The Ethnography and Social Theory Colloquium typically meets in-person at 10 Sachem Street Room 105, unless otherwise noted.
Fall 2025
Huatse Gyal — October 14, 2024
Restoring Indigenous Relations of Land: Grassland Restoration, Tibetan Yaks, and More than Human Indigeneity
This talk details emergent and innovative forms of land restoration efforts in Tibet that prioritize land-based community building as an indispensable step in environmental protection. This research draws on nearly fifteen years of fieldwork in eastern Tibet and over a decade of involvement in community-led efforts to restore the vitality of land, language, and community in the region. It is informed by Critical Indigenous Studies scholars who see the revitalization of Indigenous ways of relating to land and language as essential to the mission of empowering Indigenous communities and unmaking settler colonialisms in small and specific ways. Amidst other examples, I highlight how a prominent Tibetan community leader and conservationist tapped into land-based Indigenous knowledge by utilizing yaks and their dung as natural fertilizers for land restoration. The talk aims to broaden our perspectives on conservation and Indigeneity in a world that encompasses more than just humans.
Dr. Huatse Gyal is an environmental anthropologist and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. He received his B.A in Anthropology from Reed College, and MA and Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Gyal has contributed peer-reviewed articles to international journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Nomadic Peoples, and Ateliers d’anthropologie. He is the co-editor of the first English volume titled, Resettlement among Tibetan Nomads in China (2015) and recently co-edited a special issue of Yeshe: A Journal of Tibetan Literature, Art and Humanities entitled, Translating Across the Bardo: Centering the Richness of Tibetan Language in Tibetan Studies (2024). Dr. Gyal released his first feature length documentary film titled “Khata: Poison or Purity? in 2023.
Daniel Agbiboa — October 28, 2024
Taken For A Ride: Learning From Mobile Ethnography
Drawing on my body of research into urban precarity and violent insurgency in West and Central
Africa, this talk will discuss the value of mobile ethnography as a theoretically informed mode of
traveling with people in their everyday worlds. By centering the lived experience of everyday subjects
as often one of encountering the state in motion (i.e., the state as a mobile entity), mobile
ethnography constitutes a riposte to traditionally static approaches to doing fieldwork in the social
sciences. Taking to the road—in particular, dwelling at checkpoints, bus terminals, and roundabouts
located at the precarious and shifting margins of the state—enables us to actively observe the figure
of the subject on the move, the circulation of power relations across space, and how place itself
shapes the emotions, maneuvers, and arts of survival of a population that is stuck, yet always on the
move to seize opportunities for self-protection, advancement, and recognition.
Daniel E. Agbiboa is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard
University, where he also serves as Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Affiliate Faculty of the Bloomberg Center for Cities, and Co-Chair of the Urban Conversation Series in the Mahindra Humanities Center. He earned a PhD from the University of Oxford and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the intersection of violence and order, urban governance, mobility and mobilization, and planetary politics. His recent books include They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Mobility, Mobilization and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context (University of Michigan Press, 2022). He is the recipient of several awards, including the Lee Ann Fujii Book Award, the ISA Peace Best Book Award, the Politics and Gender Best Article Award; and the James F. Short Jr. Distinguished Article Award (Honorable Mention). In 2023, he received the Clarence Stone Scholar Award for his significant contributions to the study of urban politics. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, recipient of the Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award, and holder of the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar Award (2024-2026). He is currently on the Editorial Board of the African Studies Review and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, where he also serves as a Trustee.
Ryan Cecil Jobson — December 2, 2024
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Ryan Cecil Jobson is an anthropologist and social critic of the Caribbean and the Americas at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching engage issues of energy and extractivism, states and sovereignty, climate and crisis, race and capital. His first book manuscript, The Petro-State Masquerade, is a historical ethnography of fossil fuel industries and postcolonial state building in Trinidad and Tobago. Excavating more than a century of commercial oil, gas, and petrochemical development, Jobson theorizes how the tenuous relationship between hydrocarbons and political power—enshrined in the hyphenated form of the petro-state—is upheld through a “masquerade of permanence” sustained by speculative offshore and deepwater extraction. Meanwhile, working class Trinbagonians play a mas of their own—in the form of strikes, protests, and the Carnival road march—to stage direct democratic alternatives to the fossil economy.