The Ethnography and Social Theory Colloquium typically meets 3:30 pm in-person at 10 Sachem Street in Room 105, unless otherwise noted.
Spring 2025
Sienna R. Craig — April 7, 2025
Turn Toward the Light: A Graduate Student Ethnographic Writing Workshop
“Right now, the lightness of spring feels far away – as winter in New England stubbornly hangs on, leaving the world a cold muddy mess. And, without wishing to push this metaphor to its saturation point, we are living in a very dark political moment, where skating on thin ice has become a survival mechanism. For those interested in the human and more-than-human condition, in care for each other and the worlds we inhabit, the current dismantling of so much – from family units to healthcare access, from environmental science to broader activist efforts toward equity and justice – makes terms like the “Anthropocene” or even “decolonization” feel a bit quaint.“
Built from the work that Sienna Craig and Laura Ogden (Dartmouth) have done together for many years, and further inspired and guided by anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, author of Ordinary Affects (2007), this workshop invites graduate students to engage the senses, experiment with brevity, and build community around writing. During the session, we’ll discuss different approaches to the page, paying special attention to how themes of lightness, illumination, and renewal show up in our own work. We will also have time to respond to prompts and share work. Graduate students only: Register here.
There will also be a catered lunch conversation with Craig at 12:00 pm (Room 105, 10 Sachem St.), where we will discuss her book, The Ends of Kinship (2020), alongside her research, methods, and more. Open to all.
Sienna R. Craig holds the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professorship in Asian Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She is a medical and cultural anthropologist whose relationships with Himalayan and Tibetan communities spans three decades and bridges communities in Asia and North America. Craig is the author of The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives Between Nepal and New York (University of Washington Press, 2020), Mustang in Black and White, with photographer Kevin Bubriski (Vajra Publications, 2018), Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (University of California Press, 2012) and Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage through the Himalayas (Wisdom Publications,2008). She is the co-editor of Medicine Between Science and Religion: Explorations on Tibetan Grounds (Berghahn Books, 2010), and Studies of Medical Pluralism in Tibetan History and Society (IITBS, 2010), among other publications. Craig enjoys writing across genres and has published poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, flash ethnography, and children’s literature in addition to scholarly works in medical and cultural anthropology. From 2012-2017 she served as co-editor of HIMALAYA, Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, and she is an Executive Council member of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM).
Tracie Canada — April 14, 2025
Engaging Multiple Audiences as Athletes Tackle the Everyday
College football, with its prestige, drama, media, and money, is a core feature of the sporting landscape in the US. However, the promises of an “amateur” system that offers a “free” education contradict the reality. In Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football, I describe how this system particularly harms the Black men who are demographically overrepresented on gridirons across the country. I also incorporate this analysis into my public scholarship. In this talk, I highlight how I engage multiple audiences in my own ethnographic writing, which details how Black college football players tackle the systems that structure their everyday lives, and who helps them do it.
Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is also the founder and director of the HEARTS (Health, Ethnography, and Race through Sports) Lab. In her first ethnographic book, Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football (University of California Press, 2025), she analyzes the performing athletic body to reveal how processes of anti-Blackness, injury, violence, and care impact the everyday lived experiences of Black college football players. In addition to her academic publications, her work has been featured in public venues and outlets such as The Museum of Modern Art, TIME, The Guardian, and Scientific American.
Grace Cho — April 28, 2025
Dreams as Knowledge Production: Memory, Archives and Autoethnography
How do we bring forth stories that have been silenced or suppressed? Where do we look for evidence of that which has been erased? And how do we expand our understanding of the archive? Tracing the trajectory of her research and writing from Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War to her new book project, We Will Go to Jinju: A Search for Family and the Hidden Histories of the Korean War, Cho will explore the creative methods we can use to make sense of violently suppressed social histories. By paying attention to phenomena that are typically disavowed by the social sciences, such as dreams, ghosts and hallucinations, we can call forth new ways of knowing and remembering.
Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in The Nation, Catapult, The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, Womens Studies Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry. She is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Fall 2024
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
The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago
“The Petro-State Masquerade” considers how postcolonial political futures in the Caribbean nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago came to be staked to the market futures of oil, natural gas, and their petrochemical derivatives. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Jobson theorizes how the tenuous relationship between oil and political power—enshrined in the hyphenated form of the petro-state—is represented by postcolonial state officials as a Carnivalesque “masquerade of permanence” through the perpetual expansion of fossil fuel ventures. At the same time, low oil and gas prices, diminishing reserves, and renewable energy innovations threaten the viability of the Trinbagonian energy sector.
Ryan Cecil Jobson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. His research is preoccupied with questions of energy, sovereignty, race, and capitalism in the Caribbean and the Americas. His first book manuscript, The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. His writing is featured in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Small Axe.