Blog | Ethnography

This blog post aims to reflect on the ways in which the decolonization of knowledge can be actively pursued through the co-production of research. It focuses on examples from the author’s own research activities in the field of cultural anthropology in a historically marginalized district of Dakar (Senegal). The blog post also discusses the challenges posed by research co-production in terms of methodological issues of validity and legitimacy, as well as challenges that endangered the field research (e. g., power relations among the research participants, the tendency to gain individual control over the project, gender biases that implicitly shape the design and implementation process).

This blog article explores the elusive materiality of the Yellow Sand phenomenon: The sandy dust that originates in the Gobi Desert and travels above all of Asia, carrying hazardous components. What does it mean to ethnographically research something barely visible? What happens if we take Yellow Sand’s materiality seriously? How do we write about a phenomenon with no clear spatial or temporal boundaries? Here, CRC 1265 researcher Margherita Tess reflects on ethnography's communicative possibilities for dealing with hyper-objects, the atmospheric, and the refiguration of spaces in the Capitalo-Anthropocene.