How does project making shape the social worlds in which we live?

My current research is an ethnographic and genealogical investigation of projects and project making that draws on and expands linguistic anthropological theories of genre. It begins with the observation that projects are… everywhere. They appear across domains, scales, and geographies of social life. Yet, although anthropologists often study projects, for example, of economic development or scientific discovery, there is no “anthropology of projects” to compare, for instance, to the anthropology of infrastructure. The category of the project has not only escaped conceptualization, it is thoroughly naturalized. My research attends to the conditions and consequences of this fact.