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New from Bloomsbury: “Affect Ethnography”
Subtitled “Exploring Performance and Narratives in the Creation of Unstories”, this book Investigates new ways […]
Developing new ways of rendering ethnographic material into artistic forms.
My academic and artistic work revolve around questions of borders, translation, and theatrical exploration. In my empirical research, I follow two interwoven lines of inquiry. One line builds on debates around migration and mental health in Europe, and the current “refugee crisis” in the Mediterranean. I address the politics of migration through the lens of ethno-psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of recognition. My other line of inquiry involves finding new ways of rendering empirical material into written texts and artistic forms through collaborations that blur the boundaries of disciplines. In collaboration with playwright and director Greg Pierotti, I have developed a new method/process, Affect Theater, which draws from anthropological practices, theatrical techniques, and affect theater. This devising theater technique draws from non-theatrical source material (interview transcripts, legal and medical reports, news articles, archival documents, visual material, etc.) to create theatrical essays about current events.