Ethnography has been a leading method and product in the discipline of cultural and social anthropology, and to a lesser extent other social sciences. The current interdisciplinary interest in this field has grown due to feminist cultural analyses that have reformulated the concept of culture in tandem with post-structuralist, postcolonial, and queer-of-color critiques. The interventions of transnational, postcolonial and decolonial feminists, critical race studies, and queer scholarship, have argued that everyday processes of worldmaking cannot be understood as taking shape within self-contained cultural, discursive, and political economic formation. Building on this work, we create space for approaches that enable us to understand the heterogeneity of practices that coexist in any particular geopolitical location.
We see this approach to ethnography as invested in destabilizing a liberal politics of representation and US-centrist multiculturalism. By considering intellectual and social justice traditions associated with various interdisciplinary and disciplinary visions, anti-racist, feminist, and queer ethnographies construct existing but also possible worlds, all the while retaining an alternate “made” world. Our collaborative seeks to explore such radical epistemological and political alternatives.