Dr. Darcy Alexandra's current research project, Against a (Virtual) Wall: Surveillance and Futurity in the US Mexico Borderlands, builds upon her significant field expertise facilitating co-creative audiovisual research with diverse communities. Employing filmmaking, photography, and poetry, Alexandra positions the Sonoran Desert as a dynamic region from which to study viable futures during times of mass migration and detention. Alexandra's research is part of the SNSF-funded project, Big Data Lives: Anthropological Perspectives on Tech Imaginaries and Human Transformations, directed by Michaela Schaeuble. Alexandra's doctoral thesis, Visualising Migrant Voices: Co-Creative Documentary and the Politics of Listening (2015), examines the nuances of how arts-based practice in ethnographic research can facilitate cross-cultural critique, analysis, and communication. Drawing from the research, she has theorized documentary practice in diverse publications (Alexandra 2008; Alexandra 2015a; Alexandra 2015b; Alexandra 2017a; Alexandra 2017b) in which she examines the politics of voice and listening, and the anthropology of care. She argues for the aesthetic affordances of co-creative ethnography and reveals the complex ways in which audience expectations limit and shape the trajectories of first-person narratives. In 2018, the American Anthropological Association's Society for Humanistic Anthropology awarded Alexandra first-place in ethnographic poetry for her collection of poems about violence, migration and transnational belongings.

Research Fields

  • Multimodal and audiovisual anthropology
  • Landscape ethnography and de-colonial ecologies 
  • Border regimes and borderization 
  • Politics of listening and storytelling 
  • Ethnographic poetry
  • Animated documentary 
  • Violence and im/possibilities of reconciliation
  • Anthropology of the Americas 
  • Ireland, Irish diaspora 
Publikationen von Dr. Darcy Alexandra
Publikationen von Dr. Darcy Alexandra

2024

Critical Auto-ethnography and Multimodal Practice 

2023

Landscape Ethnography; Ethnographic Documentary Theory 

HS2022

Ethnographic Documentary Theory

Experiments in Ethnographic Writing: the Personal, the Sensory, the More-than-Human

HS2021

Hydro-social relations and multi-modal anthropology.

FS2021

Theory and Practice of Ethnographic Film

HS2019

Imagining Otherwise: Social Movements for Livable Futures in the Sonoran Border Region

HS2018

Stir it Up! Experimental Ethnography in the Anthropocene

FS2018

Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Inherited Pasts, Imagined Futures + Visionierung

HS2017

Ethnography - intensive methods course

Indigenous Media: Self-Representation, Identity Politics and Cultural Activism

FS2017

The Anthropology of Voice and Listening: Intersectional Subjectivities

Co-Creative Documentary: Introduction to Digital Storytelling.

FS2016

Co-Creative Documentary: Introduction to Digital Storytelling.