(PhD University of Texas at Austin, 2008)

As an anthropologist and filmmaker, my work engages a variety of approaches in order to advance better understandings of visual culture and its changing dimensions in the digital age of globalization. My work draws on experimental ethnography, the anthropology of art and film, the mediation of violence and trauma, memory and the senses, the politics of public representation, cosmopolitan sensibilities, oral histories, and autoethnography, among other influences and interests.

My doctoral research joins interests in global cities, media anthropology, and the modern Middle East in order to examine the way people mediate experiences of social violence in the modern Middle East. My dissertation, "Crisis of Representation: Experimental Documentary in Postwar Lebanon," explored the role of emergent visual media in Beirut's postwar society in order to better understand how people experience, represent, and comment upon the uncertainty and volatility of their everyday existence amid recurrent violence. As such, my research traces the way contemporary Arab filmmakers and artists grapple with disjunctures between national histories of violence, individual experience of remembering, and transnational trajectories of representation. Furthermore, my research locates contemporary Lebanese visual culture along fissures in the broader destabilization of the Middle East and helps to elucidate the ways that official meaning constantly retreats from sites of unfinished trauma and unresolved politics.

My research on experimental documentary filmmakers in Lebanon is informed by my own work as a visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. During my graduate studies I engaged in several projects that worked to foster connections between both an anthropology of visual forms and an effort to do anthropology visually. My Masters’

research explored the politics of cross-cultural collaboration during the production of an ethnographic video in the highlands of Ethiopia.

My video documentary about cultural preservation and the pursuit of global economic development ultimately accentuated the fissures of identity that must tenuously negotiate between notions of authenticity and modernity. Cutting my teeth on this project required me to grapple firsthand with the politics of representation across cultural boundaries.

I also worked on several projects based in Texas. My oral history documentary 'Truth I Ever Told,' which recounts both the oppression and pastimes of a rural African American community in East Texas, earned the Zora Neale Hurston Prize from the American Folklore Society. This project has generated other oral history projects, including training the Texas After Violence Project to conduct interviews with people personally impacted by capital punishment. As such, I co-found the Seed Documentary Cooperative with Antony Cherian, my colleague on these projects, to foster more projects that feature the stories of ordinary people.

Ideas I am currently exploring or developing:

In general, my work has compelled me to more closely examine the the issue of aesthetics. As a visual anthropologist I have been significantly influenced by the sensory turn of David MacDougall's theories of "social aesthetics". How are societies or publics aesthetically informed? How does cosmopolitan sensibilities and class- based privileges enable and delimit new modes of urban and transnational agency? Do these critical re-positionings gesture to the emergence of a radical Post-orientalist aesthetics?

In a more experimental approach to my research in the Middle East, I have incorporated the aesthetics of "impossibility" used by many contemporary Arab filmmakers and artists in order to disrupt dominant anthropological discourse. PS Westmoreland is an experimental art project that follows the cultural jamming techniques and aesthetics of artists like Walid Ra'ad to engender affective critiques of imperial- colonial relations. These critiques draw connections between the banality of expatriate living with the conspiracies of diplomatic missions.

In addition to ethnographic and theoretical analyses of visual culture and social aesthetics, I am a committed documentarian. With long-time collaborator Tony Cherian, I co-found the SEED Documentary Collective to facilitate opportunities for scholars and artists to develop public history projects by working closely with communities and assessing their cultural needs and assets. The Phillips Family Photo Album, for example, tells the story of rural african american domesticity through the multi-generational story of Doc Philips, a self-taught veterinary legend in central Texas.