Material, Visual and Digital Culture seminars

Autumn 2024

Mondays 5.00 - 6.30pm | Daryll Forde Seminar Room | Department of Anthropology

30th September – Alexandra D’Onofrio, University of Manchester
Aesthetics of possibility: practicing ethnography in the subjunctive mode

7th October – Martin Webb, Goldsmiths
Putting the selfie to work: Image making and work/time discipline in the margins of the Indian state

14th October – Dieter Deswarte, UCL
The Art of Collaboration

21st October – Jo Krishnakumar, LSE
Translating, Constructing, Failing: Using Patchwork and Scavenger Methodologies to Understand Transnational Experiences of Violence, Care, Kinship and Advocacy

28th October – Helena Hunter, Scottish Association of Marine Science
Title TBC

Please contact Elena Liber for further information.

Spring 2024

8 January – Toby Austin Locke (University College London)
"ADHD, communities of care and vernacular anthropologies of attention economics on TikTok"

15 January – Nick Seaver (Tufts University) (UCL Centre for Digital Anthropology Annual Lecture)
"Computing Taste: Care and Control in Algorithmic Recommendation"

22 January – Yathu Yogarajah (University College London)
"Petrol Station Dreams: Blurred lines between exploitation and extortion"

29 January – Rik Adriaans (University College London)
"A Sound of One’s Own: Modular Synthesizers and Post-Digital Culture"

5 February – Akanksha Awal (University College London)
"Love as Enjoyment: Hopelessness, Play and Desirable Futures in India"

19 February – David Jeevendrampillai (University College London)
"Urban planning at home and in the sky: politics of belonging and new frontiers of colonial power"

26 February – Kellynn Wee (University College London)
"Worlds beyond words: Atmospheres, bodies, and materiality in the staging of tabletop roleplaying game fantasies"

4 March – Emilie Glazer (University College London)
"Care and its dispossessions: Jerusalem waters, affective politics, and the infrastructures of the Anthropocene"

11 March – Hermione Spriggs (University College London)
"On Capture: a practice-based ethnography of mole catching in North Yorkshire"
With discussant Jonas Tinius (Humboldt University/Saarland University)

Please contact Rafael Schacter for further information.

Autumn 2023

Seminar convenors: Susanne Kuechler s.kuechler@ucl.ac.uk and Shireen Walton shireen.walton@ucl.ac.uk

16 January - Graeme Were (University of Bristol)
Museums, Collections and Social Repair: Transforming the Past in Vietnam

23 January - Haichao Wang (UCL)
Beyond Social E-commerce: a comparative study of practicing values in Chinese Hui Muslims Jama’at

30 January - Emma Tarlo (Professor Emerita, Goldsmiths)
Hairy Entanglements – working towards a public anthropology

[Cancelled] 6 February - Elena Liber (UCL)
“The First TikTok War”: Narratives of conflict and emergency on TikTok

Reading Week

20 February - Heather A. Horst (Western Sydney University)
Doing kalavata: The performance and practice of collective identity

27 February - Elena Liber (UCL)
“The First TikTok War”: Narratives of conflict and emergency on TikTok

6 March - Kevin Smets (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
(De)bordering imaginations: “reel” power struggles in a bordered world

13 March - Karen Strassler (Queens College, Graduate Center of the City University of New York) [*on Zoom*]
The Mirror and the Lens: image-work and bodily reckoning after breast cancer

Spring 2023