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 where they will discuss Affect Ethnography: Exploring Performance and Narrative in the Creation of Unstories. They will be in conversation with Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan and Joe Salvatore.
Praise for Affect Ethnography
“In my own experience of research and teaching ethnography, there emerges in every fieldwork project a repository of creative ideas that lacks modes of sharing, validation, and implementation. Giordano and Pierotti, recognized artisans of this ethnographic craft in theater arts, now provide the much needed practice/technique bridge to excavate and implement these dramaturgical impulses embedded in every experience of ethnographic research.”
George Marcus, Director, Center for Ethnography, University of California.
“This book presents a radical empiricism of theatrical composition on stage and in forms of living. Sidestepping explanatory rhetorics, it catches itself in the elemental resonance of a play of light, sound, props, bodies, words, gestures. A fictionalizing real that incites experimentation in an associative swing through the allusive, fragmented, and accented.”
Kathleen Stewart, author, Ordinary Affects.
Cristiana Giordano is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book, Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (University of California Press, 2014), won the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing (2016), and the Boyer Prize in Psychoanalytic Anthropology (2017). Her current research investigates new ways of rendering ethnographic material into artistic forms. She has been collaborating with playwright and director Greg Pierotti on a new methodology at the intersection of the social sciences and performance. They have created Unstories, a 50-minute performance around the current “refugee crisis” in Europe, and Unstories II (roaming), a 45-minute performance which furthers the reflection about movement and borders.
Greg Pierotti is an associate professor of theater at the University of Arizona. He is a playwright, theater director, and actor. He co-authored the plays The Laramie Project, Laramie: 10 Years Later, The People’s Temple, and Unstories I and II. He co-authored the book Moment Work: Tectonic Theater Project’s Process of Devising Theater. His honors as a writer/director/deviser include a Humanitas Prize, The Will Glickman Award for best new play, and Emmy, Lortel, Drama Desk, and Alpert Award nomintations. Since 2015, he and Cristiana Giordano, he have developed a method for research, writing and theatrical devising called “Affect Theater.” Together they have created performances and authored articles that play at the intersection of Anthropology and Theater. Their new book, Affect Ethnography: Exploring Performance and Narrative in the Creation of Unstories was published in June 2024 by Bloomsbury.
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and co-editor of the Multimodal Section of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. He received a joint PhD in Anthropology and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. For almost a decade Gabriel has utilized collaborative, multimodal, and speculative approaches to research how media consumption, production, and circulation shape understandings of migration, gender, race, and urban space. His first book, The Globally Familiar: Digital hip hop, masculinity and urban space in Delhi (Duke University Press, 2020), narrates how Delhi’s young working class and migrant men adopt hip hop’s globally circulating aesthetics— accessed through inexpensive smartphones and cheap internet connectivity that radically changed India’s media landscape in the early aughts— to productively re-fashion themselves and their city. Recently, Gabriel has become interested in the ways that corporate owned social media platforms have become a site for a rearticulation and disruption of enduring forms of coloniality. His second book, co-written with Sahana Udupa and titled Digital Unsettling:Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media (NYU Press, forthcoming), explores these developments and their material consequences.
Joe Salvatore is an artist-researcher who creates theatre and video projects from interview-based data, found media artifacts, and historical events. He believes that performance has the power to disrupt pre-conceived notions and to challenge and change collaborators and audiences alike. Critics and audiences have called his work “engrossing and illuminating,” “courageous,” and “an incredible bit of truth.” Salvatore is the director of the Verbatim Performance Lab and teaches in the Program in Educational Theatre at NYU Steinhardt. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the American Alliance for Theatre and Education. He is a cluster member of the UBC Research-based Theatre Collaborative, an affiliated faculty researcher with the NYU Steinhardt Theatre and Health Lab, and an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab.