What am I looking at?

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In lieu of a traditional academic poster, I’ve constructed a mixed-media map of the Governors Island test-bed. In addition to visualizing the material projects over time which are positioning Governors Island as a ‘climate tech’ hub. I have annotated this map with illustrative excerpts from my ethnographic fieldnotes, photographs, and some found ephemera. 

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Why?

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Ethnography, ‘writing culture,’ centers questions about representing human worlds through the written word. Frustrated by the flattening necessary to inscribe human lifeworlds in writing, James Agee famously began Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first by berating the reader for even picking up his ethnographic account, and then asserting: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be  fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and  iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement” (1939, p. 10). Agee followed this with a 300 page account.

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As a scholarly community concerned with communication, mediation, and interpretation, we are all aware of the limits of linguistic and numeric representations. I believe that in our context of pervasive streams of flowing images, the aesthetics of collage I’ve channeled in this project are an opportunity to represent the messy and nonlinear process of interpretive research. I’m inspired by recent work in visual culture which argues that the saturation of images in everyday life, enabled by contemporary technologies of visualization, have augmented the visual field in which we operate (e.g., MacKenzie & Munster, 2019; Martínez Luna, 2019) such that sharing images is a key mechanism for translating “individual, psychic representations” into social and political realms (Buck-Morss et al., 2022, p. 129). An image of Governors Island sits just behind my eyes as I write up my research. This image is charged with many meanings and interpretations which I’ve come to hold through my research. 

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I also had a lot of poster boards and sticky notes and stuff.

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Agee, J., & Evans, W. (1939). Let us now praise famous men: Three tenant families. Mariner Books. 

Buck-Morss, S., Michaels, A., & McCaughey, K. (2022). Seeing–Making: Room for Thought. Inventory Press.  

MacKenzie, A., & Munster, A. (2019). Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities. Theory, 
Culture & Society, 36(5), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419847508
Martínez Luna, S. (2019). Still Images?: Materiality and Mobility in Digital Visual Culture. Third Text, 33(1), 
43–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2018.1546484


 

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