Upcoming Events
FALL 2024
FLASH ETHNOGRAPHY
September 27, 12-2pm, with Huatse Gyal and Cymene Howe, Department of Anthropology
“A flash essay,” writes anthropologist and writer Ruth Behar “is like a filigree earring in how it fills you with a sense of wonder. And as a form of writing, it leaves you in awe that something so miniature can be so capacious as to let the whole world inside.” This workshop invites both graduate and undergraduate students to experiment with flash ethnography as a form of writing and engaging the world.
SENSORY ETHNOGRAPHY – Experiments in Dismantling Environmental Injustice
October 11, 12-2pm, with Prash Naidu, Assistant Professor of Environmental and Medical Anthropology at City College of New York
What do capitalism and pollution feel, smell, and sound like? Why does air pollution have a sour, metallic taste to it? Can we feel the gritty textures of particulate matter coating our landscapes? How do we attune our ears to the sonic disruptions in everyday life? What chromatic assaults accompany gray clouds of smog? This workshop discusses sensory ethnography’s promises and challenges in dismantling environmental injustice.
SPRING 2025
OBJECT-ORIENTED ETHNOGRAPHY
January 31, 12-2pm, with Timothy Morton, Department of English, Cymene Howe and Huatse Gyal, Department of Anthropology
2020 marks the point when human-made materials have come to outweigh all of earth’s living organisms. We now produce about 30 gigatons of stuff every single year and that quantity is increasing. In this workshop we get into this stuff to ask about objects: what are they, how are they, where are they and what ethnographic forms might they take? With philosopher Timothy Morton, author of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, we collectively reflect on the qualities and compositions of objects in our lives and across space and time.
EXPLORING MULTIMODAL FORMS - Embodied Knowledge and Modes of Repair
February 11, 12-2pm, with Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology; Director of Center for Experimental Ethnography at University of Pennsylvania.
What does the body know? What can bodies tell us about the forms of collective world-building that exist outside of but in relation to the juridical structures of sovereignty that govern modern Western political and social life? This talk invites us to think with and through the space of Tambufest in Jamaica, a kumina festival I have co-organized for the past five years. We will reflect on how community-based spaces of care, creativity, and spirituality can open portals to thinking beyond linearity and create channels for accountability. I will argue that we are heir not only to colonial logics, but also to the means to refuse or retool them, and that both of these inheritances are inscribed in and on the body.
Evening Film Screening and Discussion
March 7, 5-7pm
Snow Leopard, directed by Pema Tseden (2023)
Snow Leopard has been described as “a magical, memorable, visually stunning film…yet another exquisite drama by Pema Tseden (sadly his final film) and an empathic portrait of the modern dynamics affecting the pastoral society of Tibet." Snow Leopard is at once a creative visual ethnography of human and nonhuman relations and an intimate exploration of the complex relationships between Tibetan pastoralists, Chinese state law, and snow leopards.
Fall 2023 - Spring 2024
Information coming soon...
Fall 2022 - Spring 2023
Information coming soon...
Fall 2021 - Spring 2022
Ayana Flewellen, March 30, 12 PM
"Towards an Archaeology of Redress: The Estate Little Princess Archaeological Field School in St. Croix"
Abstract: This presentation summarizes archaeological fieldwork conducted at the Estate Little Princess since the summer of 2017, led by the Society of Black Archaeologists members Drs. Ayana Flewellen, Justin Dunnavant, William White, Alicia Odewale, and Alexandra Jones. Archaeological excavations, mapping, artifact analysis, and archival research at the Estate Little Princess, an 18th-century sugar plantation, add to what is known about pre- and post-emancipation life Afro-Crucians in the Christiansted area on the island of St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands (USVI). The Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project is just one project through the Society of Black Archaeologists dedicated to addressing and combating the lack of diversity and inclusivity within the field of archaeology. During this presentation, Dr. Flewellen will discuss core principles of the Society of Black Archaeologists that shape the ongoing work conducted at the Estate Little Princess.
Helena Zeweri, April 13, 12 PM
“Refuge as Anti-imperial Politics: Activism in the Global Afghan Diaspora, Post-US Withdrawal”
Abstract: This talk examines Afghan American diasporic humanitarian aid in the wake of the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Through conducting a discursive analysis of diasporic social media engagement and drawing from personal experience aiding the effort to evacuate Afghan civilians to third countries, I offer examples of how Afghan diasporic collectives’ efforts to secure refuge for displaced civilians transformed into a critique of the disposability of Afghan life under US empire. More specifically, I examine the ways in which requests for humanitarian aid for Afghanistan became newly entangled with anti-imperial critiques of US government policy toward displaced Afghans seeking safe passage to transit countries. For example, several collectives, in social media posts calling for prompt assistance for displaced Afghans, also critiqued the racialized politics of recognition of the US immigration system. For other collectives, the call for humanitarian aid was paired with a call to give Afghans Temporary Protected Status as a way for the US state to take responsibility for the mass displacement caused by the military withdrawal. Through this analysis, I turn to how Afghan diasporic collectives frame mass displacement both as a humanitarian crisis and a political injustice borne out of prolonged occupation. In doing so, this talk will illustrate how humanitarian calls for action are not limited to saving lives and can extend to political critique. This talk will also explore how this burgeoning anti-imperial politics becomes an intimate mode of self-reflection for Afghan Americans who, since the War on Terror, have occupied a contradictory position as hypervisible yet marginalized by the US state. In doing so, it seeks to make sense of a unique moment in Afghan American political life in which the language of anti-imperialism is emerging as central to calls for humanitarian aid. This talk marks a preliminary exploration of a long-term ethnographic and historical study of how Afghan global diasporic activism over the past twenty years has been shaped by global and domestic movements for racial justice, refugee rights, and decolonization.