charles mcdonald
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I will offer a multimedia introduction to my current ethnographic fieldwork in the American queer underground electronic music scene. I invite the audience to experience a DJ set as an ethnographic dispatch, a sonic essay on and as fieldwork. Tacking between audio and text, we will dwell in a shared space of improvisation, curation, transition, sampling, sequencing, and fluctuating tempos. I aim to give a sense of the worlds in which I am doing fieldwork, while also showing how the techniques of DJing might helpfully be understood as methods for doing and making ethnography.
Charles McDonald is Clinical Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Pace University in New York City. He previously held a Visiting Assistant Professorship at New York University and Postdoctoral Fellowships at Northwestern University and Rice University. He received his PhD in anthropology and historical studies at the New School for Social Research in 2019.
He is currently finishing his first book manuscript, Return to Sepharad: Citizenship, Conversion, and the Politics of Repair, an experimental ethnography that pursues “return” as an ethnographic object, a political concept, and a mode of self-transformation.
He is also in the research phase of a second ethnographic project, Queer Nightlife Ecologies: Arts of the Underground in the Era of COVID, which examines how the COVID pandemic has affected queer workers and communities in the underground house and techno music scenes.
McDonald's broader interests include the anthropology of race and religion; citizenship and mobility; kinship and inheritance; subjectivity and ethics; liberalism and multiculturalism; empire and colonialism; queer studies; and experimental ethnography. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Wenner-Gren Foundation, Center for Jewish History, and the Posen Foundation. He has held visiting research positions at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Since 2015, he has been the Managing Director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) at the New School for Social Research, a residential fellowship that each year brings together an international cohort of sixty junior and senior scholars for a week-long master class with three distinguished thinkers. For more information, see https://www.criticalsocialinquiry.org.
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