Dr. Darcy Alexandra

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