Ethnographic Terminalia

The terminus is the end, the boundary, and the border: Ethnographic Terminalia is a celebration of these borders but not an exaltation; it is a playful engagement with reflexivity and positionality; it asks what lies beyond and what lies within. No longer content to theorize the ends of the discipline and possibilities of new media, new locations, or new methods of asking old questions, the ethnographers and artists associated with Ethnographic Terminalia are working in capacity to develop generative ethnographies that do not subordinate the sensorium to the expository and theoretical text.

Writing with Light

Writing with Light is an initiative to bolster the place of the photo-essay—and, by extension, formal experimentation—within international anthropological scholarship. As a collaboration between two journals published by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), Cultural Anthropology and Visual Anthropology Review, Writing with Light is led by a curatorial collective that aims to address urgent and important concerns about the sustained prominence of multimodal scholarship. Anthropological projects based in video, installation, performance, etc. take as a given that multimodality changes what anthropologists can and should see as productive knowledge. Such projects compel anthropologists to begin rethinking our intellectual endeavors through an engagement with various media, addressing the particular affordances and insights that each new form of scholarship offers. How, for example, does photography produce different types of knowledge than text and/or film? What criteria might we need to interrogate and evaluate each of these forms of multimodal scholarship? As part of a broader set of questions about the relationship between forms of scholarly work and knowledge production, we explore the ongoing relevance of the photo-essay.

Picturing Second Geography

The world seen in passing or experienced through dwelling presents contested sites of meaning: a social geography of layered spaces, officially and unofficially constituted by presences and absences. The concept of a second geography has been put forward by Michel de Certeau as a geography created by walkers and placed on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning.

Published as a special issue of Space & Culture (2008. 11-1)

Endangered Archives Projects: Picturing Central Siberia

The goal of this project is the study and representation of pre-industrial and early-industrial cultural history. It covers both pre-Soviet and Soviet eras and looks at indigenous siberian peoples, settler societies, missionaries, old believers, exiles, communists, socialist agitators, and everyone else who was on the scene during the momentous upheavals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This project is documented in an article published by David G. Anderson and myself:

Anderson, David and Craig Campbell (2009). "Picturing Central Siberia: The Digitization and Analysis of Early Twentieth-Century Central Siberian Photographic Collections" in Sibirica. Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 2009, pp. 1-42(42)

Awesomejumbo: the museum of queer things and uncanny communications

AWESOME JUMBO, the museum of Queer Things & Uncanny Communications is a museum of visual, textual, and oral ephemera.

The Queer Things consist of the fetishized items of the everyday. They are surreal apparitions that we come to ignore through familiarization and habit. Uncanny Communications consist of words, fragments of statements, and statements-whole. The persistence of the words, outside of their connotation, drives the uncannyness. This persistence to mean seems to be another fetishization, in the absence of a stable referent.