Marina Peterson
The work of Marina Peterson attends to elemental forces and shifting modalities of matter, with an emphasis on sound and urbanism. She explores diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic through writing, sound, and image. Most of her research is in and of Los Angeles.
Her most recent book, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles examines ways in which environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter cohere in and through noise pollution legislation and the politics of airport noise from the 1960s to the present. The atmospheric encompasses the aerial and the ephemeral, dynamic relationships between forms of matter, and the indeterminacy of forms and concepts. It traces noise as it animates atmospheric registers that span airspace law, environmental legislation, acoustic treatments, and neighborhoods cleared for noise mitigation now home to an endangered species of butterfly. She uses the term indefinite urbanism to address the porous boundaries between that which is hard and that which is airy, to edge spaces of infrastructure as effects of the interplay between sounds from the sky and sensation, considering spaces shaped by atmospheric conditions and now invisible histories as a dimension of lived urbanism.
She is involved in a number of projects focused on experimental and multimodal ethnography. She has co-edited two books on anthropology and art, am a member of the Society for Cultural Anthropology's Digital Curatorial Collective, and runs the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography (with Craig Campbell and Casey Boyle). She is currently co-editing Errant Elements, a chapbook project organized around the Periodic Table of the Elements. She is Professor of Anthropology at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas. (2025)
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