Into the den:

Description

Seminar with Dr Catherine Trundle about Poetry and Ethnography.
Poetry attempts to generate experience and resonance with the world, rather than represent experience and the world. Dwelling in ambiguity, surprise, strangeness, and the loosening of settled associations, poetry offers ways to think and craft ethnography that both aligns with contemporary ethnographic sensibilities, and challenge them. Reflecting upon an ethnographic project on heat stress in Australia, I will discuss how poetic methods and a poetic slant have shaped my approach to heat, the body and illness, research, and ethnographic writing. Poetic methods, I'll show, create particular orientations towards the notion of the political, an ethics of knowledge, the place of the body in fieldwork and writing, and even notions of truth. They also generate the 'radical art of noticing', as Anna Tsing articulates, an attention to the 'feral effects' of our ethnographic projects. My talk will weave between sharing my own ethnographic poetry, reflections on the rich lineage of ethnographic poetry in anthropology, and a kind of 'philosophical manifesto' for why poetry matters for ethnography. In doing so I hope to offer ethnographic pathways into poetry, and poetic pathways into ethnography, that can be both grounded in everyday methods and engaged with anthropological debate.

Period	28 Aug 2026
Event type	Seminar
Location	Sydney, AustraliaShow on map