Of all the readings, I’m most interested in Shahram Khosravi’s Engaging Anthropology: An Auto-Ethnographic Approach piece. I was first introduced to auto-ethnography when you (Elena) were advising me over the first year of my MFA program. While I didn’t quite understand it at first, I have found this writing style to be among the most interesting forms of writing ~ and I’m grateful for your introduction to the form. 🙂

Shahram Khosravi’s work especially interests me for two reasons. First, because he utilizes socially engaged art projects to research, share, and educate people in the public sphere and within the institutions he has access to (academia & the state). Secondly, because he writes about “what emerges from the space in between.”

THE SPACE IN BETWEEN is an idea I think about regularly. Originally through a young adult novel with the same title written by a playwright friend of mine which I began reading at the same time I was composing a song about my mother’s suicide in which the phrase started to emerge.

Also, as Khosravi talks about, he expresses his sense of feeling caught in the gap between

While I’m not a migrant or a nomad, I have often felt a sense of “unfittingness and unbelongingness” in the places I have inhabited. And for similar, parallel reasons, I feel like I live in the spaces between the normal, “accepted” ways of being and a totally different, unconventional way of existing. While my experiences and ways of existing bear little to no resemblance to that of which Khosrabi speaks of (since I am white, American, and ostensibly privileged and free to go where I like) it is more of a psychological gap where I feel a sense of “unfittingness and unbelongingness”.

I’m wondering if the writings I’m doing for my Archive of Invisibility may fall into the category of auto-ethnography, or are rather simply, spontaneous stream-of-consciousness writing…? I suspect it is the latter, but I would like to utilize the form of auto-ethnographic writing for the Invisibility Lab reports as they are written over Year 2.

COMFORT

JOY

AIR

 

New terms I’ve learned in this reading:

Public intellectual

Street academia

Public anthropology

Engaged anthropology

 

 

. . . . . . . . POSTED 15 JULY 2017 . . . . . . .

Dear Elena (et al)

I am sorry I do not have my reading diary ready yet.

A major flood happened in my studio a few days ago and I am overwhelmed trying to do everything I can to manage this disaster and get my place back in order before leaving for Berlin next week.

I promise I am reading the texts and am very excited to be in your workshop!

Will see you soon!

Gabrielle

 

 

 

 

GUIDELINES:

Briefly explain your understanding of the text(s), what problems they address, which questions they answer (and how) and which ones are left open.