The premise of the course is that through close, creative, and organized attention – to images, objects, and texts – students will develop new capacities in scholarly and creative expression. Participants in this combined reading, viewing, and writing workshop encounter distinctive, mostly contemporary, books and films in a range of forms and genres. Engaging intensely with these works, they explore practices of narration, affect, and experience, working across and between expressive forms in relation to their own ongoing and emergent projects. All students are expected to enter the class with an archive of field documentation (written and/or visual and/or audio notes) from which to develop their work and with some familiarity of contemporary ethnography broadly-conceived. They will draw on this archive to produce weekly writing and/or image or sound work to share with the group. Students who enter the class with an in-progress film, photography, or audio project will be able to develop and share this work in the context of the course. Permission of instructor required prior to registration.