On the Commons: A Conversation with Julie Livingston

JL: One of the things that has interested me recently has been a desire to play with form. Formal experiments are going on in journalism, literature and many other sites as well as anthropology. Part of it has to do with new kinds of reading practices, as screens have been eviscerating our powers of concentration. There has been a sort of move toward a short form which I find interesting. For me, these experiments are about trying to find modes of communication that expand readership, that conjoin a public to think alongside them while retaining the complexity of the analysis, about finding modalities beyond critique. I’m super interested in formalism as a writer. I will also note that I am strangely positioned towards questions about the discipline because I’m actually an interdisciplinary scholar. I have training in anthropology and I like to claim a position within the discipline, but I’m not really a disciplinary person.