The Ethnographic Media Lab is a student-led space for encounter and exchange for students working between the silos of anthropology and creative practices. Those interested in exploring multi-media practices in their research or ethnographic methods in their artistic work can find each other, learn together, and provide mutual support in the Lab, while cultivating a rigorous, experimental, and discipline-bending ethnographic practice. We encourage our group to take advantage of the vast resources available through the Making Center or the Equipment Center, and to locate opportunities to learn from or collaborate with Parsons students on projects that sit between anthropology and art-making. Our Lab is also a practical, hands-on complement to academic and public discussions like the Ethnographic Media subject area in the MA in Anthropology and research workshops like GIDEST.
More Information
We meet every other week, and those interested in participating should already have a project in mind to workshop with us. An annual call for participation is sent to registered students of the Anthropology Department at NSSR at the beginning of every academic year. For questions, you can drop us a line at ethnographicmedialab@gmail.com.
Projects 2023-2024
Minsu Yoo (PhD student) works with the history of postcolonial Taiwanese psychopharmacology through East Asian films.
ayodamola okunseinde (PhD student) produced 'How We Danced Our Way Back Home', a project that explores how digital technologies exploit Blackness and imagined the salvation of the Black soul from digital capture through a performance ritual.
Ella Richmond (MA student) works with E-ephemera: An Auto-ethnographic Meditation on the Digital Anti-Library.
Clara Beccaro (PhD student) works on an ethnographic film on how oysters in France materialize and bear witness to the making of history.
Ewan Shannon (MA '24) worked with different techniques for documenting graffiti at Sailors’ Snug Harbor, Staten Island, exploring the impossibility of capturing the past head-on.
Isabel Arciniegas Guaneme (PhD student) ethnographically documents the intimate workspaces for writing of fellow anthropologists.