Slow Ethnography is a methodological response to Isabelle Stenger’s call for the “slowing down” of critical theory (2005: 994). This approach reappraises the territory of ethnographic fieldwork in terms of the potentialities and foreclosures of an “otherwise” (Povinelli 2014): other relations, other material arrangements, other worlds and wordings. In other words, a slow ethnography considers a present set of relations as one particular unfolding within “a commodious field” (James qtd in Povinelli 2016, 139) of other possible realities, and allows these latencies to slow down one’s inclination to diagnose and predict the outcome of an ethnographic problem. Slow ethnography partakes in the activities of speculation and experimentation, disruption, play, worldbuilding, unmapping and remapping one’s conceptual and physical terrain to be responsive to the half-thought, the intimated, or the unfulfilled. Slow ethnography can be thought as an umbrella term for a number of different methodological experimentations with slowing down, including slow fieldwork and slow description.
The Water Chronicles
By Tricia Toso
"Is it cynical or naive, or perhaps ironic (?) to discuss the impending apocalypse of climate change, while hydrating from bottled water?"
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The Water Moves Too Quickly
By Garrett Lockhart
"We can see all the water now, it is too lively"
You and Us Silent Beings
By Ségolène Guinard
"They told me about the time before the great fires. Before everything became ashes..."
Visiting the Canadian Malartic Goldmine
By June Pham
"The difference between my 2, 3 hour-visit and life of those people who are constantly exposed to the mine’s activities, needless to say, is incomparable. Apparently, there are a number of measures implemented to reduce noise as well as dust generated from the mine’ daily operations. Still, I cannot help but questioning the extent to which the company is committed not only to the environment but also to the local community."
