Fieldwork in the Collection

Sunday, 08 April 2018

By Hanine Miriam Habig • MA Material and Visual Culture Like several other students from the Anthropology Department, I have been volunteering at the UCL Ethnographic Collection to practice object-based research. Most  of my work became focused on a particular case; the Rawlings Collection. This collection comprises of 18 objects, most of them originating from New… Continue reading Fieldwork in the Collection →

Living On Screen: Sondra Perry and Ian Cheng at the Serpentine Galleries

Saturday, 24 March 2018

Like many other London institutions seeking to shore up against an ever-rising digital tide, the Serpentine Galleries have announced a new annual “Digital Seasons” initiative that will recognize the works of artists working across digital media. Inaugurating this are acclaimed American artists Sondra Perry, whose work occupies the intersection between racial identity and techno-political power structures, and Ian Cheng, who creates experiments in live simulation.

Entitled “Typhoon Coming On,” Sondra Perry’s extensive installation spans the breadth of the Sackler Gallery. Walking into the space, the viewer is immediately confronted by a massive blue wall. In many of her video installations ¹, Perry wryly employs this hue to evoke the “blue screen of death”— that ever-dreaded Windows error screen that tells the user that their computer is basically f$%#!&—in order to conflate catastrophic system failure with systematic violence against Black bodies.…

Ideologies of mortgage financing in Mongolia

Friday, 16 March 2018

Rebekah Plueckhahn is a Research Associate on the Emerging Subjects Team at UCL – Anthropology. This post draws from research that forms part of her book Shaping Urban Futures in Ulaanbaatar forthcoming with UCL Press. Visiting Mongolia in November-December 2017, many people I spoke to were preoccupied with the topic of the current influence of […]

Female Tristeza in Santa Cruz La Laguna, Guatemala: How Sadness Maps Onto Depression

Thursday, 01 March 2018

By Elizabeth Markowitz “As always, as people, there are problems … perhaps they happen [as depression] but one does not know the form…”  – Tzununá woman How does major depressive disorder exist in a society lacking a word for it? I studied this question through the lens of the female experience of tristeza (sadness) in...

CAOS SUPPORTS ACTIVITIES IN BRAZILIAN INDIGENOUS LANDS

Sunday, 18 February 2018

Carolina Schneider Comandulli Extreme Citizen Science Research Group University College London   The Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability has been supporting the project “Environmental and Territorial Management in Indigenous Lands of the Guarani People in South and Southeast Brazil”, since the beginning of 2016. Financed by the Newton Fund – British Council, the project … Continue reading CAOS SUPPORTS ACTIVITIES IN BRAZILIAN INDIGENOUS LANDS

Young Curators Club Maria Fidelis exhibition

Wednesday, 24 May 2017

What stories lie inside collections? How can we connect historical artefacts to our everyday lives? Can heritage be an object? The UCL Young Curators project brings a group of GCSE students from a local secondary school, Maria Fidelis, to work with the Ethnography Collections and learn a little about what anthropologists do. Housed in the […]