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.

Cristiana Giordano is an associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis. 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.

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.