The Ethnographer’s Way: A Handbook for Multidimensional Research Design (with Valerie Olson), under contract, Duke University Press.
This ten-module handbook focuses on the often invisible and solitary process of starting to plan a research project: namely, imagining, conceptualizing, and operationalizing your objectives. What is different about this book is that it brings standard design processes together with intuitive and otherwise non-linear modes of experimenting with design element connections, such as integrating social processes and scholarly literatures into the project that would not typically be included. We call this process “multiscaling,” by which we mean imbricating different scholarly and empirical domains and dimensions. Our handbook’s processes of making projects multiscalar allows them to coordinate apparently noncommensurate elements within the project’s design space. Such related aspects may only be noncommensurate from a dominant, negating perspective; but are, within the politically and ethically attuned researcher’s experience and sensibility, really related aspects of lifeways and material configurations. “Multiscaling,” as we teach it, creates dynamic relationships between the project’s internal components (e.g, elements to study, plans for data collection) and external components (e.g., other scholars’ research, structural conditions in the world that will impact the project, the reception of the project by many audiences). As such, this handbook is a departure from standard approaches to methods and design. Through the project design process – and not ethnographic methods – we offer one way to let go of contemporary, western orderings of knowledge and instead turn toward an “otherwise anthropology.”
The book also provides ways to help researchers engage in early design processes in a collective setting, and to do so in a manner that foregrounds researcher self-care and ethical considerations for the social liberatory possibilities that multiscalar knowledge production can foster. This brings into view the sensible understanding that self-nurturing and compassion for our own and others’ research processes will lead the way to deep insights and care for intellectual communities within broader social worlds.
Temporal Machinations: An Ethnographic Communion
What if cancer was thought of as the latest iteration of settler colonialism? What if contemporary cancers were thought of as the latest manifestations of settler colonialism? Cancer is often considered a disease of modernity (Livingston 2012) as well as the inevitable price a society pays for the comforts of industrialized agriculture. Yet, when situated in settler colonialism – the very process that gave rise to industrial agriculture – what then is revealed about modern cancers? The significance of the project is to interrogate the following: when cancer’s colonial and racialized genealogy is erased, modernity is justified, cancer is inevitable, and this inevitability renders life expendable.This creative non-fiction/science fantasy/poetry/memoir explores how cancer logically follows the politics of genocide, whiteness, extinction, and climate change in California. It is in the early stages of research and writing.
Viral Geopolitics
The turn of the century was marked by a new orientation toward Global Health, one that is entangled with the worlds of finance, oil, and counterterrorism – worlds that converged as dreams of African emancipation were waning. This project begins at this global political and temporal juncture. It thinks about “resilient viruses” as markers of political struggles that directly map on to a wide range of racialized geopolitical stakes. For example, what might polio reveal about the war on terror in the Sahel region? What can Lassa Fever possibly uncover about corporate land grabs and internal displacement? How do responses to HIV/AIDS reveal evolving security strategies, which are linked to pharmaceutical capital? And how can Ebola shed light on new Washington Consensus paradigms that merge militarism with financialization? These four viruses can help understand the geopolitical formations underway since 9-11 – events that set in motion a scramble for the meaning and materializations of endemic viruses – including new interventions, new indebtedness, new hopes for the future. Within this particular frame of geopolitics, I intend to think about how a genealogy of African emancipation might be read today. This project is in an early research stage.