ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter to the volume situates ‘worldly’ ethnography in an intellectual trajectory that cuts across the humanities, the interpretative social sciences, and many other disciplinary fields. It stands as an invitation to use ethnographic practice that recognises ‘present conjunctures’ to interrupt and disrupt those fields, a provocation to collapse boundaries and scales between material and symbolic worlds, to explore connections between the human and the non-human, to work with entanglement of matters, and to feel or sense – rather than know or explain – one's way through encounters. Moving beyond more rigid theoretical and methodological frameworks to get at ‘the global’, engaging at the worldly edge in this way is a call to imagine, to invent, and to both prefigure worlds shared and reveal and create worlds beyond. This introduction stresses the particular importance of graphing, or, experimenting with intersections of worldliness and writing, understood as inscription, especially as it pertains to engaging affect, the relational, the sensorial, and the multimodal. This approach highlights the themes of the contributions to the volume as examples of creativity, of some play, and some vulnerability – however messy or liberating – in ethnographic practice. Here, we also understand worldly ethnographic practice as a form of address, a potentially publics-creating methodology, one that can take the form of text, image, and/or sound, or any combination of those modalities to make or unmake connections, trace links, construct relations in the tapestries of the global/local (or elsewhere), the extraordinary/mundane, and the seeable and unseeable. Ultimately, this chapter sets out some ways in which current and future ethnographic practices may stand as forms of a meeting of edges, a speculation of futures, a creation of new meanings, and a vital part of living in, as well as witnessing, worlds.
