Jessica Madison Pískatá
Jessica Madison Pískatá is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Oberlin College. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the New School. She also served as a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) volunteer with the United States Peace Corps in Mongolia from 2011-2013.
Her current project looks at the intersection of poetic practice and geological sociality on the Dariganga Volcanic Field in eastern Mongolia. By working with poets, professional poetry readers, local scholars of literature, and lay poetry enthusiasts, her research considers poetics to be a tool that enables subversion of epistemic categories that divide the material and immaterial world and its living and non-living beings.
A key aspect of this research explores how people use poetry to create enlivened and mutually collaborative relationships with non-living mineral landscapes, particularly in the context of heightened material extraction across Mongolia. This work looks at poetry as a mediator for relations between humans and geological bodies revealing the central role that sacred mountains, precious stones, magnetic fields, and pit mines play in the social life, politics, and cultural production of the region.
Featured Work: “Provincializing Energy in the Mongolian Gobi.”
Upcoming Projects: Jessica Madison Pískatá has published Mongolian-to-English translations of Dariganga Mongolian poet O. Dashbalbar’s Grass Trilogy and is working on an experimental ethnographic memoir about Czech uranium mining.
