The Ethnographic Design Co.Lab (EDC) is a collective effort to embrace the experimental and the experiential. Building upon the reputation of Rice University’s Department of Anthropology as a hub for methodological and theoretical innovation, the EDC embraces participatory, multimodal, and community-oriented ethnography as well as collaborative and creative exercises in research design and ethnographic analysis. We are committed to engaging feminist, queer, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, diasporic, decolonial and abolitionist perspectives. We see ethnography as a vehicle for justice and imagination. Living and working in times of ongoing crises, we believe that ethnography enables us to envision new ways of thinking, acting, and being together.
Events and Projects
FALL 2024
FLASH ETHNOGRAPHY
September 27, 12-2pm, with Huatse Gyal and Cymene Howe, Department of Anthropology
“A flash essay,” writes anthropologist and writer Ruth Behar “is like a filigree earring in how it fills you with a sense of wonder. And as a form of writing, it leaves you in awe that something so miniature can be so capacious as to let the whole world inside.” This workshop invites both graduate and undergraduate students to experiment with flash ethnography as a form of writing and engaging the world.
SENSORY ETHNOGRAPHY – Experiments in Dismantling Environmental Injustice
October 11, 12-2pm, with Prash Naidu, Assistant Professor of Environmental and Medical Anthropology at City College of New York
What do capitalism and pollution feel, smell, and sound like? Why does air pollution have a sour, metallic taste to it? Can we feel the gritty textures of particulate matter coating our landscapes? How do we attune our ears to the sonic disruptions in everyday life? What chromatic assaults accompany gray clouds of smog? This workshop discusses sensory ethnography’s promises and challenges in dismantling environmental injustice.
SPRING 2025
OBJECT-ORIENTED ETHNOGRAPHY
January 31, 12-2pm, with Timothy Morton, Department of English, Cymene Howe and Huatse Gyal, Department of Anthropology
2020 marks the point when human-made materials have come to outweigh all of earth’s living organisms. We now produce about 30 gigatons of stuff every single year and that quantity is increasing. In this workshop we get into this stuff to ask about objects: what are they, how are they, where are they and what ethnographic forms might they take? With philosopher Timothy Morton, author of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, we collectively reflect on the qualities and compositions of objects in our lives and across space and time.
EXPLORING MULTIMODAL FORMS - Embodied Knowledge and Modes of Repair
February 11, 12-2pm, with Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology; Director of Center for Experimental Ethnography at University of Pennsylvania.
What does the body know? What can bodies tell us about the forms of collective world-building that exist outside of but in relation to the juridical structures of sovereignty that govern modern Western political and social life? This talk invites us to think with and through the space of Tambufest in Jamaica, a kumina festival I have co-organized for the past five years. We will reflect on how community-based spaces of care, creativity, and spirituality can open portals to thinking beyond linearity and create channels for accountability. I will argue that we are heir not only to colonial logics, but also to the means to refuse or retool them, and that both of these inheritances are inscribed in and on the body.
Evening Film Screening and Discussion
March 7, 5-7pm
Snow Leopard, directed by Pema Tseden (2023)
Snow Leopard has been described as “a magical, memorable, visually stunning film…yet another exquisite drama by Pema Tseden (sadly his final film) and an empathic portrait of the modern dynamics affecting the pastoral society of Tibet." Snow Leopard is at once a creative visual ethnography of human and nonhuman relations and an intimate exploration of the complex relationships between Tibetan pastoralists, Chinese state law, and snow leopards.