Center for Experimental Ethnography
Hosting multiple visiting fellows and scholars from Philly and around the globe each year, such as Saya Woolfalk (pictured above), Gabrielle Goliath, Louis Massiah, and others.
Courses engage students in multimodal research arts across sound, film, performance, and more, such as Ernesto Pujol’s course “An Ethnography of Vulnerability”, which culminated in a field trip to San Juan, The Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, and queer farming collectives.
Events, workshops, and public programs featuring local and global artist-scholars, such as the English-language premiere of Amitav Ghosh’s “Jungle-nama”, scored by Ali Sethi and performed by Penn students under the direction of Brooke O’Harra.
CEE Graduate certificate students from the first graduating class, including Tali Ziv, Leniqueca Welcome, Juan Castrillon, and Jasmine Blanks.
An ample collection of free professional film, audio, and photography loans and consultations.
CEE Spring Scholars
Gabrielle Goliath
South African artist – Venice Biennale 2024 – Tate Modern Collection
Best known for her long-standing series of performance works Elegy (2015–ongoing), conceived as collective ritual mourning in response to the prevalence of gender-based violence in South Africa. Her immersive, multimedia works convene relational encounters within what she calls
the “radical familiar.”
Daniel Tucker
Curator – Author of “Lastgaspism” (Hyperallergic Best Art Book 2022)
An arts leader who helps artists, activists, and organizations create impactful work. He chairs the international Arts in Society Research Network and organizes the ongoing Eco-Social Salon, Site-Seeing, and Screening Series in Philadelphia.
Featured Courses
A Radical Familiar
ANTH 3670 | 6670 · Deborah Thomas
A critical rethinking of representation and the role of aesthetics in formulating a global racial-sexual order
through radical, Black, decolonial, feminist, and queer theory. CEE Spring Scholar Gabrielle Goliath will provide
studio sessions and in-depth critical responses for students in the class.
Grassroots Archiving & Curating Engagement
ANTH 3672 | 6672 · Daniel Tucker
Hands-on grassroots archiving grounded in oral histories with Philadelphia artists and administrators. Students
collaborate to conduct interviews, exploring how Philadelphia’s arts landscape has changed over time and what
major events and spaces have shaped community. The course responds to calls to radically rethink museum
exhibition practices and institutional legacies, forging a new hybrid practice where curators, educators,
archivists, and artists work across sectors.
The Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE) is a hub for faculty and students across Penn’s twelve schools who have a creative practice at the root of their research process. At the CEE, we recognize that knowledge production is participatory, embodied, and social. We know that the space of the 21st century university must extend beyond its walls and beyond books and labs. And we understand that sometimes the most transformative experiences come through an encounter with a film, a performance, a poem, or a soundscape. The Center for Experimental Ethnography is committed to supporting these forms of knowledge production by promoting ethical, engaged, and experimental multi-modal research that is generated ethnographically.
“Multi-modal research is the academy’s inevitable future, and the CEE aims to advance that future by centering participatory learning, experimental practice, creative collaboration and social justice.”
Deborah A. Thomas
Director, CEE – R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology
2025-2026: Year of Curating Presence
This year’s CEE theme explores what it means to be truly present—in our research communities,
in our partnerships with Philadelphia, and in the spaces where creative practice meets scholarly
inquiry. From the Pedagogies of Presence symposium to our Third Thursday gatherings, we ask
how sustained, authentic engagement transforms both the university and the communities it
serves.
Through our fellows’ courses, public screenings, the CAMRA Screening Scholarship Media Festival,
and ongoing community collaborations, CEE cultivates the conditions for presence: slowing down,
showing up, and making space for encounters that change us.
Explore CEE
A multi-site exhibition exploring transnational care and kinship across the African diaspora at the Penn Museum.
Free film, photography, and audio equipment for any Penn student, faculty, or PennCard holder.
