Craig Campbell (Anthropology dept. 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. Current points of focus include the carceral edgelands of immigrant detention in Texas, the stake of greetings in a time of climate catastrophe, Indigenous erasure in West Texas, and the aesthetics of damaged, degraded, and manipulated photographs. I am a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia curatorial collective and Writing with Light Magazine. I am also one of the directors of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography.


Vivian Y. Choi teaches anthropology at St. Olaf College, where she is affiliate faculty in Environmental Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies. Her research focuses on the experiences, representations, and temporalities of disasters. Her research in Sri Lanka focused on the militarized intersections of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the decades long civil war. Her current project focuses on the ecological crises of the Indian Ocean – the fastest warming ocean basin in the world. Vivian is a founding member of the Writing with Light curatorial collective. She is also secretary of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).

Lee Douglas is London-based anthropologist, image-maker, and curator. She is a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the MA in Visual Anthropology. Broadly speaking, her work analyzes how the past is reconstructed and the future reimagined through collective and individual engagements with the traces of political violence, displacement, and decolonization in Spain, Portugal, and the Iberian Atlantic. Most recently, she has turned her attention to the ecological crisis, forest imaginaries, and the social and political lives of Eucalyptus plantations. She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Visual Anthropology Review, a member of the curatorial collective Writing with Light, and a working group leader for the TRACTS network. www.leedouglas.net

Arjun Shankar is an Assistant Professor, Georgetown University. Dr. Shankar is an anthropologist, critical pedagogue, and mediamaker whose work falls into three broad areas. First, he is concerned with the politics of help and its role in upholding systems of racial capitalism. In his current book project, Brown Saviors and their Others, he takes India's burgeoning help economy, specifically the education NGO sector, as a site from which to interrogate these ideas. He shows how colonial, racial, and caste formations undergird how transnational and digitized NGO work is done in India today. Second, he is a visual anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker who has been interested in developing decolonial, participatory visual methodologies.


Alejandro M. Flores Aguilar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Komon Sajbichil project at the University of Edinburgh and teaches community-engaged research methods at Ixil University. He earned his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on visual ethnographic studies concerning the aftermath of the Cold War in the Maya-Ixil region. Currently, he is developing a film and a book related to this topic. His ongoing project endeavors to create multimodal cartographic representations of the Ixil region during the second half of the 20th century, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, Ixil University, and Ancestral Authorities. He has an extensive publication record, has co-edited four books, and has produced a community book on memory and indigenous resistance.

Mark R. Westmoreland is an anthropologist at Leiden University whose work engages both scholarly and practice-based approaches at the intersection between art, ethnography, and politics. His research has explored how experimental documentary practices address ongoing legacies of political violence in Lebanon and how video activists enacted modes of resistance-by-recording in Egypt. He is currently developing a new multimodal, multi-sited, and collaborative research agenda that attends to broken landscapes. He previously served as co-editor of Visual Anthropology Review and recently co-launched ReCNTR, a collaborative and interdisciplinary center that serves as a rigorous space for sharing and producing practice-based and multimodal research.

Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California and Director of the Ethnography Studio. Her book A Future History of Water (Duke 2019), examines how people create distinctions in a world of never-ending bifurcations between water as a human right and water as a commodity. She is co-editor of Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis and is currently writing a book that explores cultural imaginaries of the underground as a new planetary frontier. Her works can be found at www.andreaballestero.com

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is an anthropologist based at the University of Victoria. She has conducted fieldwork in Cuba since the year 2000. Her research interests include sound, images, infrastructure, and imagination. In 2020, she published Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops, an illustrated book compiling five ethno-fiction stories about the sky in Cuba. She co-directed the films La Tumba Mambi (2023) and Guardians of the Night (2018), both entirely shot and produced in Eastern Cuba. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Anthropologica.

Ariel Caine is a Jerusalem-born artist and researcher. His practice centers on the intersection of spatial (three-dimensional) photography, modelling, and survey technologies, and their operation within the production of cultural memories and national narratives. Ariel is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin, undertaking his project “Architectures of the Sensed: Models as Augmented Sites for Resistance”. He received his PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London where from 2016–21 he was a project coordinator and researcher at the Forensic Architecture Agency. In 2021–22 he received a postdoctoral research grant from Gerda Henkel Stiftung as part of the speculative cameras and post-visual security projects at Tampere University (Finland).

Katherine Chandler is an associate professor in Culture and Politics at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Her research addresses intersections between technology, media, gender, race and nation in transnational contexts. She is the author of Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers, 2020). Find out more on her website, www.katherinechandler.net/


Rui Gomes Coelho is a historical archaeologist working on colonialism, decolonisation, conflict and resistance in Southern Europe and in the Atlantic World, and committed to the ongoing struggle to decolonise the discipline. They studied History and Archaeology at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, where Itheyobtained my BA (2005) and MA (2010), and later completed a PhD in Anthropology at Binghamton University (2017). They joined the Department of Archaeology as an Assistant Professor in Historical Archaeology in the summer of 2020, after having lived in Portugal, Brazil and the United States for several years.

Grayson Cooke was born in New Zealand and is based in Australia, and is an interdisciplinary scholar and media artist. Grayson has exhibited and performed at major galleries and festivals internationally including the Japan Media Arts Festival, WRO Media Art Biennale and Imagine Science Film Festival in New York, and he has published widely in scholarly journals. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD from Concordia University in Montreal. www.graysoncooke.com.

Filip De Boeck, a  Professor of Anthropology at the University of Leuven, writer, film-maker and curator, has conducted extensive field research in both rural and urban communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Co-authored with visual artist Sammy Baloji, his most recent book is  Suturing the City. Living Together in Congo's Urban Worlds (Autograph ABP 2016).  

Gerco de Ruijter is a Rotterdam-based visual artist working in the field of photography and film. In the late 1980s, he started using kites, balloons, and fishing poles to create images of situations far removed from our own vantage point. Since 2012, he has been mining Google Earth as a source, resulting in films like CROPS (2012) and Playground (2014). His art explores how far the presentation of a landscape can be reduced and yet still remain recognisable. He studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, graduating with honours in 1993. Gerco’s work is featured in several important private and public collections.

Eric Higgs is a Professor in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria and director of the Mountain Legacy Project. He is the author of Nature By Design, co-author of Mapper of Mountains, and co-editor of Novel Ecosystems.


Institute for Cartopology team members:
Marlies Vermeulen (Tielt B, 1986) has a background in architecture and works within Dear Hunter as a cartopologist. This means representing the everyday reality of our spatial environment by stretching existing spatial notation systems and applying anthropological methods. Besides her role within Dear Hunter, she also teaches at various universities and colleges, and is working on a PhD, a 'Cotutelle agreement' between FH Aachen, Maastricht University and Zuyd University of Applied Sciences. She recently started the Institute of Cartopology (www.cartopology.institute) to question, substantiate and share cartopology with a wider audience.
Remy Kroese (Heerlen NL, 1981) is educated as a fine arts teacher, interior architect and architect and worked for various architecture and design firms before founding Dear Hunter with Marlies Vermeulen in 2014. Besides, he teaches Research at the Maastricht Architecture Academy and the FH Aachen University. He has published several articles on Archined, platform for architecture and design, and is a guest lecturer/juror at several colleges and universities in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

Suzanne Dekker (The Hague NL, 1993) studied Interdisciplinary Arts at Hogeschool Zuyd and social and political philosophy at Radboud University. This combination makes her feel at home in various settings, both in research and reflection on political systems and in hands-on project management and strategic concept development. She has been working at Dear Hunter since 2015 based on her interest in everyday environments and what they tell us about social developments (and vice versa). Until recently, she worked at HAN University of Applied Sciences where she researched urban mobility transition.

Sarah Jacobs is a cultural anthropologist and Mitacs postdoctoral fellow in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on science, technology, sport, mountaineering and colonialism (for more details, visit www.sarah-jacobs.com). She is currently working with the Stoney Nakoda Nations using archival and repeat photography to support traditional knowledge, engage youth and reimagine how images can be archived.

Hagit Keysar is a researcher and activist, working and teaching in the fields of science and technology studies, critical data studies and digital urbanism. Her research and creative work concern the politics of data and digitization and the political potentials of community-driven science and technology for articulating rights in situations of conflict and colonisation. She has recently been a research fellow at the Weizenbaum institute for the Internet society, Berlin (2019), a postdoc fellow of the Minerva Stiftung (2019-2021) in Berlin’s Natural History Museum and she is currently a postdoc at the Minerva center for Human Rights at the Tel Aviv University.

Hillary Mushkin is an artist and a research professor of art and design at the California Institute of Technology. Mushkin’s art and research are focused on the limits and power of human and technological observation. She is the founder of Incendiary Traces, an art-and-research initiative to collaboratively reverse-engineer the politics of landscape visualization. She is also co-founder of Data to Discovery, a data visualization, art, and design group based at NASA/JPL, Caltech, and Art Center College of Design that engages co-design and visual practices to influence the production of scientific knowledge.

Sohei Nishino. (b. 1982) produces works based on his personal experiences obtained through walking and travel. His works are shown in major Museums and Festivals around the world including "A Different Kind of Order" at the Triennale of the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). He was selected as the Foam Talent 2013, Prix Pictet Space shortlist in 2017 and winner for MAST Foundation for photography award 2018.

Nii Obodai works with photography as a medium for recording and celebrating the unseen and the everyday in Africa. Working primarily with black and white photography, his work encompasses portraiture and ethereal landscapes. His deep interest in how the past is remembered stems in part from aphantasia, a condition that prevents him from forming images in his mind. He is the founder of Nuku Studio and the Nuku Photo Festival, Ghana’s first photography festival. His work has been exhibited in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark, the Addis Ababa Festival in Ethiopia, and elsewhere.

Toma Peiu is a scholar, writer and media artist who works at the intersection of anthropology, media & technology studies and the documentary arts. He has done oral history and documentary work with migrant people in New York, the Aral Sea basin, Western and Eastern Europe. His doctoral research in Critical Media Practices (CU Boulder) looks at contemporary imaginaries of migration from Central Eurasia. He is a member of the visual anthropology research group "Foraging at the Edges of Capitalism" at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, and an affiliate of the Melikian Center at ASU.

Demián Rabilero is a poet, a producer, a graphic designer, and a lawyer. He is currently the director of the Museum of Image and Sound located in Santiago de Cuba. His publications include Todas las despedidas del mundo (2004), Palabra de suicida (2012) and El hombre invisible (2014). His poetry is published in various collections and journals. In addition to being an accomplished poet, he designed more than forty posters for theater and exhibits. He also directed various experimental films and music clips since the year 2000.
Suzanne Schaaf (Dutch, American) holds a bachelor's in theatre directing and teaching (Amsterdam University of the Arts), and a master’s degree in visual anthropology (UvA). Her work is often connected to placemaking, memory, landscape, and transition. For her theatre graduation piece, Tussen A en B (A), she walked from Amsterdam to Arnhem in 6 days, and created an immersive play about memory, loss and landscape change. Her master’s graduation film The Memory of Glitch was shown at the RAI conference (2023), Freiburg Filmforum (2023), OT301 Visual Encounters Festival (2023) and was selected for TIEFF (2023) and SVA Film Festival (2023).

Mark R. Westmoreland is an anthropologist at Leiden University whose work engages both scholarly and practice-based approaches at the intersection between art, ethnography, and politics. His research has explored how experimental documentary practices address ongoing legacies of political violence in Lebanon and how video activists enacted modes of resistance-by-recording in Egypt. He is currently developing a new multimodal, multi-sited, and collaborative research agenda that attends to broken landscapes. He previously served as co-editor of Visual Anthropology Review and recently co-launched ReCNTR, a collaborative and interdisciplinary center that serves as a rigorous space for sharing and producing practice-based and multimodal research.

Nathaniel White-Steele is a documentary artist from Bristol, UK. He is interested in the visual register of authority, how power inscribes itself on landscapes and how ‘territory’ is made. He has worked with satellite images, GIS mapping technology, audio, archive, wet plate collodion tintypes and other methods to unpick how we attempt to control the landscape in order to govern people, and the moments when the landscape and the people resist. Nathaniel is currently based in London and has exhibited both nationally and internationally, most recently showing alongside anthropologist Jason de Leon’s work Hostile Terrain 94 in Den Haag, The Netherlands.

Coming soon

Writing with Light Magazine is an illustrated visual anthropology periodical. The core aim of the magazine is to support and develop a photo essay form that takes seriously the contribution of design to the production of creative and scholarly knowledge.

The Writing with Light collective is comprised of leading scholars in the field of Visual Anthropology. Our five-member collective was originally formed nearly ten years ago to curate and edit the photo essay section of the journal Cultural Anthropology. This was an initiative that was jointly supported with the Society for Visual Anthropology. In 2015 we received a grant from the Wenner-Gren foundation to hold a workshop on the subject of the photo essay. It was in that workshop that we first conceived of the Writing with Light magazine.

Writing with Light Magazine is a design-oriented, hybrid print and digital large format publication. Our inaugural issue is nearing completion and will be printed in November 2021. The goal is to publish a single issue annually. Our magazine features extended photo essays where each photographer is given space to elaborate their research through dynamic combinations of image and text developed in collaboration with design-editors. Select photo essays are vetted by a robust peer-review process.

The process we call print-forward design has grown out of our experience of editing photo essays for websites. Not only were these disastrously ephemeral (disappearing altogether from the internet if the provider no longer supports the publication) but they were subject to transformation at the whim of programmers and UX designers. Limitations we faced included simple serial slide-show like displays that differed from screen to screen, device to device, and year to year. Various disappointments led us to abandon design that was subordinated to vagaries of software. We chose instead to design with the intention of publishing a short-run print magazine that would benefit from digital distribution as a free PDF. The PDF format ensures that our design decisions are ‘locked down’ as the magazine circulates and is copied and shared from one device to another. For inspiration we looked to the illustrated print magazines like Life, VU, AIZ, USSR in construction, and others. These large format magazines featured photography and put images and text into wide-circulation. It was in these magazines that the photo essay enjoyed a kind of golden-age. The unique mixture of writing, photographs, and design-layout put a dramatically novel form of knowledge production into the hands of millions upon millions of people around the world. While most large-format mass circulation photographic magazines disappeared by the 1960s we believe the form of the photo essay continues to offer a unique possibility for critically creative expression.

Use these keywords to search below for related publications with ICER Press.

Photoessay, creative, multimodal

Please note that visual- and audio-based content published with ICER Press prior to 2022 may not have access supports such as complete transcripts and closed captioning. If you are experiencing difficulty accessing any content related to ICER Press or have any questions regarding accessibility, please contact us and we will be happy to work with you to find a solution that best supports you.