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Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2016-17

Spring 2017 

16 January Elisa OREGLIA (SOAS) 
The Digital Imagination: Mobile Phones and Internet in the Global South

CANCELLED 23 January Asta VONDERAU (Stockholm University)
Technologies of Cooling and Imagination: Locating the Cloud in Sweden's North

30 January Spike BUCKLOW (University of Cambridge)
A Material Selfie: John Donne's portrait of c.1595

6 February Thomas BINDER (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts)
Design Anthropological Futures (download the poster)

13 February Reading week

20 February Katja Müller (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)  
Digital Future of Anthropological Archives? Memory Making on the Indian Past

27 February Charlotte JOY (Goldsmiths)
Islamic bodies and (pre)Islamic material culture? The Care and Destruction of People and Things in Mali and in Transit to Europe

6 March Kostis KALANTZIS (University College London)
Warriors and Tourists? Nativism, Visual Culture and Greek-German encounters in the Greek crisis

13 March Alberto Corsín JIMÉNEZ (CSIC, Spain)
Ethnography: a prototype

20 March Elizabeth HODSON (University of Aberdeen)
The Painter's Discipline: Aesthetics and Form in Scottish Painting

Seminar Convenors: Hannah Knox (h.knox@ucl.ac.uk) and Timothy Carroll (t.carroll@ucl.ac.uk)


Autumn 2016 - In collaboration with the Ethnographic and Documentary Film Programme

3 October Chris Pinney (UCL Anthropology)
The Waterless Sea: On the Curious Histories of Mirages

10 October Tadgh O'Sullivan (Independent Filmmaker)
Screening of The Great Wall, and discussion with filmmaker
NOTE CHANGE OF LOCATION: Medical Sciences 131 A V Hill LT

17 October Dryden Goodwin (UCL Slade)
Unseen: the lives of looking. Screening (90 mins) and discussion with filmmaker
NOTE CHANGE OF LOCATION: Medical Sciences 131 A V Hill LT

24 October Gareth Evans (Film Curator, Whitechapel Gallery)
Further Beyond: Adventures in Essay Film

31 October Christophe Leclercq and Davy Braun (Sciences Po Media Lab, Paris)
What is a Medialab? a Year inside the Sciences Po Medialab

7 November READING WEEK - NO SEMINAR

Enquiries to Haidy Geismar (h.geismar@ucl.ac.uk) and Michael Stewart (m.stewart@ucl.ac.uk)

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2015-16

Spring 2016

11 January Laurent DISSARD (Research Fellows, Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL)
"We do not want guns... here": On the Materiality of Violence in Turkey's Kurdish City of Diyarbakır

18 January Joe DUMIT, (Department of Anthropology, Director of the Institute for Social Sciences, University of California, Davis)
Embodying Improvisation: Studying Scientists, Data, and Bodies Together

25 January Shireen WALTON (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford)
Doing digital-visual ethnography in/of Iran: The virtual intimacy of working with images, blogs and digital exhibitions

1 February Adrian MACKENZIE (Sociology, Lancaster University)
Large numbers: Imitative fluxes in the data-material imaginary

8 February Amy PENFIELD (Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London)
Vital materialities of a petro-state: Petrol, citizenship and energy in Venezuelan Amazonia

15 February READING WEEK - NO SEMINAR

22 February Mette Louise BERG (Senior lecturer, Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education)
Intersections: Producing, representing, and living diversity in Elephant and Castle, South London

29 February Frédéric KECK (CNRS, Director of the Département de la Recherche, musée du quai Branly)
Stockpiling and Storage: Techniques of preparedness for Avian flu pandemics

7 March Francesca MEZZENZANA (Fyssen Postdoctoral Fellow, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, Paris)
Forms of paju: Knowledge and Technology among the Runa of ecuadorian Amazon

14 March Carlos Sautchuk (Department of Anthropology, University of Brazilia)
Pirarucu´s net: Environmentalism, animals and technical objects in the Amazon

Enquiries to Ludovic Coupaye and Susanne Küchler 


Autumn 2015

12 October Michał Murawski (UCL SSEES)
Marxist Morphologies: A Critique of Flat Infrastructures, Fuzzy Property and Complexified Cities

19 October Lindsay Bremner (University of Westminster)
Thinking with an Indian Ocean Archipelago

26 October Julien Clément (Musée du Quai Branly)
Embodiment in Samoa: the Case of Rugby Union

2 November Ravinder Kaur (University of Copenhagen)
Aporia of Smart Images: On Spectacle, Capital, Novelty in post-reform India 

9 November READING WEEK - NO SEMINAR

16 November Joost Fontein (British Institute in Eastern Africa & University of Edinburgh)
The Politics of the Dead & the Power of Uncertainty: Materiality, Rumours and Human Remains in post-2000 Zimbabwe

Enquiries to Jill Reese and Connie Smith

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2014-15

Spring 2015

12 January Dr Deborah Lupton (University of Canberra)
Fabricated Data Bodies: Reflections on 3D Printed Digital Body Objects in Medical and Health Domains

19 January Dr Maruska Svasek (Queens University Belfast)
Aestheticisation and the Production of Religious Space: Merging and Clashing Formations of Potentiality and Agency in Chennai

26 January Dr Jamie Cross (University of Edinburgh)
Everyone Is Not Illuminated: Light, Energy and Infrastructure Off the Grid

2 February Dr Alison Hulme (Royal Holloway)
On the Trail of the £1 Commodity: The Thrift Ethic and the Spirit of Austerity Capitalism

9 February Dr Eeva Berglund (University of Helsinki)
Activism in the entrepreneurial city: reworking ecological and political relations

16 February READING WEEK - NO SEMINAR

23 February Dr Gabriela Nicolescu (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Three faces of communism: on the relationships between people and things in a contemporary Romanian museum

2 March Dr Antonia Walford (Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, Open University)
Compacting and Comparing: the nature of scientific data and the culture of anthropological Comparison

9 March Professor Penny Harvey (University of Manchester)
The material and social intimacies of waste infrastructures

16 March Dr Regina Bittner (Head of Academy Department, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation)
Bauhaus stuff: between Museum and Everyday life

23 March Professor Ton Otto (Head of Academy Department, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation)
Yiwan kup: Worlding practices, objects and notions of personhood in Baluan, Papua New Guinea

Seminar Convenors: Adam Drazin a.drazin@ucl.ac.uk & Hannah Knox h.knox@ucl.ac.uk.


Autumn 2014

29 September Rafael Schacter (UCL)
Ornament & Order: Graffiti and Street Art from a Material Culture Perspective

6 October Hannah Knox (UCL)
The Carbon-Life of Buildings: Material Politics in the City

13 October Paolo Fortis (University of Durham)
The aesthetics of power and alterity among Kuna people

20 October Lambrose Malafouris (University of Oxford)
How things shape the mind: a theory of material engagement

27 October Roos Gerritsen (Heidelberg University)
Public intimacy: Urban affects on South Indian walls

Enquiries to Haidy Geismar h.geismar@ucl.ac.uk & Ludovic Coupaye
l.coupaye@ucl.ac.uk.

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2013-14

Spring 2014

13 Jan Christine Guth (History of Design, Royal College of Art)
Theorizing the ritual disposal of needles (hari kuyo) in early modern Japan

20 Jan Nicolas Nova (Haute Ecole Art et Design Geneve)
Exploring people and artifacts, a designerly approach to ethnography

CANCELLED - 27 Jan Petra Karlshoven (Manchester University)
Taxidermy and Its Model: 'Elastic Rigour' in Human - Animal Articulations

3 Feb Jana Scholze (Curator of Contemporary Furniture and Product Design, Victoria and Albert Museum)
Ghosts in cases. Collecting the immaterial

10 Feb Noortje Marres (Goldsmiths)
What is Digital Sociology

17 Feb  - Reading week - no seminar

24 Feb Marta Ajmar (Head of Post-Graduate Research, Victoria and Albert Museum)
Placed between the eye and the light: Understanding Materiality and Longue-Durée Cross-Cultural Connections in Early Modern Objects

CANCELLED - 3 Mar Dorothea Kleine (Royal Holloway University of London)
Technologies of choice?: ICTs development and the capabilities approach 

10 Mar Massimiliano Mollona (Goldsmiths)
The Passions and the Interests. Finance, Labour and Imagination in post-authoritarian Brazil

17 Mar Lesley McFayden (Dept. of History, Classics and Archaeology, Bikbeck University)
Objects that are a part of buildings- Architecture, material culture and understated performance

Enquiries to Victor Buchli v.buchli@ucl.ac.uk and Stefana Broadbent stefana.broadbent@ucl.ac.uk.


Autumn 2013

7 October Joanna Latimer (Sociology, Cardiff)
Moving materials: extension, affect and the (post) human

14 October Anna Laine (Anthropology, Stockholm)
Authoethnography bas shared profession? Exploring the boundaries between ethnographer and 'other' in collaborations with British Tamil artists

Cancelled: 21 October Sharon MacDonald (Anthropology, York)
How things matter: stones from Nuremburg

Cancelled: 28 October Heloise Finch-Boyer (National Maritime Museum, London)
The ideological function and technical legacy of paper in the adoption of electronic sea charts 1977-2010

4 November Reading Week - No seminar

11 November Lee Komito (Dublin)
New technologies and changing migrants' identity practices: balloon, band-aid or bricolage?

18 November Rodney Harrison (Institute of Archaeology, UCL)
Collecting and governing ourselves and 'others': Mass Observation's fieldwork agencements

25 November Mike Rowlands (Anthropology, UCL)
The New Museology in China

2 December Timothy Carroll (Anthropology, UCL)
Shifting ontologies through fabric: augmenting person, changing place

Organisers: Susanne Kuechler and Christopher Tilley. Enquiries to: c.tilley@ucl.ac.uk

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2012-13

Spring 2013

7 January Chris Pinney (UCL Anthropology)
Gandhi, Camera, Action! Image Citation and Anti-Corruption Politics in 21st Century India

14 January Frances Gooding (Colonial Film Archive, London)
The Visual Vernacular: amateur film and colonial vision in the British Empire 

21 January Laurent van Lancker (Freie Universitat, Berlin, Independent Filmmaker)
Experiencing Cultures: Rethinking Documentary strategies

28 January Paul Basu (Institute of Archaeology, UCL)
Reanimating Cultural Heritage: Digital Curatorship, Knowledge Networks and Social Transformation in Sierra Leone

4 February Pwyll ap Stifin (UCL Anthropology)
Moments of Silence: The Absence of Sound as Materiality at Ground Zero

11 February READING WEEK - NO SEMINAR

18 February Adam Fish (Lancaster Sociology)
Proformations: The Network Activism of American Television Producers, Media Reformers, and Free Software Geeks

25 February Jean Paul Demoule (Sorbonne, Paris)
Title to be announced

4 March Bruce Grant (NYU Anthropology)
Surplus Capital: Notes on the Rebuilding of the Contemporary Caucasus

11 March Maia Nuku (Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology)
Unwrapping gods: encounters with gods and missionaries in 18th century Polynesia

Enquries to Haidy Geismar (h.geismar@ucl.ac.uk) or Chris Pinney (chris.pinney@ucl.ac.uk)


Autumn 2012

October 1 Haidy Geismar (Department of Anthropology, UCL)
"An indigenous commons? Refashioning intellectual property in New Zealand and beyond"

October 8 Yvonne Rogers (UCLIC, UCL)
"Rethinking Cognition in the Wild"

October 15 Charles Ess (Dept of Media and Communication, University of Oslo)
"Ethics of the Internet(s): Philosophical and Cultural Approaches"

October 22 Fernando Dominguez Rubio (CRESC, The Open University)
"On the Material Ecologies of Contemporary Culture and The Challenge of New Media at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)"

October 29 Jannis Kallinikos (ISIG, London School of Economics)
"Technology and Social Practice: Action, Sense-Making, Governance"

November 5 (Reading Week)

November 12 Chow Wah Chan (Firmenich SA, Singapore)
"The Scent of Social Undercurrents: Fragrance Trends and Social Change"

November 19 Nicholas Thomas (Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Cambridge), Michael O'Hanlon, Marilyn Strathern, Peter Brunt, Lissant Bolton and Susanne Kuechler
Approaching Art in Oceania: a panel discussion around 'Art in Oceania: a new history' (Thames and Hudson, 2012)

November 26 Andrea Rigon (Sociology, Trinity College Dublin & Bartlett School, UCL)
"Land and infrastructure: the 'visual' upgrading of a Kenyan slum"

December 3 Dec Wendy Gunn (SPIRE, University of Southern Denmark)
"The Design Studio as Extension of Field Site"

Cancelled - December 12 James Weiner (Crawford School, Australian National University)
Special Wednesday Seminar at 11am
"Local Perceptions of Environmental Impact in Papua New Guinea's Petroleum Project Area"

Enquries to Stefana Broadbent, Adam Drazin

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2011-12

SPRING 2012

January 16: Tom McDonald (UCL)
Karaoke Migrations: tranquillising homes, relocating pleasures in a south-west Chinese town

January 23: Razvan Nicolescu (UCL)
Boredom and Anxiety in Rural Romania

January 30: David Frohlich (Univ. Surrey)
Is the Family Album Dead?

February 6: Sonia Livingstone (LSE)
Mapping digital and social learning networks among a class of British school children

February 20: Thomas Malaby (Univ. Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
The Technoliberal Gambit: Architecting the Digital through Game Design

February 27: Mathew Engelke (LSE)
The stuff of funerals: Material culture and commemoration for the non-religious of London

March 5: Martijn Oosterban (Univ. Utrecht)
`Thou Shall Not Use that Social Network Site' New Media Disciplines, Sociability and Pentecostalism

March 12: Caroline Humphrey (Univ. Cambridge)
The political logic of Buryat national outrage: a movement on the Russian internet

March 19: Jean-François Blanchette (Univ. California LA)
Heavy Clouds: Steps Towards a Material Analysis of Computing

For further information contact d.miller@ucl.ac.uk


AUTUMN 2011

3 October:  Graeme Were (University of Queensland)
"Curl Lecture" On the Materials of Mats: thinking through design in a Pacific society NOTE In the British Museum's Clore Centre

10 October: Nicholas Thomas (Cambridge)
Artist of PNG': Mathias Kauage, Melanesian, and other modernisms

17 October: Josh Reno (Goldsmiths)
Green Markets and Theories of the Economic 

24 October: Perig Pitrou (Laboratoire d'anthropologie social, Paris/UCL)
The Power between Display and Concealment: Analyses of political rituals in a Mixe Indians community of Oaxaca, Mexico

31 October: Aristóteles Barcelos Neto (UEA)
Arakuni: the serpent with his body covered in songs 

7 November: reading week - no seminar

14 November: Adam Drazin (UCL)
The Social Life of Concepts in Design Anthropology

21 November:   Pauline Garvey (NUIM - National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
Democratic Design and the Ikea Flatpack

28 November: Sue Hamilton (UCL) - Colin Richards ( Manchester)
Rethinking the Archaeology of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) 

5 December:  Anne-Christine Taylor (Musée de quai Branly, Paris)
On Amazonian Iconophobia. Lowland Indian relations to figurative images

Enquries to l.coupaye@ucl.ac.uk

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2010-11

AUTUMN 2010


4th October Stephen Eisenman (Northwestern)
"Meat Modernism: An Introduction"

11th October Emma Tarlo (Goldsmiths)
"Distant Intimacy and Virtual Materiality: Re-considering visibly Muslim dress practices in Britain"

18th October Rupert Cox (Manchester)
"Pencil of the Sun: tracking the reverberations of war memory in Okinawa"

25th October Erhard Schüttpelz (Siegen)
"Trance Mediums and New Media in the long 19th century. The heritage of a European Term"

1st November Ludovic Coupaye (UCL)
"Knowing What has been Done: Approaching Ritual Display of Yams through cognition"

8th November READING WEEK - no seminar

15th November Chris Tilley (UCL)
"The East Devon Pebblebed Project"

22nd November Johannes Fabian (Amsterdam)
"Katanga popular Painters and the virtual archive"

29th November Tamar Garb (UCL)
"The Fragility of the Figural: Some Thoughts on Contemporary South African Photography"

6th December Simon Schaffer (Cambridge)
"Soft Matters"

Enquiries to:

Christopher Pinney
Department of Anthropology
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2017-18

Spring 2018

15 January Gina Neff (Oxford Internet Institute) 
Making Data in Undisciplined Teams: Lessons from the field for quantitative analytics

22 January Jeff Silva (Centre Norbert Elias at La fabrique des écritures innovantes en sciences sociales)
From Harvard Sensory Ethnography to Fabrique in Marseille: Working with Moving Image in the Social Sciences

29 January Elizabeth Edwards (Honorary Professor UCL, Professor Emeritus De Montfort University)
'Our Ancient Monuments': Photographs and the Visibility the Past

5 February Catalin Brylla (University of West London, Material Culture)
Representation and Documentary Practice

12 February Reading Week - No Seminar

Cancelled due to illness - 19 February Charlotte Townsend Gault (Honorary Professor, UCL)
Broken Copper / Canoe Mend: Some Current Cultural Techniques on 'the Northwest Coast'

Please note the following three seminars have been cancelled due to UCU strike action

Cancelled - 26 February Steven Eastwood (Film Studies, QMUL) 
The interval and the instant: art, film, death and dying

Cancelled - 5 March Alex Rhys Taylor (Goldsmiths)
Meat, Morality and the City

Cancelled - 12 March Henrietta Moore (UCL Institute for Global Prosperity)
Visualising the ethical imagination: some thoughts on the Urban in Africa

Seminar Convenor: Haidy Geismar (h.geismar@ucl.ac.uk)


Autumn 2017 - Art in the Public Sphere: A Series of 4 Artist Talks 

2 October Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
Embassy Embassy, the Makings of Ethnographic Conceptualism, and Other Art-Research Projects About Incarceration and the Precocity of Statehood

9 October Filippo Minelli
Reality, Perceptions of Reality, and Remains 

16 October Clara Balaguer
"Isn't Weird That Most Discourse on Decolonization is Western?" And Other Questions From the Social Practice Periphery

23 October Zach Blas
"well that's not human lookin.. it works tho lol"

30 October NO SEMINAR

6 November READING WEEK - NO SEMINAR


Enquiries to Rafael Schacter (r.schacter@ucl.ac.uk)

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2018-19

Spring 2019

14 January - Kate O’Riordan - University of Sussex
Algorithms and sexuality: revisiting the biodigital 

21 January - Hyphen-Labs - Carmen Aguilary Wedge and Ece Tankal
In Emergency Break Glass 

28 January - Victor Cova - Aarhus University
Changing houses: architectural transformations at the settler colonial frontier in the Ecuadorian Amazon

4 February - Elena Gonzalez-Polledo - Goldsmiths
Can digital health save democracy? Meeting the cosmopolitics of digital worlds

11 February - Reading Week

18 February - Lina Hakim - Kingston University
Gyroscopic Thinking: how playthings shape the thinking that they put into play

25 February - Pauline Destree - UCL
Softwares, scandals and the ‘small-small’ economy: the politics of electricity in Accra, Ghana

4 March - Ramon Amaro - Goldsmiths
Machine learning and the empirical reality of a racialised future

11 March - Kate O’Donnell - Trans Creative
Telling our own stories

Enquiries to Antonia Walford (antonia.walford@ucl.ac.uk) 


Autumn 2018

1 October Prof Chris Tilley, Ilaria Pulini and Rafael Schacter (UCL)
London's Urban Landscape

8 October Prof Wayne Modest, Tropen Museum and Vreije Universitat, Amsterdam
Pressing Matter: What do with with Ethnography Collections in Europe

15 October Prof Charlotte Townsend Gault, UBC emerita and UCL Honorary Professor
Failed social relations and the volatility of cultural techniques in British Columbia

22 October Prof Eleanor Conlin Casella, Adjunct Professor in Humanities, University of Tasmania
“Doing Trade": a Sexual Economy of Imperial Prisons in Nineteenth Century Australia

29 October Dr Rebecca Saunders, Digital Humanities, Kings College London
(Im)material Labour in Digital Pornography

5 November READING WEEK - NO SEMINAR


Enquiries to Haidy Geismar (h.geismar@ucl.ac.uk)

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2019-20

Autumn 2019

30 September Rivke Jaffe
Criminal Contestations: Popular Aesthetics and Urban Order beyond the State

7 October Michal Murawski
The Rise of the Public Self(ie): "Fake Architecture" and Sensory Utopia in Putin’s PPParadise

14 October Alex Rhys Taylor
Eels, Weed and Hot Peppers

21 October Laura Grace Ford
Radical Spectrality

28 October Dhanveer Singh Brar
Colony Culture

 

Spring 2020

20 January Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (Goldsmiths)
The Globally Familiar: Mediating masculinities in Delhi, India

27 January Matti Pohjonen (SOAS)
Three Perspectives to Extreme Speech: Theory and Practice

3 February Chloe Dominique, Rebecca Jennings and Sasha Roseneil (UCL)
Queer Intimacies & Activism: A Conversation across the Social & Historical Sciences *Organised with QueerAnth to kick off LGBTQ+ History Month

10 February Donya Alinejad (Utrecht University)
Mediated Migrancies: How Genres of Digital Media Practice Form Transnational Experiential Worlds

Reading Week

[Cancelled due to UCU strike action] 24 February Benjamin Dix (SOAS & PositiveNegatives) and Lindsay Pollock (PositiveNegatives)
Graphic Violence: An Innovative Way of Representing the War in Sri Lanka

[Cancelled due to UCU strike action] 2 March Theodora Sutton (Oxford Internet Institute)
Textures of Digital Detoxing

[Cancelled due to UCU strike action] 9 March Jo Aiken (UCL)
Out of the Extreme: NASA, Astronauts, and Martians

[Cancelled] 16 March Zeynep Devrim Gürsel (Rutgers University)
Portraits of Unbelonging: Photography, the Ottoman State and the Making of Armenian Emigrants

ALL WELCOME

Seminar Convenors: Jill Reese jill.reese@ucl.ac.uk and Rik Adriaans r.adriaans@ucl.ac.uk

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2020-21

Spring 2021

18 January Christopher Pinney (UCL)
Contingency, Futurity and Ethics: Photographic Ethnographies from Nepal, Bangladesh and India

25 January Zeynep Devrim Gursel (Rutgers)
Portraits of Unbelonging: Photography, the Ottoman State and the Making of Armenian Emigrants

1 February Dieter Deswarte (UCL)
Collaborative Films to Tackle Social Stigma

8 February Marc Isaacs (UCL)
Staging the Real

Reading Week

22 February Theodora Sutton (Oxford)
Textures of Digital Detoxing

1 March Daniel Fisher (Berkeley)
Fire's Image: Media, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Apprehension

8 March Diana Vonnak (UCL)
Creativity and the Infrastructural Constraints of Curatorial Practice in Lviv’s Museums

15 March Sahana Udupa (Munich)
Anthropological Home/Field: The Dilemmas of Networked Data Relations

22 March Manal Massalha
Geographies of Hope: Reflections on an Ethnographic and Photographic Practice

ALL WELCOME

Seminar Convenors: Rik Adriaans r.adriaans@ucl.ac.uk and Michael Stewart m.stewart@ucl.ac.uk

Autumn 2020

5 October - Morten Axel Pedersen, University of Copenhagen
Centre for Digital Anthropology Annual lecture: Computational Anthropology: Quali-quantitative Analyses of Attention Economies during the Covid-19 Lockdown

12 October - Maria Salaru and Hannah Knox
The City as Environmental Mediation

19 October - Gökçe Günel, Rice University
Leapfrogging to Solar

26 October - Tess Lea, The University of Sydney
Decolonizing Trauma Theory by Way of Housing Disrepair: The Case of Santa Teresa, Australia

2 November - Shannon Mattern, The New School
Purity and Security: A Cultural History of Plexiglass

Seminar Convenors: Maria Salaru m.salaru@ucl.ac.uk and Hannah Knox m.salaru@ucl.ac.uk

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2021-22

Spring 2022

10 January - Guilherme Heurich (Leverhulme Research Fellow, Dept of Anthropology, University College London)
Language automata: the pervasiveness of English in computer programming

!Please note this seminar is on Zoom (link below)! 17 January - Diana Espírito Santo (Associate Professor in Anthropology, Dept. of Anthropology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) - speaker will join remotely
Imaginal media, animate apparatuses, and the temporalities of paranormal interference-as-effect in Chile

24 January - Xinyuan Wang (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Dept of Anthropology, University College London) - speaker will join remotely
The Contemporary Revolution in Digital China

!Please note this seminar is on Zoom (link below)! 31 January - Iván Chaar López and Héctor Beltrán (Assistant Professor of Digital Studies, Dept of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin; Assistant Professor in Anthropology, MIT) - speaker will join remotely
Borderlands and/as Machine

7 February - Penny Harvey (Professor of Anthropology, Dept of Anthropology, University of Manchester
Geology as Unconforming Infrastructure: engineering the containment of nuclear matter

READING WEEK

!Seminar cancelled due to the strike action! 21 February - Lee Douglas (Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Contemporary History, Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Images of Colonial (Dis)possession in Contemporary Portugal: The Material Traces of Mobility and Return from the Periphery

!Seminar cancelled due to the strike action! 28 February - Silvia Posocco (Reader in Social Anthropology, Dept. of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck University of London)
Forensic Biodata, Figures of Extraction, Biologizing Genocide

7 March - Ludovic Coupaye (UCL) and Carlos Sautchuk (Universidade de Brasília) presenting work from the Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity (CATT)
The CATT: A presentation

14 March - Sarah Kenderdine (Professor of Digital Museology, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
A Compendium of Computational Museology

Autumn 2021

4 October Dr Natasha Schüll (NYU New York University)
Data-based Selves: An ethnographic vantage on the ethical possibilities of quantification

11 October Professor Tim Edensor (MMU Manchester Metropolitan University)
The Contested Meanings and Uses of a Scottish Medieval Cross.

18 October Dr Isabel Bredenbröker (Goethe Universität Frankfurt)
Plastics as matter of life and death: Attributing durability in Ghanaian Ewe funerary contexts. 

25 October Dr Rosalie Allain (UCL University College London & Oxford)
'Gold walks like a snake': Tracking technical analogies between hunting and mining in Cameroon.

1 November Dr Nayanika Mathur (South Asia Centre, University of Oxford)
Entrapment: new ways of seeing big cats in India.

Material, Visual and Digital Culture Research Seminars 2022-23

Autumn 2022

3 October - Katrien Pype (Leuven) *Also streamed on Zoom (book tickets below)
Tech imaginations of “the good life”. Re-imagining sociality (Annual Centre for Digital Anthropology Lecture)

10 October - Branwen Spector (UCL)
Mediated mobility: internet infrastructures, social media, and navigation in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank

17 October - Shireen Walton (UCL)
Urban Digital Ethnography: Notes from a Milan Neighbourhood

24 October - Brian Larkin (Barnard/Columbia)
Technologies and Forms of Religious Revival in Nigeria

31 October - Anita Herle (Cambridge)
Curating Colour