Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies
CLALS is delighted to co-sponsor this conference by the Department of Anthropology and Penn EnviroLab:
Penn EnviroLab invites graduate students and other early career researchers to consider how (and what modes of) ethnographic work can facilitate a praxis of elemental thinking informed by ecological, political, and social matters of concern including, but not limited to, the following themes:
• Multimodal Elements
• Entangled Ecologies/Ontologies
• Climate and its Elements
• Bodies/Grounds
• Seeds and Other Minutiae
• Waste and Ruination
In addition to more traditional conference programming, there will be a pre-conference writing retreat on Thursday, March 21st for a small group of panelists engaged in conversations around craft, genre, multimodality, and experimental ethnography.
We ask: What are the political and ethical implications of thinking elementally? How might ethnographic conceptualization retool elemental thinking as a mode of inquiry grounded in the processes critical to the survival of human and more-than-human worlds? How do reconfigurations of the elemental help us think through the Anthropocene and the anthropos-not-seen (de la Cadena 2015)?