So far, I have been the sole contributor and curator. However, my intellectual curiosity in the archive has been increasing recently, as I have started to catch up with some of my colleagues’ in realizing its potential. I have and will continue to attempt to recruit other interested Austinites into this practice. I believe I will be better able to communicate its use.
Not all of us are strong writers. Not all of us are comfortable with public speaking. The archive offers ways of articulating through collecting and curating. PECE essays, timelines, photo essays, etc., these provide a means of producing underdetermined arguments, ones that produce thought, rather than reduce it.
I am not sure what to tilte it... but I was thinking something that shifts the figure from the archive to the collective of archivists, something like "Austin EJ Archivist Collective." (Or, maybe just "Austin EJ Archive")
This is the only public facing piece on the data this archive holds (for the moment): Petro-Ghosts and Just Transitions.
I have developed numerous PECE essays structured around the projects Scales and Systems analytic.
A timeline of Austin’s energy infrastructure, resource planning updates, and official climate protection policy would be useful.
I am planning to eventually create a photo essay that tracks the development of Austin’s contemporary racial geography through time, from early paintings, maps, city plans, etc. to contemporary data visualizations.
I usually used bundles to hold together artifacts that pertain to the same event: i.e. agendas, images, printouts, and/or field notes from a single resource planning working group meeting.
In my view, the future of anthropology lies less in the filling out of new ethnographic enclosures and more in increasing our capacity to open up what were once unthinkable lines of inquiry. Archive ethnography facilitates this, as it leaves the ethnography open or unfinished, reaching outside itself, so that the tensions that animate it and render it productive persist beyond any “final word.”
In a sense, my view of a possible anthropology is inspired by something like an "archival ethic," characterised by slowing down and reconsidering how we think about our work, across numerous stages, all the way from research design to write up. To be ok with having many fits and starts and restarts. A prime example of this ethic may be found in the way Foucault characterized his approach to the second volume of his history of sextuality, which took much longer and a much different form than he originally expected:
"As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next-as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet” (The Use of Pleasure, 7).
My interest in data sharing took a while to… um… let’s say, cultivate. I came to UC Irvine with very static and somewhat traditional ideas about fieldwork, data, and ethnography. Because, to be honest, I was less interested in anything to do with method than I was in the history and future of anthropological theory. I am a big fan of (maybe even a junky for) shattering my contemporary worldview (or what Foucault called “getting free of oneself”), and I had always assumed that consuming and producing theory was the best way to achieve this “shattering” effect. Ironically, however, this fetishization of theory has been (and still is) the most stubborn and shatter-resistant “pillar” of my perspective, though I am hoping the archive can help me crack it!
An important step towards cultivating a deep interest in data sharing came when I recognized the “question” as a discarded middle between theory and method. This came out of my reading and writing for my qualifying exams, where Kim Fortun taught me how to “read for method.” Through this new style of reading (a new way of punctuating the text), I came to completely re-interpret my interest in the discipline. That is, I became less interested in the (theoretical) answers that scholars generated than in the problems and questions that anthropologists had been able to ask. That is, I became interested in data production as a theoretical problem.
This “question of the question” dominated my fieldwork (i.e. I generated about 41 different research questions during this period, and discarded many more) and has also haunted my efforts to “write it up.” I spent the first few months of post-fieldwork revisiting the (now canonical) anti-canon that was the “Writing Culture” moment. It was the first time I really felt the depth and the gravity of the “crisis of representation,” living through my own version of it (which I’ve still yet to escape). In this struggle, I ended on a “meta-modeling” mode of dissertation writing, where I am attempting to construct four chapters as unique (Naven-esque) wholes; that is, each chapter serves as a different-yet-repeated vantage point into my ethnographic material (differentiated by scale of attention, rather than theory), hoping that the reader can develop their own arguments and interpretations of the material by reading across them. In doing so, I am trying to resist that ever present demon of the “question of the question:” its answer.
Which finally brings me to my rather meandering and round-about answer to the question posed here: my interest in data sharing (which I equate to my interest in the archive) lies in the added capacity to keep ethnography open by always approaching closure (like an ethnographic asymptote), both through continually refreshed angles of data analysis and also more meta-analyses of the ethnographic process. The archiving tactic also refreshes the relevance of ethnography, by opening up an new question of how and what it means to maintain this archive and continue to keep it lively, rather than "nail it down" in a book.
Over the past 5 years, I have worked extensively in/with the Platform for Experimental Ethnography, using the platform to coordinate, undertake, and publish diverse projects. My first PECE project was STS Across Borders, where I helped lead an investigation into the history of STS-inflected anthropologies in the Anthropology Department at UC Irvine. The following year, I helped design and lead an experimental collaboration in ethnographic visualization called Visualizing Toxic Subjects (and later Visualizing Toxic Places). I am also currently using PECE to infrastructure the development of my dissertation archive, which continues to both enable and unsettle the arguments of my dissertation (in the best of ways!).
I conducted in-person and “tele-fieldwork” in Austin from October 2019-April of 2021, investigating local efforts to transition the city to renewable energy. I have also co-organized short, ethnographic field campuses in New Orleans (2019) and St. Louis (2018). I was the lead organizer for a field campus in Austin (2020) that was cancelled due to the pandemic.
I have also led or co-led ethnographic design projects, like Visualizing Toxic Subjects and Visualizing Toxic Places, which was hosted by the UCI Center for Ethnography in 2018 and 2019 (respectively.
At the onset of the Pandemic, I began participating in a digital collaborations to study the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic from a transnational STS perspective.
Later that year, I also joined the Energy Rights Project’s ethnographic investigation of energy vulnerability in the mid-atlantic region of the US.
I have also had experience in developing and hosting “PECE Training” sessions, and worked as a PECE consultant for the UCI Newkirk Center’s Essential Workers in Covid-19 project.