Recent scholarship in the fields of affect studies and the new materialisms raises important questions about the ethnographic encounter and the kind of knowledge it generates. Refusing to grant ontological status to classic oppositions between Nature/Culture, Self/Other, Subject/Object, and Human/Nonhuman, this work forces anthropologically inclined ethnographers to rethink longstanding assumptions about the composition of the “social” and the “political” in an age that ignores the vulnerabilities and agential capacities of global ecosystems at its peril. Reading across ossifying disciplinary divides, this seminar examines the intellectual projects of writers such as Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Lauren Berlant, and Kathleen Stewart among others. Our objective is to theorize the intersection between the material and the immaterial in social life in ways that bring the aesthetic and political implications of ethnography to the fore.