Ethnography in practice – workshop Inspiration

Add your term to Susan Wardell’s Speculative Dictionary of Climate Emotion =

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Workshop Inspiration

For volunteering tips, go to bottom of bibliography

Foraging For Human-Plant Relations

Michaels, Lucy & Puig De La Bellacasa, María. Forthcoming. ‘It’s only really when I put my hands in the soil that I feel at home”.
Soil care and ecological belonging in urban growing practices’. Environmental Humanities, Vol 18, issue 1 (2026)

Solnick, Rachel. 2024. ‘Cultivating Diasporist Ontologies: Identity-Based Agrarianism and the Practices of Anti-Colonial Place-Making’. Agoriad: A Journal of Spatial Theory 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.18573/agoriad.12.

Lindemann, Justine. 2023. ‘“A Little Portion of Our 40 Acres”: A Black Agrarian Imaginary in the City’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 6 (3): 1804–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221129408.

Ives, Sarah. 2014. ‘Uprooting “Indigeneity” in South Africa’s Western Cape: The Plant That Moves’. American Anthropologist 116 (2): 310–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12096.

Poe, Melissa R., LeCompte ,Joyce, McLain ,Rebecca, and Patrick and Hurley. 2014. ‘Urban Foraging and the Relational Ecologies of Belonging’. Social & Cultural Geography 15 (8): 901–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2014.908232.

Classifying Worlds

Barua, Maan. 2022. ‘Feral Ecologies: The Making of Postcolonial Nature in London’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28 (3): 896–919. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13653.

Stoetzer, Bettina. 2018. ‘Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin’. Cultural Anthropology (Washington) 33 (2): 295–323. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.2.09.

Suzuki, Yuka. 2017. The Nature of Whiteness: Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe. Edited by K. Sivaramakrishnan. University of Washington Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvct026x.

Todd, Zoe. 2017. ‘Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in Amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory’. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 43 (March):102–7. https://doi.org/10.1086/692559.

Plant Communication

Chao, Sophie, and Dion Enari. 2021. ‘Decolonising Climate Change: A Call for Beyond-Human Imaginaries and Knowledge Generation’. eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics 20 (2): 32–54. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3796.

Arregui, Aníbal G. 2023. ‘Reversible Pigs: An Infraspecies Ethnography of Wild Boars in Barcelona’. American Ethnologist 50 (1): 115–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13114.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2017. ‘Learning the Grammar of Animacy’. Anthropology of Consciousness 28 (2): 128–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12081.

Degnen, Cathrine. 2009. ‘On Vegetable Love: Gardening, Plants, and People in the North of England’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 151–67.

Bird‐David, Nurit. 1999. ‘“Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology’. Current Anthropology 40 (S1): S67–91. https://doi.org/10.1086/200061.

Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800. Penguin. United Kingdom.

Moss Literacy

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2021. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. 1st edition. London: Penguin.

The Art of Listening

Haskell, David. 2022. Sounds Wild and Broken. Faber and Faber.

Hirschkind, Charles. 2001. ‘The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary Egypt’. American Ethnologist 28 (3): 623–49.

Rudge, Alice. 2018. ‘The Sounds of People and Birds: Music, Memory and Longing among the Batek of Peninsular Malaysia’. Hunter Gatherer Research 4 (1): 3–23. https://doi.org/10.3828/hgr.2018.2.

Climate Emotions

Schnegg, Michael. 2024. ‘Rural Boredom: Atmospheres of Blocked Promises’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 30 (3): 627–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14095.

Wardell, Susan. 2020. ‘Naming and Framing Ecological Distress’. Medicine Anthropology Theory 7 (2): 2. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.7.2.768.

Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Neville R. Ellis. 2018. ‘Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss’. Nature Climate Change 8 (4): 275–81. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.

Multi-Species Ethnographic Research Methods

Hartigan Jr, John. 2019. ‘Plants as Ethnographic Subjects’. Anthropology Today 35 (2): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12491.

Miller, Theresa L. Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil. University of Texas Press, 2019. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.7560/317396. Accessed 13 Feb. 2023.

Wels, Harry. 2020. ‘Multi-Species Ethnography: Methodological Training in the Field in South Africa’. Journal of Organizational Ethnography 9 (3): 343–63. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-05-2020-0020.

Further reading

Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World / David Abram. New York: Vintage Books.

Gooley, Tristan. 2015. The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs: Their Meaning and the Art of Making Predictions and Deductions. Digital original edition. Sceptre.

Howes, David. 2019. ‘Multisensory Anthropology’. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-011324.

Hirschkind, Charles. 2001. ‘The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary Egypt’. American Ethnologist 28 (3): 623–49.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals: Why We Need to Learn to Listen, Breathe and Remember, Across Species, Across Extinctions and Across Harm.” Soundings (London, England) 78.78 (2021): 20–37. Web.

Miller, Theresa L. Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil. University of Texas Press, 2019. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.7560/317396. Accessed 13 Feb. 2023.

Pink, Sarah. 2015. Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd edition. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Samudra, Jaida Kim. 2008. ‘Memory in Our Body: Thick Participation and the Translation of Kinesthetic Experience’. American Ethnologist 35 (4): 665–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00104.x.

Volunteering

Glengall Wharf Garden

64 Glengall Rd, London SE15 6NF

Forest Hill Library Community Gardens

V22 Forest Hill Library Dartmouth Road
 Forest Hill
 London
 SE23 3HZ

(Next door to V22 Louise House and next door but one from Forest Hill Pools)

Calthorpe Community Garden

258-274 Grays Inn Rd, London WC1X 8LH

Lawyers for Nature = a collective of lawyers trying to give Nature legal personhood in the UK – volunteers welcome

London Freedom Seedbank (A network of food growers and gardeners in London dedicated to saving, storing and sharing open-pollinated seed)

London’s Beaver Working Group (returning beavers to London’s waterways, volunteers welcome)

Thames21 (citizen science group, working to clean/fight for clean waterways in London)