Ethnologica
Mapping Movements: The Invisible Highways of Urban Birds at the Water’s Edge
2017
Beth Uzwiak is an artist, anthropologist and cultural activist with a deep commitment to
community engagement. She has exhibited art in numerous places including Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and Woman Made Gallery.
Anastasia Hudgins is a sociocultural anthropologist with broad experience in qualitative research. Much of her work revolves around the relationships between health, human rights and social policy. Together, they founded Ethnologica, a research consultancy firm with a focus on community-based ethnography.
Philadelphia families created the art in this book during a collaborative visual
storytelling and myth-making workshop called “River Beasts and Besties.” During
the workshop, we celebrated cultural beliefs about rivers from around the world and explored the mystery of what lives—or doesn’t—beneath the water’s surface. We created fantastical beasts to explore dystopian imaginings of urban waterways and fears about the future health of our watershed. We also conjured besties, our mythical creatures to protect our rivers from ecological destruction. We hope this book will help readers to do the same.
