Cristiana Giordano (Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Davis) earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.A. in philosophy from the University of Pavia, Italy. Her first book, Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (University of California Press, 2014), is a reflection on foreign migration, mental health, and cultural translation in contemporary Italy. Her broader research interests also engage the relation between psychic life, therapeutic ethics, and clinical sites. Migrants in Translation won the Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology (Society for Psychological Anthropology, 2017), the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing (Society for Humanistic Anthropology, 2016, second prize), and was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Center USA UC Press First Book Award.
Giordano’s other line of inquiry involves finding new ways of rendering ethnographic material into written texts and/or artistic forms. She has trained in devising theater techniques which draw from non-theatrical source material (e.g., interview transcripts, legal and medical reports, news articles, archival documents, visual material, etc.) to devise theater pieces on current events. Her collaboration with playwright and director Greg Pierotti (one of the founders of Tectonic Theater Project) has culminated into new methodologies and cross-pollinations between the social sciences and performance practices. Their theatrical productions include Unstories, a 50-minute work on movement, borders, and the current “refugee crisis” in Europe; Unstories II (roaming), a 45-minute piece that furthers the reflection about movement and borders (both co-written with Pierotti); and B-More (written by Pierotti), based around police violence in the U.S.
Playing with the relation between truth and representation in the stories they tell as ethnographers and theater makers, in their new book, Affect Ethnography: Exploring Performance and Narrative in the Creation of Unstories, (Bloomsbury, 2024), Giordano and Greg Pierotti contribute to the current debates around experimental research methodologies and ethnographically grounded theatrical forms. Their approach departs from other studies by proposing a unique methodology that brings together theatrical devising practices and anthropology. Through its theoretical exploration and performative script, the book bridges the relation between ethnographic writing and performativity, and simultaneously troubles conventional narrative practices in theater and anthropology. The practice described in Affect Ethnography also emphasizes associative and affective approaches to empirical research and defines a process for rendering this type of material into imaginative academic writing, collaborative performance, and other inventive forms, applicable across a range of academic disciplines.
Click here to learn more about Giordano and Pierotti’s collaborative project Affect Theater.