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 21, 12-2pm, with Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology; Director of Center for Experimental Ethnography at University of Pennsylvania.
Our workshop with Dr. Deborah Thomas will think through abstraction as a representational mode. In her beginning discussion, Dr. Thomas will feature her film work as well as a kumina festival she co-organizes in Jamaica called TambuFest. Participants will be invited to think about abstraction as a tool that reorients ethnographic praxis away from transparency—and Enlightenment modes of categorization and comparison—and toward non-linearity, intimacy, vulnerability, and relation. Working with and through abstraction asks how we can reconsider the forms of evidence we mobilize, and it inspires experimentation in relation to ways of seeing, listening, and documentation.
Evening Film Screening and Discussion
March 7, Reception: 4-5pm, Film Screening and Discussion: 5-7pm
Snow Leopard, directed by Pema Tseden (2023)
Location: The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology, 1412 W. Alabama
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.