Kathleen C. Stewart

Ethnography, meaning writing difference, describes entanglements of forms, forces, bodies, practices, media, materialities, sensibilities and structures of living that constitute a world. It composes with what’s already composed. It can use social science, art, science, creative nonfiction, auto-ethnography and more. It loves the details. It hones in on angles, possibilities, and problematics – what might happen, what things in process might become, what something might be related to. By writing culture, we are learning to describe the precision of how a whole range of things impact lives.

This course is a writing workshop. We will build conceptual skills through writing; here, thought does not precede writing but takes place in working with words. As writers, we’re trying to build our voice, or the ability to develop thoughts by writing with conviction and self-confidence. We are aiming for writing that is clear, direct, descriptive, creative, and actively approaching its object. Write for an audience – your classmates and perhaps also the people you are writing about (what would they think/say about what you’ve written? Would they recognize themselves in it or be interested in the thoughts you’ve had?). Read your drafts aloud to yourself.

Over the course of the semester, the students will write five 500 word descriptive, analytical, artful papers. Each piece should be written in four drafts, using the Peter Elbow’s method in Writing Without Teachers: 45 minutes of fast writing followed by 15 minutes of hard editing to eliminate all but the sentences or sentence fragments you think are true (or that really express your thought, or have real potential).

In seminar, each person will read their work aloud while the others listen carefully and take occasional notes on their own creative lines of thought prompted by each piece (I call this compositional listening). After four readings, we will discuss the four pieces together. Learning to be good readers or listeners is part of the process of learning to be good writers. A writer with skill thinks of her readership and writes to communicate and have an influence. Writing well begins with reading. There will be reading each week and prompts to link the reading to your writing for the week. Students will also keep daily writing journals for the first seven weeks. This is fast, associative writing you can do anywhere. The point is to create the habit of making words on paper. I will not read the content but simply check, once a week, that it’s been done every day. It can literally be “I’m trying to write and I can’t think of anything to say. Oh, but wait a minute, the bus driver just smiled at the student wearing A&M colors. What’s happening here? Did anyone else notice? Is this funny?” There is a final essay, which will be fashioned out of 3-5 of your short pieces and edited, edited, edited. This should be 5-7 pages, double-spaced. Don’t try to come up with a single thesis to subsume the separate pieces but, instead, hold your focus on the particularity of each piece and then look for resonances between them as you select the pieces to piece together. They can remain separate, even divided by an asterisk. Or you may find a writing line that allows you to link the three pieces, editingthem together.

There will be workshops on ethnography, auto-ethnography, editing, voice, descriptive writing, anddescribing a world. There will also be many experiments.

Worlding theorizes the generativity and brokenness of the sensation of being in a world.  Worldings are not globe-like containers but radically-situated modes of response to a present sensed-out in bodies, affects, aesthetics, and politics. They are both prolific and metamorphic

in the activist occurrent arts of everyday life in which objects, practices and sensitivities become the forceful, subtle, unstable, dreamy and compelling phenomena of world-building.

There is nothing innocent or finished about the sensation of being in a world. In the U.S., for example, tvery sense of a world lives the afterlives of settler colonialism, slavery, the hegemony of a hybrid protestant-secular state, virulent strands of capitalism and inequality, racial criminalization, subcultures and popular cultures set in motion in the face of an official world, all the decompositions of fraud, corruption, and political manipulation that cut short the American century of empire, and the ongoing dreams of an ordinary that could float free or a resistance that could stop the world in its tracks.

Anti-colonial, antiracist, feminist and post-humanist critiques have approached the concept of a single static world as a dangerous blind rhetoric that obscures possibilities of thinking differently. And yet worlding is itself also a constitutive process of differing, an attunement to the potential in what throws together and falls apart, for good or bad. Worldings, now prolific as atmospheres, reverberations, and little worlds of all kinds, mark not only the fact of things but their generativity in the mode of the possible, the not yet, the “as if”, the might have been, and the still unattended.

This is work that approaches Stengers’s cosmopolitics, Deleuze’s plane of immanence, the elemental, self-sensing surround of Whitehead’s speculative realism, Barthes’s incidentals, Foucault’s micropolitics, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh, Lingis’s imperative, and Jean Luc Nancy’s world at its edges.

Stengers’s thinking through the middle, Haraway’s response-ability, Barad’s coming to matter, Sedgwick’s weak theory, and a wide range of experimental writing crossing fields including autoethnography, post-phenomenology, non-representational theory, new materialism, ficto-criticism, sensory studies, affect studies, flash fiction, and queer, feminist and antiracist studies are all efforts to re-pair composition and critique to better attune to the multiplicitous cuts, passages and wounds in the cohabitation of strange and ordinary worlds, good or bad.

Everyone will choose a semester’s project, building it in pieces, from angles, aspects, registers, or in the mode of a cetain theory or method of approach.  Your project could be a draft of dissertation chapter or a master’s thesis, an article, a short story, a series of experiments in fieldwork…

The seminar is organized as a writing workshop. We will all write 500 good words a week spinning off readings and research. Three people will read their work in a cluster while the others listen compositionally, taking detailed notes and thinking creatively in response.

This course will be a writing flag. It will be run as a writing workshop with weekly writing assignments on topics including place, character, objects, subjects, cultural forms, everyday life and feeling states or structures such as trauma, love, hope, depression, the even keel and melodrama. We will explore how to articulate structures of feeling with models of culture and the self. We will carefully examine and experiment with modes of ethnographic attention, the importance of the telling detail and methods of participant observation. 

Sensitizing Theory emphasizes modes of attunement, haptic encounters, material and affective forces, and a more than human sensorium. It attends in particular to interconnections between doing, thinking, and making - to thought as practice, writing as thought, and the sensory capacities of media. 

The seminar will be an interplay of two methods

1. a writing workshop. We will all write 500 words a week spinning off readings and research. Three people at a time will read their work in a cluster while the others listen compositionally, taking detailed notes and thinking creatively in response.
2. sensory ethnographic outings with media engagement of your choice. This might be collective, as in a trip to the Tower herbarium where we draw together, or a quick response to the Power Plant (or elsewhere) in writing, sound, or images. These will be shared and discussed.

Everyone will choose a semester’s project, building it in pieces, from angles, aspects, registers.  Your project could be a draft of a dissertation chapter or a master’s thesis, an article, a short story, a film, a sound piece, a series of experiments …

Readings will consist of articles and selections from books including:

Stuart McLean. Fictionalizing Anthropology.

Erin Manning. Thought in the Act.

Jason Pine. The Alchemy of Meth: A Decomposition. 

Robert Desjarlais. The Blind Man.

Michel Serres. The Five Senses.

Peter Sloterdijk. Bubbles.

Povinelli. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism.

Nancy. Corpus (or Sense of the World).

Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter.

Laplantine. The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology.

Latour, “Sensitizing”

Yusoff, “Insensible Worlds: Postrelational Ethics, Indeterminacy and the (K)nots of Relating”

von Uexküll, “A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds”

Hustak and Myers, “Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters”

Hugh Raffles, “25 Years is a Long Time” 

Simondon, “On Techno-Aesthetics”

Bennett, “De Rerum Natura” 

Diana Coole. New Materialisms

Christine Hume, Ventrifacts.

Ethnography, meaning writing difference, describes entanglements of forms, forces, bodies, practices,

media, materialities, sensibilities and structures of living that constitute a world. It composes with what’s

already composed. It can use social science, art, science, creative nonfiction, auto-ethnography and more.

It loves the details. It hones in on angles, possibilities, and problematics – what might happen, what things

in process might become, what something might be related to. By writing culture, we are learning to

describe the precision of how a whole range of things impact lives.

This course is a writing workshop. We will build conceptual skills through writing; here, thought does not

precede writing but takes place in working with words. As writers, we’re trying to build our voice, or the

ability to develop thoughts by writing with conviction and self-confidence. We are aiming for writing that

is clear, direct, descriptive, creative, and actively approaching its object. Write for an audience – your

classmates and perhaps also the people you are writing about (what would they think/say about what

you’ve written? Would they recognize themselves in it or be interested in the thoughts you’ve had?).

Read your drafts aloud to yourself.

Over the course of the semester, the students will write five 500 word descriptive, analytical, artful

papers. Each piece should be written in four drafts, using the Peter Elbow’s method in Writing Without

Teachers: 45 minutes of fast writing followed by 15 minutes of hard editing to eliminate all but the

sentences or sentence fragments you think are true (or that really express your thought, or have real

potential).

In seminar, each person will read their work aloud while the others listen carefully and take occasional

notes on their own creative lines of thought prompted by each piece (I call this compositional listening).

After four readings, we will discuss the four pieces together. Learning to be good readers or listeners is

part of the process of learning to be good writers. A writer with skill thinks of her readership and writes to

communicate and have an influence.

Writing well begins with reading. There will be reading each week and prompts to link the reading to

your writing for the week.

Students will also keep daily writing journals for the first seven weeks. This is fast, associative writing

you can do anywhere. The point is to create the habit of making words on paper. I will not read the

content but simply check, once a week, that it’s been done every day. It can literally be “I’m trying to

write and I can’t think of anything to say. Oh, but wait a minute, the bus driver just smiled at the student

wearing A&M colors. What’s happening here? Did anyone else notice? Is this funny?”

There is a final essay, which will be fashioned out of 3-5 of your short pieces and edited, edited, edited.

This should be 5-7 pages, double-spaced. Don’t try to come up with a single thesis to subsume the

separate pieces but, instead, hold your focus on the particularity of each piece and then look for

resonances between them as you select the pieces to piece together. They can remain separate, even

divided by an asterisk. Or you may find a writing line that allows you to link the three pieces, editing

them together.

There will be workshops on ethnography, auto-ethnography, editing, voice, descriptive writing, and

describing a world. There will also be many experiments.

This is a writing workshop. We will read one another's writing, proceeding through a series of exercises to add density and texture to ethnographic description by including attention to scene, character, event, situations, dialogue, etc. Why does writing matter in ehtnography? Hoe do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description? 

This is a writing component class. there will be assignments to write different kinds of essays (autobiographical, descriptive, analytical) and to work through drafts.

Please check back for updates.

This is a reading seminar and writing experiment on affect. This means some version of seeing forms, powers, socialites, aesthetics, and sensory registers not only as the transparently obvious effects of abstracted, pre-known structures and determinants but as some variegated registers of things like capacities, affordances, energies, intensities, impacts, circulations, potentialities, trajectories and other lines, diffusions, dissipations, assemblages, circuits of action and reaction, states of quiescence and arousal and/or planes of expressivity. There are questions about mediations and materialities, subjects and objects, actions, practices and forms of agency, rhythms, atmospheres, and refrains, noumena and machines. 

This is a writing workshop. Students will keep free-writing journals and write four essays, each of which

will be built through 4 drafts. We will read one another’s writings and give useful comments. In class we

will proceed through a series of exercises and workshops in doing ethnography, writing and reading. We

will experiment with how to writing about objects, places, scenes and situations, characters, forms of

attention, and sensibilities.

This course will be an experiment in long-form writing. Each participant in the seminar will write a short (25,000 word) book-length manuscript modeled on Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series: http://objectsobjectsobjects.com/

Pick an ordinary object that will help you develop your dissertation project. The focus in the seminar will be on the writing and work-shopping it. But we’ll read too, in new materialisms, subjects-and-objects, object oriented studies, thing theory, nonrepresentational theory, and discard studies.

Some concerns of the class are: How do we write objects? What is an anthropological object? Can we approach the thing itself through writing? What happens when something fails, is destroyed, or has not yet come to be? Is caught up in circulation? What of encounters, whether human/nonhuman or “dynamic assemblages” of forms of matter?

Each week everyone will pick one of the Object Lessons books to peruse over the week, then switch to another the following week. The topics of these books include Remote Control, Phone Booth, Golf Ball, Drone, Drivers License, Hotel, Refrigerator, Silence, Glass, Waste, Shipping Container, Book Shelf, Hood, Bread, Cigarette Lighter, Dust, Hair, Tree…   You may also write a 1500 word essay for publication in The Atlantic on-line. Go to the Object Lessons website to pitch your idea.

This course will explore the ways in which shared emotions and sensibilities animate

social and cultural life. We will read works trying to describe this process. Ethnography

means writing difference. Here we stretch that concept, along with many anthropologists,

to treat ethnography as a description of the specificity of any shared or recognizable form

of life, practice, sensibility, or feeling. Difference is pervasive and generative even in

what, in one model, appears to be “the same” “culture”, group, or genre. By writing

culture, we are learning to describe the precision of how a whole range of things impact

lives. In doing this, and in looking for models of this, we will also stretch our attention far

beyond the confines of ethnographies written by anthropologists into mixed-genre works

of creative nonfiction and memoir.

This is a very hands-on writing workshop. Students will keep daily free-writing journals,

write and read aloud in class weekly ethnographies of feeling inspired by the readings,

and compile a longer essay from the short, working through drafts. I will provide

exercises and workshops on needed tools including on ethnography, autoethnography,

voice, and the description of objects, places, scenes, situations, characters, and

sensibilities from the point of view of their emotions, moods, structures of feeling, and

atmospheres. There will also be work an editing.

This course will be a writing flag. It will be run as a writing workshop with weekly writing assignments on topics including place, character, objects, subjects, cultural forms, everyday life and feeling states or structures such as trauma, love, hope, depression, the even keel and melodrama. We will explore how to articulate structures of feeling with models of culture and the self. We will carefully examine and experiment with modes of ethnographic attention, the importance of the telling detail and methods of participant observation.

This is a reading seminar and writing experiment on affect. For Deleuze, following Spinoza, affect is force. The capacity to affect and to be affected. A vital point of emergence where the actual meets the potential. This means seeing forms, powers, socialites, aesthetics, and sensory registers not as the obvious effects of abstracted, pre-known structures and determinants but as lived intensities, impacts, circulation, assemblages, and planes of expressivity. A world is not a bounded unity but a multiplicity of trajectories of potentiality. Binary oppositions and contradictions become resonating relations (of inside/outside, action/reaction, quiescence and arousal...). Constructions are not mere representations but compositions that take place as rhythms, atmospheres, refrains and energies entrained on bodies of all kinds. Culture and power are not structures and determinations but articulations of lines of flight. Structures are ontologically complex, prismatically proliferating assemblages of noumena and matter, dream and abstraction, energy and machines of all kinds.

Books

Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. William Connolly. A World of Becoming.Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth. The Affect Studies Reader. Derek McCormack. Refrains for Moving Bodies. Yael Navarro-Yashin. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-War Polity. John Protevi. Political Affect. Rajchman. The Deleuze Connections. Kathleen Stewart. Ordinary Affects.

Writing: Each week read aloud a 300 word piece of writing inspired by the reading and useful for your project.

This is a writing workshop. Students will keep free-writing journals and write four essays, each of which

will be built through 4 drafts. We will read one another’s writings and give useful comments. In class we

will proceed through a series of exercises and workshops in doing ethnography, writing and reading. We

will experiment with how to writing about objects, places, scenes and situations, characters, forms of

attention, and sensibilities.

This is a reading seminar and writing experiment on affect as a partially undisclosed force, the capacity to affect and to be affected and a point of emergence where the actual meets the potential. This means seeing forms, powers, socialites, aesthetics, and sensory registers not as the obvious effects of abstracted, pre-known structures and determinants but as lived intensities, impacts, circulation, assemblages, and planes of expressivity. A world is not a bounded unity but a multiplicity of trajectories of potentiality. Binary oppositions and contradictions become resonating relations (of inside/outside, action/reaction, quiescence and arousal…) compositions take place as rhythms, atmospheres, refrains and bodies. 

Books

Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. 

Melissa Greg and Greg Seigworth. The Affect Studies Reader.

Kathleen Stewart. Ordinary Affects.

Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism.

John Protevi. Political Affect.

Derek McCormack. Refrains for Moving Bodies.

Yael Navarro-Yashin. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-War Polity.

Rajchman. The Deleuze Connections.

William Connolly. A World of Becoming.

This is a writing workshop. We will read one another's writing, proceeding through a series of exercises to add density and texture to ethnographic description by including attention to scene, character, event, situations, dialogue, etc. Why does writing matter in ehtnography? Hoe do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description? 

This is a writing component class. there will be assignments to write different kinds of essays (autobiographical, descriptive, analytical) and to work through drafts.

This is an advanced seminar on place. We’ll read a lot of theory. It will be a writing workshop in which students read their work each week and the discussion revolves around the writing. It’s helpful to have already done ethnographic fieldwork. Students should have a strong background in cultural theory. Readings will include

Deleuze, The Three Ecologies; Morton, Hyperobjects; Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road; Feld and Basso, Senses of Place; Anderson and Harrison, Taking-Place: Non-representational theories and Geography; Auge, Non-Places and chapters from a number of ethnographies of place. 

This course is designed to help students writing PhDs, MAs, or articles learn to develop concepts and research projects through writing. We’ll read some writings as models and some works about writing but not too much. The course will be structured as a workshop – we will read one another’s work and give comments. Each person will turn in a short piece of writing every other week. Readings include a packet of selections (including works by invited speakers) and

Mark Doty  The Art of Description

Kirin Narayan  Alive in the Writing

This is a Deleuze-influenced reading and writing event. Deleuze re-worked social theory away from structures and determinations and linear developments toward an ontology of difference and flow. Away from binary oppositions or contradictions toward resonating levels of things like inside/outside, action/reaction, quiescence and arousal. Central to this move was his attention to affect as a vital point of emergence where the actual meets the potential. Affect is the thing that always exceeds or escapes its capture by anchored perspectives or categories including nameable "emotions." It's about the trajectory and unplanned productivity of complex interacting social forces. While it will be the underlying puzzlingof the seminar to try to imagine what this kind of attention does to anthropological theory and cultural studies, we will also spend time reading on affect through other traditions including Freud, feminist theory,phenomenology, globalization theory, and ethnography.

This is a writing workshop. We will read one another’s writings, proceeding through a series of exercises to add density and texture to ethnographic description by including attention to scene, character, event, situation, dialogue, etc. Why does writing matter in ethnography? How do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description?

This is a writing workshop. We will read one another’s weekly writings in addition to other readings. Why does writing matter? What’s ethnography? How do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects?

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back with updates.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back with updates.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back with updates.

Please check back for updates.

This course focuses on "classic" themes in anthropology such as ethnicity, language, adaptation, marriage, kinship, gender, religion, and social stratification.  We will consider anthropological theory from its 19th-century origins to the present.  The course also explores the nature of ethnographic field work, especially the relationship between the anthropologist and the field community.  
The lectures, readings, and films for this course have been selected with the objective of exploring the social meanings with which diverse groups invest their life.  By comparing and analyzing the similarities and differences between "us" and "others," both within the borders of the U.S. and abroad, the anthropological perspective can expose some of our own cultural assumptions and enable us to better understand diverse cultures.