Center for Experimental Ethnography

CEE Scholar Saya Woolfalk — 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.

Ernesto Pujol's course — 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.

Amitav Ghosh's — 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.

CEE Equipment — An ample collection of free professional film, audio, and photography loans and consultations.

CEE Fall Scholar

Guthrie Ramsey

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a music historian, pianist, composer, and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.

A widely-published writer, he’s the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003), and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop (2013).

As a producer, label head, and leader of the band Dr. Guy’s Musiqology, Dr. Ramsey has released five recording projects and has performed at venues such as The Blue Note and Harlem Stage in New York, and the Annenberg Theater of the Performing Arts and Chris’ Jazz Café in Philadelphia, and other venues worldwide.

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.

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Seeing is Believing: The American Music Documentary

ANTH 6676 · Guy Ramsey

This course surveys the American music bio-pic and documentary, spanning subjects from the Jazz Era of the 1920s to the contemporary moment. The British musicologist Christopher Small wrote a fundamental question guiding the work of music studies scholars: “Why are these people making this music at this time in this place?” This course considers the various ways that filmmakers have attempted to answer this question.

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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.

Address

3260 South Street, Penn Museum, Room 438
Philadelphia, PA 19104

CEE

“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

2026-2027: Hear (Here)

The CEE’s 2026-2027 theme, “Hear (Here),” is meant to draw our attention to the ways we bear witness to our histories, our presents, and our connections through the realm of the sonic. Whether through music, chanting, testimony, or poetry, we are touched by the sonic frequencies we absorb. Their power pulsates through us and becomes atmospheric. What we hear both creates and unsettles the limitations of the here and now, while also bringing into our consciousness those intangible vibrations that can push us into new relations.

Our fellows this year will take our theme in different directions, and we will also offer monthly programming – in collaboration with partners at Penn and beyond – that explores the sonic resonances of pan-solidarities. Hear! Here!

Explore the Center for Experimental Ethnography