Anthropology

On the Afterlife of Fieldwork

Dr. Richard Kernaghan

This professionalism seminar will be an open conversation about ethnography’s potential over and above, and even autonomous to career path. We will ask: what endures and insists from ethnographic encounters that never find adequate place in a doctoral thesis? We will ask as well how even their most minor traces—whether as scratch notes, memories, dreams, images or vague impressions—can animate other kinds of intellectual-creative projects. Given that extended periods of professional uncertainty are not uncommon for recent anthropology PhDs, finding strategies for cultivating and building upon the expressive, critical force of prior fieldwork experiences seems not only necessary but vital. If the afterlife of fieldwork is writing, then what kinds of concrete blockages get in the way and how might they be overcome? In this conversation we will share ideas for returning to fieldwork encounters and then staying close to them so as to unfold, expand and explore the germinal sparks they contain for research projects now and to come.