The Writing with Light (WWL) curatorial-editorial collective is Craig Campbell, Vivian Choi, Lee Douglas, Alejandro Manuel Flores Aguilar, Arjun Shankar, and Mark Westmoreland.
In 2016, the WWL collective was organized to support the publication of photo essays for the website of the journal Cultural Anthropology. The scope of the project is fully described in the Archive section of this website, including links to the original fifteen photo essays we published.
We conceive our work as an expanded editorial-curatorial labor that supports and develops photo essays from ethnographers, photographers, and photographer-ethnographer collaborations.
In 2022, we are launching an editorial initiative that further explores how anthropologists and image-makers produce knowledge through photography. Writing with Light Magazine considers the intersections between photography, ethnography, and design as a potent arena for communicating ideas and experiences about social life. Inspired by the emergence of picture-driven magazines, like LIFE and Vu, that circulated in the 20th Century, the magazine considers not only the potency of sequenced images, but also of how words and text are arranged on the page.
Mark R. Westmoreland, Leiden University
My work engages with both scholarly and practice-based approaches to the documentary form, particularly at the interface between sensory embodiment and media aesthetics in on-going legacies of contentious politics. I have done extensive research on the way experimental documentary practices play a crucial role in addressing recurrent political violence in Lebanon and on the way independent filmmakers and activists reframed street politics to complicate reductive readings of the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt. I have also conducted research on the state of photographic collections across the region noting how institutional archival practices and private collecting delimit the social history of photography in the Middle East. More recently, I have cultivated several collaborations that explore the epistemological possibilities and productive tensions at the intersection between art, science, and politics. My teaching and research aspire to push anthropology and social research in general into more multimodal engagements that help reframe research as a generative, critical, and collaborative imperative for our times.
Arjun Shankar, Georgetown
I am a visual anthropologist and critical pedagogue interested in globalization, development, and urbanization; NGO labor; critical race and the politics of Indian diasporic racialization; and digital media circulation. I am also deeply invested in questions of university pedagogy, with a special focus on curiosity and student mental health.
My work is radically interdisciplinary, multimodal, and participatory. I believe that collaborating across disciplines, using mixed media methods (including photography, film, and sound), and working with communities opens opportunities to develop research insights which are ethically-grounded, theoretically rich, and applicable to real-world problems.
Alejandro M. Flores Aguilar, CSMCH-IASH Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow (2022)
Focusing on aesthetics, sensorial and visual anthropology in post-Cold War Guatemala I obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. I also hold a diplom Soziologue degree, focused in cultural sociology of alterity, from the Freie Universität Berlin. I specialize in studies of race and racism, visual ethnography, collaborative, decolonial methods and the reconstruction of memories of resistance within contexts of indigenous postcolonial struggles. My current project aims at producing multimedia knowledge, building upon memorial repertoires of Maya-Ixil former guerrillas, from the northwestern highlands of Guatemala. This project builds upon transdisciplinary research in collaboration with the Universidad Ixil and the Ixil Ancestral Authorities (Alcaldía Indígena de Nebaj). This project has received the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ethnographic Film, for the fieldwork period between 2020 and 2021. Currently, I’m editing and expect to produce a seven-episode documentary series about life stories of former indigenous guerrillas. I am an affiliated researcher at the Anthropology Department at the University of Texas at Austin and most recently a visiting postdoctoral fellow in modern and contemporary history (IASH-CSMCH) at the University of Edinburgh. Some times I teach history of race and racism at the Universidad Ixil, other times I teach on anthropological theory and contemporary philosophy of violence in universities at Guatemala, Mexico and the United States, and currently I am pleased to teach a course about visual ethnography, at the Universidad Rafael Landívar.
Lee Douglas, IHC-NOVA
I am a visual anthropologist, curator and filmmaker who is currently a Marie Skłowdowska Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC) at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Combining scholarly research with visual production and curatorial initiatives, I examine how the past is reconstructed and the future reimagined through engagements with the remnants of political violence and social change in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.
Vivian Choi, Saint Olaf College
My research focuses on the political, environmental, and technological dimensions of disasters. My current book project, entitled Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka, examines the intersections of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the decades-long civil war which ended in 2009 in Sri Lanka. I am currently developing a new project on climate change and sea surface warming – a slow-moving disaster – in the Indian Ocean. I am also affiliate faculty in Race and Ethnic Studies and Environmental Studies.
I received my B.A. in Anthropology (with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies) from Pomona College. I received my M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology (with a designated emphasis in Social Theory and Comparative History) from the University of California, Davis.
Craig Campbell, University of Texas at Austin
I am fascinated with the way that making things, curating exhibitions, and organizing workshops end up being social devices that complicate and enhance thought. My work is committed to experimenting with and theorizing modes of description and evocation of and through ordinary life. Current projects include the cultural history of an unbuilt hydro-electric dam in Central Siberia, the weird time of a shadow, carceral edgelands of immigrant detention in Texas, the stake of greetings in a time of climate catastrophe, and the aesthetics of damaged, degraded, and manipulated photographs.