VtP Research Questions and Key Concepts

Visualizing Toxic Places is designed to advance five key concepts. The design ethnography process -- moving from place proposals to digital photo essays to a gallery installation -- will provide data for this conceptual work. Cumulatively, the project will address these research questions: 

• How can ethnographers configure|imagine|query “place” to be responsive to contemporary conditions (discursive, geopolitical, etc)?

• What are the dynamics of toxicity and how can they be captured ethnographically? 

• How can diverse modes and moments of visualization in ethnographic work flows deepen ethnographic understandings? 

• How can thinking and working in terms of “installation ethnography” -- with material and experiential dimensions, and affective as well as epistemic effects -- take the work of Writing Culture into its next phase? 

• How can collaboration ethnography work, advancing both the production of ethnographic knowledge and understanding of collaboration itself as a sociocultural, necessarily infrastructured activity?