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 2025
AFFECT THEATER (CANCELED)
September 26, 12-4pm, with Professor Cristiana Giordano, UC Davis Anthropology Department
This workshop in Affect Theater is an exploration of and a cross pollination between research and narrative practices in theater and anthropology. By creating a dialogue between these disciplines in a laboratory format, we pose questions and engage techniques in ways that enrich our relations with anthropological questions and performative productions. Instead of enacting our research, we put the elements of the stage (lights, sets, objects, sound, bodies etc.) into conversation with it. This generates surprising and often more affective analyses and relations.
ARCHAEOLOGY AND OBJECT-ORIENTED ETHNOGRAPHY
November 7, 12-2pm, with Khadene Harris, Anthropology Department, Rice University
Objects are essential to human culture, and our propensity to understand the world in material form is an impulse we can't resist. Objects are not only a key focus of study in anthropology/archaeology; they also serve as tools for understanding how humans and non-humans have influenced and shaped the world together. This workshop will encourage participants to engage with objects as a means of exploring culture, power, and knowledge.
SPRING 2026
FILMMAKING AND THE PRACTICE OF DAILY LIFE
February 27, 12-2pm, with Filmmaker Kevin Everson, Commonwealth and Ruffin Foundation Distinguished Professor of Art, University of Virginia
Kevin Everson is a renowned and innovative filmmaker with an impressive body of work that includes over 144 films, varying in length from less than a minute to eight hours. Everson's films primarily focus on the migration of African American communities and the everyday practices of labor - the conditions necessary to achieve this labor, the patience required to do it right, and the beauty found in everyday work. This workshop will explore ethnographic and filmic representations of daily life, labor, and the intersection of theory and practice.
COLLAGE ETHNOGRAPHY
March 27, 12-2pm, with Professors Vivian Lu and Cymene Howe, Department of Anthropology, Rice University
Ethnographers have been fascinated with the conceptual possibilities of assemblage and the arts have been enlivened by the cognate, material practice of collage. In this design co.lab, we use our hands and eyes, as well as our spatial intuition and scalar capacities, to arrange form, color, texture and mood. Ethnography, we surmise, is a kind of collage work—during these two hours we will materialize that proposition through collaging together in discussion and silence, reflection and sharing.