Book Talk | Cristiana Giordano & Greg Pierotti | Affect Ethnography: Exploring Performance and Narrative in the Creation of Unstories
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Wednesday, April 30th at 5:30 PM for a book talk with Cristiana Giordano and Greg Pierotti. They will discuss their new book Affect Ethnography: Exploring Performance and Narrative in the Creation of Unstories.
Cristiana Giordano is an associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.A. in philosophy from the University of Pavia, Italy. She works on foreign migration, mental health, the body, and cultural translation in contemporary Italy. Her research addresses the politics of migration in Europe through the lens of ethno-psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of inclusion/exclusion of foreign others; and through the lens of research on the human microbiome and migrant health in Europe. Her broader research interests also engage the relation between psychic life, therapy, clinical sites, and images. She is the author of Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (University of California Press, 2014), Winner of 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 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 explores new ways in which anthropology can contribute to and learn from performative endeavors, such as theater performance and installations. To this end, she has been training in devising theater techniques which draw from nontheatrical source material (interview transcripts, legal and medical reports, news articles, archival documents, visual material, etc.) to devise theater pieces on current events.
Greg Pierotti is an assistant professor of dramaturgy and collaborative playmaking at the University of Arizona. He has been a teacher of theatrical devising for twenty years. He is co-writer of the plays The Laramie Project, Laramie:10 Years later, and The People’s Temple and the HBO teleplay The Laramie Project. For these works Pierotti received the Bay Area Theater Critics Award, a Will Glickman Award, and the Humanitas Prize, and received NY Drama Desk, Alpert and Emmy award nominations. His residencies as a playwright, dramaturge and director include Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor, Sundance Theater Lab, and Maison Dora Maar. As an actor he has performed at Lincoln Center Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, La Jolla Playhouse, The Union Square Theater, to name a few.
His current research, Affect Theater, explores the cross-pollination of theatrical devising practices and affect theory. The goal of his current research activity is two fold. On the one hand it offers ethnographic writers new research designs and approaches for presenting their empirical material; on the other it attunes theater makers to more complex understandings of political and cultural contexts, and supports them in approaching different events and social issues through more nuanced discourse formations. Ultimately his technique, Affect Theater, challenges performing artists, writers, designers and directors to pay deeper attention to the complexities of worlds and their grammars.