Center for Experimental Ethnography

The Center for Experimental Ethnography was founded in 2018 to promote multi-modal research practices as integral forms of scholarly research.  We are a group of faculty across eight of Penn’s twelve schools who facilitate and support creative research practices among undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and our partners within the City of Philadelphia and beyond.  We coordinate scholarship, research, and public partnerships related to multi-modal work practices; consolidate those activities in which we (and our students) are already engaged; and grow these generative connections by hosting Visiting Fellows, coordinating workshops and conferences, supporting multi-modal project based courses, facilitating visual, sonic, and performative undergraduate and graduate research projects, producing rigorous criteria for assessing those projects, engaging with arts and community-based institutions throughout Philadelphia, and forging connections with other like-minded institutions worldwide.

We believe that multi-modal research practices transform how we conduct research, how we generate and disseminate knowledge, how we train students, and how we remain accountable to the communities in which we interact and through which our research circulates.  We see creative practice as intellectual work that necessarily historicizes the inequalities that pervade our society, and that develops interventions through collaborative and participatory work.  A basic premise that underlies our efforts is the contention that an expanded and multi-modal definition of what counts as scholarship will help lead to a more diverse university community, a community in which artistic practice is a cornerstone not only for engaged and participatory social justice work, but also for the reimagining and transformation of the university as a whole.  It is our mission to envision how we proactively reconfigure the kinds of students who enter our classrooms, the kinds of scholars who teach in them, the subject matter that is offered, and the very definition of what knowledge, scholarship, and intellectual productivity will mean moving forward.