Images of ruin: An “anxious” ethnographic workshop at the end of the world

Atafona is one of countless communities across the globe that is disappearing into the sea due to coastal erosion. The community's ruins symbolize anxieties about the end of Brazil's Anthropocene. Over the course of a week, a group of youth from Brazil's periphery joined with senior scholars in Atafona to explore the social anxieties created by 60 years of degrading coastlines and wave‐like dunes that have buried homes. Participants experimented with capturing the ethnographic conditions of a disappearing landscape through collaborative photographic practice. We explored the culturally defined notion of “ruin” amidst environmental crisis and the end of the Anthropocene. In this article, we question the dominant narratives that frame Brazil's coastal periphery as a no‐man's land—inherently ruined and anxiety‐inducing—unable to resist the force of an increasingly violent Atlantic in the age of global warming.