Show Notes
In this very first episode of AoA, we speak with Kregg Hetherington about his project on “ghost rivers” in Montreal, Canada. Kregg is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, where he specialises in environment, infrastructure and the bureaucratic state. He is the author of the multi-award-winning 2020 book, The Government of Beans, based on his long-term fieldwork on soybeans in Paraguay, as well as Guerrilla Auditors, an ethnography of land struggles in Paraguay.
As you’ll hear, Kregg’s current work continues to engage with the more-than-human world - this time with rivers, even ones that sometimes cannot be seen any more. Kregg directs the Concordia Ethnography Lab, where he runs a collaborative project called Emergent Waters which aims to understand Montreal’s changing relationship with water as a defining feature of its environment and infrastructure.
In this conversation, Kregg and I begin by discussing his current work, and the possibilities and limitations of thinking of rivers - and other nonhumans - as “kin” or “persons”. We also talk about the methodological and pedagogical approach Kregg calls “composite ethnography”, as well as STS (science and technology studies), and how the particular qualities of water make it a different kind of ethnographic object compared to land.
Links Kregg Hetherington (@krether) / Twitter Home - Concordia Ethnography Lab (ethnographylabconcordia.ca)
More from Anthropology on Air
In this episode, we speak with Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Katy Overstreet. Katy is coordinator for the Landscapes, Senses, and Ecological Research Cluster as well as a core-member of the Centre for Sustainable Futures – both located at the University of Copenhagen. Katy’s core fields of research include multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, feminist STS, and agrarian political economy, and she has written on themes such as farm animal welfare, foodways, bioindustrialisation, technoscience, trans-species sensory worlds, and care.
In today’s episode, we talk to Tom Bratrud about his ongoing, long-term work with city-dwellers who migrate to rural parts of Norway. This research forms the basis of Tom’s forthcoming book project, which has the working title Rurality 2.0: Redefining Urban-Rural Divides in the Mountains of Norway.
In this episode, we speak with Alessandro Rippa about amber – a fossilised resin that not only allow us a glimpse into prehistoric lifeforms and climatic conditions millions of years ago but also works as an entry point into understanding current political, scientific, and commercial frictions.
In this episode, we are in company with Hans Lucht to talk about ethnographic poetry. Hans is a senior researcher, and the head of migration research at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen. He has worked with migration for 20 years, with a special focus on undocumented labour-related migration from West Africa to Europe. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Ghana, Niger, Libya, Italy, and Greece, and his prize-winning monograph ‘Darkness before Daybreak’ chronicles the lives of a group of migrants who travels from Ghana to Italy in search of work. Apart from his numerous academic contributions of articles and policy reports, Lucht is a writer, and poet, I should say. He has published two novels titled Onko-Mus and Lysene på den anden side and two collections of poems, all in his mother-tongue Danish. The first poetry collection, called Feltarbejde (Fieldwork) from 2022 is a poetic reflection on both the experiences of his interlocutors and the experience as a fieldworker. The second, Vores liv ryster (Our lives are shaking), came out in 2024 and consists of what Hans has called documentary poems. This means that all text of the poems is direct quotes from conversations and interviews with his interlocutors that Hans has then curated by following a few self-imposed dogmas. In today’s episode, Hans will read out loud five poems from this collection, all titled with a name of the one speaking and where the conversation took place. In between the readings, we ask Hans about what impressions inspired the poems, the dynamic of working between anthropology and art, and how each domain can inform and expand the insights of the other. We discuss the concept of ‘existential reciprocity’ in relation to his work, and how doing fieldwork engenders impressions and transformations that exceed academic analysis and extend into the lives of both interlocutors and fieldworkers. Resources: - Hans Lucht’s academic profile - Feltarbejde (2022) - Vores liv ryster (2024)
Welcome to a special two-episode series of Anthropology on Air!