Ethnography is perhaps best recognized as a method of “thick description”, which renders in rich details the lives of others. In recent policy discourses it is deployed a technique of mining subjective experiences to partially explain social realities. But this work of description, which is represented as a straightforward empiricism, has often led ethnographers into promising and troubling new territories of imagination. This panel focuses on ethnography as a resource for speculation and re-invention, for imagining futures, by juxtaposing stories, practices and models of place-making from diverse contexts. The presentations build on different practices of fieldworking, recording, and writing to foreground emergent relations, shared dreams, and projects of co-creation in response to the profound uncertainties being generated by climate change. 

The panel asks: How are emergent living collectives co-created as place and present? How are ideas of the future informed by the present and past? What are the fictions that make place and environments? How do modes of writing interweave with multiple modes of dreaming? How do human perceptions gesture to the future of more-than-human relations? What do contemporary methods reveal about the potentiality of the pursuit of life beyond earth? From these disparate places, practices, and presentations emerge new understandings of humanity, ecology, and planetary life. As the panel discussant Anand Pandian has written, ethnographic stories “yield visions of a possible life held unexpectedly in common”.

Keywords: futures, emergent relations, humanity-yet-to-come, storytelling, speculative/imaginative writing.

Talks & Panelists:

• Rhythm, Place, and Ethnographic Co-creation, Perry Maddox (he/him), Johns Hopkins University

• Placing the Past in the Future: Environmental Conservation as a Traditionalizing Act, Ben Bridges (he/him), Indiana University

• A Place Where Processes Happen": The Environmental Context of Literature, Jane Robbins Mize (she/her), University of Pennsylvania

• Between Dreams: An Experiment in Speculative and Ethnographic Fictions, Shweta Krishnan (she/her), George Washington University

• Beauty as Relationship, Relationship as Emancipation: On the Potentialities of Human Experiences of Beauty in More-Than-Human Places, Matthew John (he/him), University of Kentucky

• Speculative Ocean Worlds: Place and Placemaking in the Pursuit of Life beyond Earth, Dana Burton (she/her), George Washington University
  

Discussant: Dr. Anand Pandian. (he/him), Johns Hopkins University
Moderated by Indivar Jonnalagadda (he/him)