in similar circumstances, I have become more attuned to these restrictions and have learned some ways to circumvent them. In my professional training in Education Research Departments, research data sharing was never discussed or raised as a possibility.

ACT UP Oral History Project - https://actuporalhistory.org/Digitized AIDS Quilt - https://www.aidsmemorial.org/interactive-aids-quiltWest Philadelphia Collaborative History - https://collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu/Informal tribal resource compendium - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lvbV1PljWxw8C9F__ebXSYpptr7li

I’ve conducted two relatively small ethnographic projects on public transportation (one on my own in Orange County and one with a class in Philadelphia). I’ve also done a lot of ethnographic observation in elementary schools, primarily in West Philadelphia music classrooms with undergraduate student volunteers.