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Paper short abstract:

Making sense of traveling biotechnologies and the assemblages to which they belong requires ethnographers to locate themselves beyond positionality, and to ask: what would it mean to consider that there is no wrong turn in one’s ethnographic encounters?

Paper long abstract:

Particular conflations occur for Southern anthropologists trained elsewhere who come to research “home.” First, the assumption that one understands home for what it is. Secondly, the illusion that one shall be openly accepted into the community, and hence entitled to the data and the stories that shall make them a credible ethnographer. In searching for the “ethnographic” moment, the paper inquires about how much data is lost when not valued as good enough. It aims to explore disappointment during fieldwork and its punctuated punctuality as a necessary marker for interrogating how anthropologists may grapple with sense-making. It takes the example of searching for future smart hospitals in Morocco and follows through an inquiry into what would it mean to consider that there is no wrong turn in one’s ethnographic encounters.

In order to make sense of traveling biotechnologies and the assemblages to which they belong, ethnographers ought to locate themselves beyond positionality. The paper argues for the potentiality of getting rid of disappointment by assembling the multiple elsewheres, and centers to which one belongs and doesn’t belong, and the role they play in giving sense to researched matter and sensorial experiences. First, by re-centering and re-evaluating old(er) and silenced questions that paved the way for one’s initial curiosity. Second, by engaging in attentive listening to interactions about how one is located in the world and the particular histories encountered through bodily correspondences, especially for individuals labeled as coming from places of “non-thought.”

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This paper reflects on the analytical purchase afforded by an assemblage thinking to unpack processes that converge into the making of a policy assemblage that is structured by "global" norms and imaginaries while also remaining entangled within political ambitions and desires of a "local" context.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing upon my research on Pakistan's Benazir Income Support Program (BISP), I reflect on the importance of an assemblage thinking that allows to capture contingent relationalities and variegated rationalities that come together to (re)constitute what can be called a national variation of a global socio-economic inclusion assemblage. In arrogating itself the tasks of reducing poverty and empowering women, the program provides cash grants to over five million poor households across the country. Since its inception in 2008, the program has sought support and approval from power global institutions (such as World Bank) shaping its critical procedures to enhance objectivity and transparency and claiming to learn from, and contributing to, an emerging repertoire of socalled best practices of social protection. But it isn't shaped just by elite rationalities - that might be traced to the elite policy makers in the national capital or global metropoles - its everyday practices are, in much more consequential ways, structured by the very local concerns, ambitions, desires, hopes and frustrations. Today, it works through human and non-human (im)mediations and entanglements that enlist beneficiaries, state officials, Point of Sale retailers, biometric devices, national database registration authority (NADRA), electricity and internet supplies, access to banking systems, software patching, hardware changes, lotions, peeled potatoes, sweat, dirt, queues and long waiting hours, and a general maintenance of bodily cleaning and washing regimes.

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Drawing on my work on Public-Private-Partnerships in Ethiopia, I introduce ‘viral assemblage’ as an analytical and therapeutic concept. The concept of viral assemblage allows us to recognize and make sense of the affective and largely unpredictable nature of anthropological practice.

Paper long abstract:

A growing number of anthropologists approach anthropology and its methods through the lens of assemblage thinking. For example, Jarrett Zigon has suggested “assemblic ethnography” as a method of tracing situations across different global scales, particularly highlighting the method’s unpredictability. In this paper, I draw on my work on Public-Private-Partnerships in Ethiopia to introduce ‘viral assemblage’ – not as a an alternative to Zigon’s assemblic ethnography – but as an analytical and therapeutic concept that allows us to recognize and make sense of the affective and largely unpredictable nature of anthropological practice. By looking at anthropology as a viral assemblage, we acknowledge that our work as anthropologists—just as life itself—is a disordered endeavor: a result of unpredictable and affective moments where human and non-human actors, things, ideas, and memories are brought together in shifting relational arrangements. Approaching anthropology as viral assemblage also implies a recognition of how our personal histories and background determines what we pick up from a situation or an interview, and the lines or stories we end up following and tracing. Similar to a virus, we tend to embrace the ideas and the “things” to which we are already receptive to, which we recognize and, hence, to which we can easily relate. While our virus-like tendencies should compel us to carefully examine our potential biases and blind-spots, our inclination to pick up things that are familiar to us and to which we can relate, can also be a resource for the discovery of hidden and unexpected relations.

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Through its methodological and theoretical tools, assemblage helps to reveal that activists’ understandings of intersectionality are constantly (re)made by affects, experiences and shifting relations with each other, theories, practices, discourses, institutions, time and spaces.

Paper long abstract:

In my work with activists engaged in various struggles in Flanders (Belgium), the field, topics, scope and limits of the research are highly dependent on the constantly evolving relations between all agents and elements involved – from individual activists and organisations, to broader discourses and political dynamics, to time and space themselves. How these relations play out and interact impacts what is in- and excluded, what becomes visible and is invisibilised in this research. By bringing activists together to discuss what intersectionality means to them in and for their activist practices, I am actively assembling ‘intersectionality in activism’ as both research field and subject. Starting out from one existing relationship, I step by step invite people to become part of the knowledge production process through different modes and temporalities of involvement.

Because of the essential role of constantly shifting relations between heterogenous elements, I turn to assemblage theory to describe and make sense not only of the content but also of my methodological approach. Assemblage ethnography allows me to partially free myself of pre-defined and imposed frames of geographical and organisational boundaries and instead organically follow the relationships and affects (intimate (Weiss 2020) as well as conflictual) that shape understandings of intersectionality in Flemish activism. Through both its methodological and theoretical tools, assemblage helps to reveal that activists’ understandings of intersectionality do not simply ‘travel’ from one place to another but are constantly (re)made by affects, experiences and shifting relations with each other, theories, practices, discourses, institutions, time and spaces.

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Using Manuel De Landa's perspective, this paper underscores that assemblage, as an idea, extends beyond a conceptual tool or even a theoretical abstraction; the concept, mirroring the nature of what it indicates, blurs the distinction between the theoretical and the conceptual within its framework.

Paper long abstract:

Using Manuel De Landa's perspective, this paper argues that assemblage transcends conventional academic boundaries, offering a unique lens to comprehend the interplay of social, biological, cultural, historical, political, and economic elements in forming tangible assemblages. In rejecting essentialism, assemblage theory emphasizes the empirical study of the processes leading to the emergence of actual assemblages. The paper underscores that assemblage, as an idea, extends beyond a conceptual tool or even a theoretical abstraction; the concept, mirroring the nature of what it indicates, blurs the distinction between the theoretical and the conceptual within its framework.

Working from this notion implicates a fundamental shift in how we perceive the world. This perspective challenges the traditional view of entities as closed, clearly delimited objects with inherent properties. In this framework, entities are not static or unchanging but dynamic and continually evolving. It redefines them as processes, becomings, or materializations. Humans and non-humans are a constant flux of mattering and disrupting.

We introduce the example of creating plus-size clothing as an assemblage, which shifts the focus from basic questions about the nature and manufacture of clothes to a more intricate inquiry: How does plus-size clothing work? This approach leads us to view clothing not as a static entity but as an ongoing process of stabilization and destabilization. Through our example, we show that assemblage is not merely a method but a way of understanding bodies in their entanglement with human and non-human elements.

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This presentation draws distinctions between multi-sited ethnography and assemblage ethnography by highlighting the potential of assemblage thinking for highlighting temporal relationships that often link people, species, and environments across time and space.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores assemblage thinking as a novel strategy for analyzing multispecies relationships. Anthropologists increasingly draw on assemblage ethnography to examine human relationships with non-human species at varying scales and between distinct sites and, in many ways, the utility of assemblage ethnography in making sense of relationships that shift across space blurs the methodological lines with multi-sited ethnography. In my presentation, I explore how assemblage ethnography diverges from multi-sited ethnography in its attention to temporal as well as spatial relationships. This, I argue, is particularly useful when examining multispecies relationships that respond to seasonal changes and cycles of life and death. To make my point about the spatio-temporality of assemblage thinking, I draw on my research with an endangered medicinal tree called quina (Cinchona officinalis) in Loja, Ecuador. I use assemblage thinking to understand how quina is implicated in two historic health crises—the emergence of malaria in the 1700s and the recent COVID-19 pandemic—and the consequences of these events for the ways that people interact with and generate knowledge about the plant today. Engagements between people and quina today do not occur in a vacuum; They are informed by past attempts to define, speak for, and control nature for medicinal, political, and economic purposes. By highlighting relational patterns across space and time, assemblage thinking can be useful for better understanding why people and quina came together so violently during the COVID-19 pandemic and how these relations are part of a longer history of multispecies relating.

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How useful is the assemblage concept for multispecies ethnography? Based on three empirical case studies on multispecies relations in a transnational conservation landscape in southern Africa, this contribution discusses the assemblage as a framework for anthropological analysis and methods.

Paper long abstract:

How useful is the assemblage concept for anthropological studies of multispecies relations? What are its analytical and methodological implications? This contribution first situates “the multispecies assemblage” within the theoretical legacy of Deleuze and Guattari. Then, based on three case studies of multispecies assemblages in one of the world’s largest transboundary conservation area, the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area in southern Africa, we highlight how we use the assemblage in our empirical research and what implications does it have for our analysis and methodological choices. Overall, we show that the assemblage concept provides an open-ended analytical and methodological framework in terms of spaces, actors and times. These three trajectories take multispecies research to be multi-sited rather than site-bound, not only following heterogeneous nonhuman things and beings, but also highlighting their active roles and their transforming relations across space as well as history.

Our three case studies highlight how values, policies and landscapes emerge in complex assemblages, including through power asymmetries involving humans and nonhumans. We conclude that the assemblage represents a chance for multispecies ethnographers to conduct analyses at wider scales, without losing a local anchorage, and without glossing over political and socio-economic inequalities. It provides an inductive and context-sensitive approach designed to account for the dynamisms of phenomena that are essentially impossible to comprehend and delineate in a clear-cut manner, in a world of complex local-global and more-than-human entanglements.

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Reflecting on the production of sound collages of the 2023-24 War on Gaza, as experienced in Amman, Jordan, this paper considers assemblages through examining events where they materialize and their effects (Bennett 2010) and eventfulness (Strassler 2020) become sensible.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores assemblage thinking through reflecting on sound collages that emerged in response to the 2023-24 War on Gaza. It examines the processes of mixing these collages in/from Amman, Jordan — a city characterized by transitions and junctures — and the multiple elements contributing to their formation. These include personal and collective commitments, fractured connections to place, regional and global power structures, online platforms and technologies, and the sensory and embodied. In addition, it asks how the effects of this assemblage of elements become materially sensible (Bennett 2010), and their “eventfulness" produced (Strassler 2020).

Presented at in-person listening sessions and broadcasted on online radios, sound collages blend an array of materials that index the present while invoking a longer history. They incorporate sounds recognizable within their social milieu: drones and bombs; voices from Gazans under fire, lawyers, and protests; iconic speeches of Palestinian leaders and resistance songs. Filtered through artists’ experience, diverse platforms, and processes of composition and sound design, these collages function as a means of bearing witness, articulating their view of the world “at the time of genocide,” and curating sound experiences that (re)contextualize these sounds and associations.

This case establishes a foundation for a broader reflection on assemblage ethnography. After summarizing the range of elements converging, here, it will suggest a conceptual framework for understanding how these assemblages materialize around specific events and moments, and argue for an appreciation of online and in-person domains not merely as intersecting but as inextricably linked.

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This paper uses the notion of assemblage to describe the urban frontiers of Kolkata city. By exploring the multiplicity, fluidity, and unpredictability of assemblages in an urban settlement, it examines how social phenomena assemble, collide, and disperse across timespaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how rural populations that have migrated to an Indian city manage to negotiate a space in the urban frontier where two distinct, yet interdependent, neighbourhoods coexist. It uses the findings of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among migrants (2018-2021) who are provisionally settled on governmental lands at the new urbanization. The paper chronicles how the two groups—new middle class and settlers—traverse and shape each other’s lives to form the urban edges. It examines how boundaries are produced between these two neighbourhoods despite the fact that both settler and middle-class families depend on each other for employment and a labour force, respectively. The article contributes to the debates on how we understand the frontier of cities, using the notion of “assemblages” and suggesting that they are unstable and uneven in terms of power but vibrant with rupture and the possibility of new “assemblages”.

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How might one study preventive healthcare in a welfare state like Denmark's ethnographically? In this paper, I reflect on how the fine-grained and intimate strengths of ethnography can be reoriented to grasp social formations as these traverse sites, scales and temporalities.

Paper long abstract:

How might one study preventive healthcare in a welfare state like Denmark's ethnographically? In this paper, I reflect on how the fine-grained and intimate strengths of ‘being there’ ethnography can be reoriented in attempts to grasp social formations as these traverse sites, scales and temporalities. In recent decades, a preventive healthcare complex as taken form in Denmark aimed at averting the occurrence of disease through the (ever) expanding segmentation of the population into differentiated ‘at risk’ groups with attendant routinization of pre-emptive actions and/or augmented vigilance trajectories. By zooming in on one form of genetic prevention – lifelong medical surveillance of people living with Lynch syndrome – I show how site-multiplied assemblage ethnographies can help us locate the intimate experiences of those who have been identified ‘at risk’ within the broader socio-historical formations that inevitably shape such experiences in profound ways.