In an interview with the Minnesota Review, cultural theorist Andrew Ross – author of, among other titles, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City – explains how, in his research practice, he went from “bargain basement ethnography” to what he coins as “scholarly reportage” (Williams, 2010, p. 39). Much to our loss, Ross has to date not developed any in-depth theorization of scholarly reportage as a method for the interdisciplinary humanities; in fairness: the appeal of scholarly reportage for Ross is the fact that, in contrast to ethnography of cultural sociology, as a practitioner, he is not “obliged to always keep an eye on polishing [his] method, for reasons of disciplinary evaluation” (Williams, 2010, p. 40). Scholarly reportage would find itself somewhere in between creative non-fiction, public sociology and investigative journalism, but unburdened by the respective professional standards and pressures of those disciplines (methodological purity, but also the pressure of journalistic deadlines, or shorter and conventional storylines). “For me, the method is really quite simply a means to an end – it’s the primary vehicle for me to build a picture of a community, topic, or tendency […]” (Williams, 2010, p. 40). This is what Ross does so convincingly in his scholarly investigations in books such as Sunbelt Blues, addressing the housing crisis in Florida, or the aforementioned Bird on Fire, a multi-dimensional analysis of the impact of the climate crisis in Phoenix Arizona through interviews, participatory observation, urban drifting, and scientific inquiry into Arizonian desertification. In Ross’ comments, scholarly reportage emerges as a kind of rogue or unruly method – which is exceedingly suitable for grasping today’s intersecting crises (environmental, technological, political, psychosocial, etc.). The Unruly Natures project exemplifies ‘scholarly reportage’ as, albeit fragmentarily, defined by Ross: a kind of interdisciplinary rogue ‘field work’ carried out by scholars and artists who are neither professional ethnographers nor storytellers, but who, in the space in between these roles, and beyond the comfort zone of their own professional disciplines, set out to “build a picture of a community, topic, or tendency.” The project engages with the Upper Valais mountains, the Zürich cityscape, the Venice laguna, the Cauca and Limmat rivers (all grasped as complex assemblages of geographical, biological, historical, affective, human and non-human – and so on – features). Moreover, and perhaps taking Ross’ idea of ‘scholarly reportage’ a few steps further, this produces a certain type of knowledge, which is not only radically interdisciplinary in nature, but also much more open-ended (which may or may not mean ‘speculative’…) than the current division of academic disciplinary labor allows for.

As good academic subjects, we visit the ISMAR (the institute of marine sciences) in the Arsenale. For once, we see how science is answerable to culture: as the institute is housed in the sprawling monument that is the Arsenale, its laboratories, offices and classrooms are not allowed to affect (or even touch) the building in any way. The ISMAR is a building within a building, a container within a container. Inside, in between the laboratories, we find a display of wooden stems, remainders of the trees used to build warships. The Arsenale has been a secret site, off the map for centuries; it has become untouchable again. Post-industrial Europe now produces knowledge (Venice is emblematic of the mirage that is the European economy: we sell you history, knowledge, leisure, aesthesis, the good life), not to conquer but to protect the seas (but perhaps, it’s the knowledge that needs protecting as our most valuable asset, hence the architectural double-bind: the Arsenale is both transparent and invisible, shelters within a shelter, glass boxes inside brick walls).

Ross’ ‘scholarly reportage’ echoes Michel Foucault’s short-lived project of “reportages d’idées” (Foucault, 2001, pp. 706-707). Dissatisfied with the increasing academicization of philosophy after the shockwaves of May 68 died out in the late 1970s, not in the least his own institutionalization as professor at the Collège de France, in 1978-79 Foucault engaged in a series of investigations for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The aim was to seize the ideas that take shape in contemporary social, political, and cultural events as they happen – as Foucault says: “in the events in which they manifest their force” (Foucault, 2001, p. 707) – even if this is far removed from the intellectual centers of metropolitan Europe. “[T]he analysis of what we think,” Foucault proposes, “will be related to what occurs. Intellectuals will work with journalists at the crossroads between ideas and events” (Foucault, 2001, p. 707). What Foucault proposes here resembles Ross’ hybrid heuristics of field work, storytelling and scientific inquiry; but not only does Foucault aim at picturing communities and capturing tendencies, he also wants to seize the new ideas that emerge in current events, which defy disciplinary methodological boundaries as well as philosophical canons. This asks for new forms of writing and thinking in the midst of things; new forms of inquiry, midway between reporting, analyzing and philosophizing, and a new type of theorist (one that isn’t afraid to hike up mountains, descend into rivers, or venture into the Venetian January mists). A kind of ‘cultural analysis as reportage’ (de Bloois, 2025) or ‘forensic philosophy’… ‘Reportage’ implies a sense of urgency, a desire for (but also the acknowledgment of the necessity of) participating in the contemporary, in the emergence of new unruly recombinant social, political, technological and natural environments, and in the ideas that emerge in these, while recognizing their ongoing, sometimes transitory nature. Scholarly reportage would shed off any longing for disciplinary respectability and head outside, to seize what is happening in the field in all its dimensions at the present moment. With the sociologist Les Back, we might say that reportage is a form of scholarly inquiry going live, as Back imagines a ‘live sociology’ which allows scholars “to work on the move in order to attend to the newly coordinated nature of social reality, […] to re-invent forms of attentiveness that are mobile and can respond precisely to admit the fleeting, the tacit, the mobile, chaotic and complex” (Back, 2012, p. 28). Live reportage thus moves with the world, as it mobilizes and articulates both the multisensory experiences of moving about in ‘the field’ and whatever methodological instruments at hand to explore the latter in the here-and-now. Reportage engages with the eventfulness of a world in motion – a world that is increasingly unruly – and for this it needs to develop new forms of in situ research, of recording, narrating and conceptualizing; as Back calls us to do: we need to find new “ambulant techniques of doing social research on the move, that do not simply try and reflect movement but which also embody movement and bring it to life” (Back, 2012, p. 28).

Reportage is multi-sensory: the scholarly reporter not only sees, but also listens, tastes, feels, smells, plunges, connects, loses themselves. On Sant’ Erasmo, we walked along the shore, on gravel roads among fields of artichokes, in salty marshlands: different surfaces, different ground for thought? We walked through the mist that was increasingly thickening and getting correspondingly colder. Does the cold mist act as a kind of Ockham’s razor, cutting away at complexity in favor of parsimony? Or does it simply suspend everything, every possible thought, any intellectual posturing, leaving all answers open? At the Tidal Garden, in the welcoming warmth of the farmhouse, slipping from one physical and subjective state into another, as we slowly defrosted, we tasted a meal made of halophytes. “Halophytes are a sign of a geography that constantly swings between seabed and islands, aquatic and terrestrial, emerged and submerged,” the Tidal Garden explains. “This spatial paradigm challenges the water-land and infertile-fertile binaries through which extractive regimes have governed the Lagoon and legitimized the cultural and ecological erasure of its brackish life-worlds. As the sea level rises, the possibility of cultivating and eating halophytes can potentially resist the politics of dispossession normalized by the myth of unproductivity and allow us to imagine our habitation with a changing climate as the care of an intertidal commons.” We taste, touch, smell and ingest the multi-dimensional constellation that is the laguna in the shape of the halophytes that could only emerge from such an environment: from its natural ecosystem as well as its post-industrial present. Feeding ourselves as a form of research, a kind of culinary psychogeography (or dérive, even as we move into uncharted gastronomic territory). I feel so good that I forget my backpack. The evening before, chef Marco Bravetti of Tocia! cucina e comunità, served an equally amazing dinner (a palatable piece of installation art) made of the fruits of his foraging in the brackish tide marshes of the lagoon landscape: seaweed, algae, artichokes (and fish and wines). Reportage is perhaps best understood as a manner of foraging: a foraging of experiences, impressions, conversations, sounds, smells, tastes, stories. But it is also a kind of political, speculative foraging: a collecting of evidence of different, potential ways of relating to one’s milieu and the life forms it encapsulates, of different types of nourishment, of different modes of non-productive, non-extractivist subsistence (in all their sensuous appeal).

As environmental theorist Jeff Diamanti outlines in his ‘Introduction to Field Theory,’ to engage with the living world, in which we always already participate, means to part ways with the traditional notion of ‘the field’ – in which we perform our ethnographic, sociological or ecological ‘field work’ – as “as the raw material from which objects and cases are drawn in order to advance knowledge in a given discipline” (Diamanti, 2022, n.p.). Diamanti asks what happens if we no longer consider ‘the field’ – a river, a city, a laguna – merely a set of “data and patterns in need of an analytic,” that is to say, ultimately, of a proof-of-existence by means of disciplinary vetting. What if we let “the field write itself into our analytic disposition” (Diamanti, 2022, n.p.)? Rather than considering ‘the field’ to be the passive repository for facts, according to an all-too contemporary extractivist logic of data mining, Diamanti argues, we should be attentive to the manifold ways in which the field – the forest, the mountain, the island, the lake, but also the allotment or the squat – modulates our research: how does ‘the field’ challenge disciplinary boundaries and epistemologies? How does it allow for certain concepts to take root, and force us to reconsider others? “When and where does theory happen? Where ought it happen?” (Diamanti, 2022, n.p.). These are perhaps the key questions for scholars today.

We are guided around Lazzaretto Nuovo, a former quarantine island; our guide is Francesca Guarnotta, a graduate from Ca’ Foscari’s Environmental Humanities M.A. program. The fog is extremely thick, you can barely see the ferries pass. Listening to our guide, circling around the small leper colony – marshes and a bit of woodland, again – the interpenetration between the human and non-human, the historical and the natural becomes manageable and somehow devoid of the sentimentality that plagues a certain kind of environmental thought, but perhaps this is the effect that spending a whole day in the freezing January mist has on you. When it’s time to go back to the city, we can barely see the ferry approaching; at Fondamente Nove another one suddenly emerges from the mist, nearly missing ours. The laguna is only a few decimeters deep, I know now.

“[F]ield theory,” Diamanti writes, “is to reflect on the emergent position that environmental theory ought to recur to a situated field of inquiry, such as a geo-physical and historically determined place […]” (Diamanti, 2022, n.p.). It proceeds in medias res and requires an immersive, multi-sensory and creative research ethic. Such an ethos is collaborative by nature: the multidimensionality of any given field, and the ideas, modes of perception and research practices that emerge from it, can only be mapped out (always provisionally) in modes of “collective composition”: 

In a single day, one might encounter artists, colleagues, comrades, and students signaling agreement that we now practice these arts of noticing […], and that this practice is in opposition to a different way of doing things. […] this new doxa carries with it a number of powerful concepts, ethical modalities, and styles of writing. Their epistemic point of convergence in situ is “the field” as such, and more empirically the theoretical orientations immanent, instead of antecedent, to that field. […] In its strongest form, fieldwork as a creative and collaborative practice involves a reflexive and generative ethic that blurs the lines between interpretive reading and collective composition; or put differently, it blurs the line of demarcation between ethnographic positions and situations summoned by solidarities. (Diamanti, 2022, n.p.)

‘The field’ is both the site of a convergence, or polyphony of scientific and artistic practices (both scholars and artists bring their savoir-faire), and of struggles and affective dispositions – of concerns for (and defense of) the immediate environment: even if these environments differ widely (the ciénagas of Colombia are by no means identical to the Venetian barene, the Cauca and  Limmat rivers are not exactly Tweedledum and Tweedledee), the struggles for the preservation of their singular nature clearly resonates. In this sense, there are only fields-in-plural, each unique and uniquely assembling scientific expertise and artistic skills, generating ideas that could only have taken root in this particular place.

The field is a site of struggle, and so is the laguna itself; it is a field (a campo?) in its own right. We are taken across the laguna to Porto Marghera by Fie a Manetta, ‘Associazione Sportiva Dilettantistica’. They offer navigation lessons for those who are traditionally denied access to the water (women), and make their boats (some collectively owned) available to those who are newly excluded from it due to financial precarity and the increasing commercialization and privatization of Venice’s waterways. Who controls the various aquatic infrastructures that surround Venice? Both on micro (Fie a Manetta’s nautic commoning) and macro level (the MOSE billion-euro hydraulic dam that lets sea water in and out of the laguna – both protecting Venice and interfering in the laguna’s symbiosis with the Adriatic crucial for its ecosystem)? Fie a Manetta’s speedboats (we do effectively spend a lot of time in boats, but I’m starting to appreciate the perspective the water offers) take us to Porto Marghera, another field of struggle. Past abandoned islands, containing ruined farms and convents (again), in cold, cold mist we arrive in the industrial port, home to some of Italy’s major chemical plants (ENI), and historical battleground for operaist Marxism. We are told of workers taking both pride in working at Porto Marghera and dying of work – that is to say: chemicals-related illness. Later that day, in their Campalto headquarters, under the watchful eye of Pier Paolo Pasolini photographed in black-and-white, hanging on the wall among other memorabilia of past struggles, aging communist activists will reminisce how, in the 1980s, they shifted from social ecology to environmental ecology, from revolution to sustainability, and from the fight for social housing to the preservation of the laguna as shared life world. We are shown a low-tech, analogue and hand-operated Power Point presentation containing a utopian, enchanting alternative vision for the laguna and its near-defunct industries. Post-industrial, post-urban, post-digital Venice as city of the future.

Any field report will necessarily remain open-ended – in this light: ‘post-’ rather than ‘inter-’ or ‘trans-’disciplinary – as perspectives change with each step taken further into the field, with each exchange of ideas and perspectives among reporters, with each change of weather, each turn in the road, mode of transport or with the time of day.

In Venice (and Zürich before that), we talked on trains, ferries, speedboats, vaporetti, trams, busses; on beaches, country lanes, river banks, industrial estates, housing projects, lake shores, islands, ancient leper colonies, dumping grounds; in the suburbs, in palazzos, repurposed convents, universities, research labs, bookstores, art galleries, bars, diners, hostel lounges, parks, train stations; philosophers talked with ornithologists, architects with filmmakers, urbanologists with sinologists, ecologists with designers, communists with food artists.           

In this sense, ‘reportage’ is akin to a new kind of unfinished, unruly cultural studies as imagined by Ben Highmore:  

Could there be a form of cultural studies that was able to ‘show its workings,’ as they used to say in maths lessons. Perhaps cultural studies would benefit from rougher work, from work that was more like a sketch-book than a finished painting, for work that was frayed, patched, and even threadbare in places. (Highmore, 2017, p. 5)[1]  

As a scholarly practice, reportage is always ongoing, always under construction, showing its architecture, defiantly admitting the contingency and transience of its ‘workings.’ As scholarly reporters, our ‘sketch-book’ can be a phone, a camera, a laptop, a Moleskine, a voice recorder, a napkin, our fallible memory, or, for that matter, a literal sketch-book, preferably in the hands of someone used to other, more scholarly means of recording (exploring the unfettering qualities of purposeless sketching). Reportage entails the absence of a conclusion, of the pressures of epistemological and semantic closure – or, at the very least, the absence of the horizon (or should we say: phantasy) of these things – and the blissful refutation of any requirement of so-called ‘deliverables.’  Perhaps the only obligation of sorts here is to report back to the living, unruly subjects of research, both human and non-human, beyond academic idiosyncrasies and disciplinary templates, to those who make the world happen. ‘Reportage’ as giving account of the world.    

On the last day of our field trip, the carnival is about to kick off. We head for the meteorological observatory, the Osservatorio Cavanis, housed in a Catholic school. Father Gigi leads us to the observatory; he informs us he has a heart condition before swiftly walking up eight flights of stairs. In the school’s attic retired colonel Marcello awaits us: he explains how a seemingly anachronistic institution and practice of data collection (with its military and nationalistic origins) now takes on an ecological significance: the human eye captures minute climatic changes better than any satellite. The view from the rooftop is glorious. The streets below quickly fill up with revelers and tourists. We are to be led across Dorsoduro by housing activists, and meet in acampothat is – exceptionally? – alive, full of young people and some street entertainment as part of the carnival: a glimpse of a Venice that was and may be again. But for now, we are shown the doomsday clock that indicates the declining amount of habitations for Venetians compared to the growth in tourist numbers and accommodations. We walk past numerous graffiti that denounce AirBnB. We visit social housing constructed in the early 20th century, now neighboring Ca’ Foscari’s CAMPLUS upscale student dorms for international students. The sanitized global-hotel-lounge aesthetics makes a mockery of the social housing’s utopia of comfort, space and hygiene for the working classes of Fordist Italy, just as it provides an oxymoronic sense of secluded, privatized community in turning its back to the adjacent housing estates. The latter are eerily quiet: there is some laundry suspended outside, but many blinds are shut showing no signs of inhabitation; it’s January, it’s cold, but still the estate feels like a De Chirico without the mystery. Walking back to the city center, Matteo shows us houses that are boarded up against floodings that occurred years ago, indicating they have been empty for a long time.

Before leaving Venice, we share an artichoke spritz.

References

Back, L. (2012). Live sociology: Social research and its futures. In L. Back & N. Puwar (Eds.), Live methods (pp. 18–39). Blackwell.

de Bloois, J. (2025). Cultural analysis as reportage. In M. Aydemir, A. Kuryel, & N. Roei (Eds.), The future of cultural analysis: A critical inquiry (pp. 113–126). Amsterdam University Press.

Diamanti, J. (2022). Introduction to “Field theory.” Postmodern Culture, 33(1). https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2022.a915389

Foucault, M. (2001). Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988. Gallimard.

Highmore, B. (2017). Out of Birmingham: Towards a more peripatetic cultural studies (A writing experiment). Cultural Studies Review, 23(1), 3–17.https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v23i1.4975

Williams, J. J. (2010). Scholarly reporter: An interview with Andrew Ross. Minnesota Review, 73/74, 37–52.