Marina Peterson

Marina Peterson is professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work explores themes of uncertainty and indeterminacy, the edges of perceptibility, and the phenomenality of matter. Experimenting with ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic, she has taken up these concerns through investigation of sound, sensation, and urban infrastructures above and below ground in Los Angeles and Appalachian Ohio. Her most recent book is titled Atmospheric Noise: Aerial Attunements in Los Angeles. Tracing indeterminate categories and emergent entanglements of environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere around airport noise in the 1960s, it addresses key ways in which noise amplifies ways of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric.

Posts by This Author

Ethnographic Listening Workshop "Toolkit"

Ethnographic Listening Workshop "Toolkit"

Listening in Toronto Our Ethnographic Listening Workshop was held at 10 a.m. on November 16, 2023, in Toronto as part of the 2023 American Anthropological Assoc... More

Underpass

Visual and New Media Review

Underpass

The body is part of the external world, continuous with it. In fact, it is just as much part of nature as anything else there—a river, or a mountain, or a cloud... More