Previous Seminars

Social Anthropology Seminars 2022-23

Autumn 2022

5 October - Ammara Maqsood (UCL) Due to the rail strikes this first week will be hybrid. Please make sure you are a part of the UCL Anthropology Seminars Team on Microsoft Teams if you would like to join online.
The work of time: Personhood agency and religious difference in married life in urban Pakistan

What is the work of time on a marriage, and how does it transform people as they struggle to change and leave traces on others? Through reflections of middle-class women in Pakistan who married men who did not share their religious aspirations, I focus on how difference is negotiated and conceived in these marriages, and on the unexpected outcomes in the religious outlook of both spouses. The work of time, articulated through the concept of sabar (forbearance), emerges here as canvas for a confluence of human and non-human interventions, influences and motivations, urging us to think of individual agency neither as autonomous action as theorised in the liberal tradition, nor as wilful submission, as elaborated in Islamic contexts. Rather, agency, the capacity to assert one’s own visions and hopes, depends on the malleability and 'openness' of persons to time, leaving those who desire change in others equally exposed to transformation.

12 October - Mette High (University of St Andrews)
The Matter of Facts: Responsible Innovation and Energy Imaginaries in the US Oil and Gas Industry

This presentation will examine how oil and gas industry participants in Colorado reflect on the potential energy mix of the future. While renewable energy sources now increasingly appeal to politicians, publics and investors, these industry participants dismiss renewable energy imaginaries and regard oil and gas as resources that are destined to enjoy great longevity. They mock and ridicule renewable energy sources, scorning them for being ‘factually impossible’. While oil and gas industry participants see their own industry as a harbinger of innovation, they deem other industries void of such potential. Exploring these mocking dismissals, I will show how epistemes of facts, legacies of wildcatter risk taking, and geoscientific knowledge are mobilized to defend fossil fuels at a time of climate emergency.

19 October - Ruben Andersson (Oxford University)
The price of life: Security and surveillance in the human bioeconomy 

From the war on terror to financial and migration crises on through the covid-19 pandemic and mounting climate and geopolitical risk, crisis has become a dominant mode of governance – the famous ‘new normal’ – yet what is perhaps less appreciated is the extent to which it is also offering exceptional impetus for state and corporate innovation. Security agendas have been among the great beneficiaries of this innovation, as exemplified by the extensive bio-surveillance of the pandemic, by advanced border control operations, or by how climate change is being framed as a threat multiplier by the military establishment. From health to climate, and from borders to 'surveillance capitalism', security thinking and practice is encroaching on a growing number of domains of human life in ever more intrusive fashion. This paper tentatively sets out to examine this security expansion by visiting one of its key fields of experimentation - the quest to control human movement. Drawing on examples of migration control and of everyday mobility tracking, I will focus on how sophisticated forms of (bio)economic extraction in such operations have come to put a price on life itself.

26 October - Nicholas Lackenby (UCL)
Holy people: Ethno-moral belonging in central Serbia 

This talk explores the concept of peoplehood by drawing on ethnographic data from the predominantly Orthodox Christian context of central Serbia. Scholars of the former Yugoslav region – and of ‘postsocialist’ Eastern Europe more generally – often approach issues of religion and nationality through an institutional, state-centric lens, reducing expressions of collective sentiment to ‘ethno’ or ‘religious’ nationalism. But such analyses fail to illuminate local feelings of belonging to a geographically and historically rooted ‘people’ (narod) – a collectivity which is not seen as coterminous with the State, and which may – at times – be in direct opposition to it. More than just a by-product of populist politics, peoplehood must be understood as a powerful moral framework which people can inhabit, especially in the face of perceived threat. In merging the anthropology of nationalism/ethnicity with the anthropology of religion the paper considers versions of belonging which are premised on an integrated conception of extended kinship ties, moral foundations, and the materiality of place – and which resonate beyond the Balkans.

2 November - Andrew Sanchez (Cambridge University)
Kill Your Ancestors: Clickbait Wars and Decolonization

This paper explains why debates about the decolonization of anthropology tend to become reactionary and confrontational, and outlines a model for why productive critique is central to intellectual progress. In a small, young discipline that values subjectivity, the decolonial critique of tradition is more likely to be felt as a personalized war on one’s professional community and sense of self. The paper argues that decolonization should not be conceived as a discrete generational war that can be definitively won. Rather, it is an ongoing transformation that expresses the logics of social progress and is consistent with the ethnographic imperative. The essay suggests that discursive degeneration surrounding decolonization is partly driven by the technological demands and constraints of social media debate, as scholars tend towards simple, affectively charged statements that court attention.

Social Anthropology Seminars 2021-22

6 October (4-6pm, online) - Dr Olga Ulturgasheva (University of Manchester) and Dr Barbara Bodenhorn (University of Cambridge)
Languages of Emergency, Infrastructures of Response, and Everyday Heroism in the Circumpolar North

13 October (11am-1pm, online) - Dr Loretta Lou (UM Macau)
Freedom as Ethical Practices: On the Possibility of Freedom through Freeganism and Freecycling in Hong Kong

20 October (11am-1pm, DFSR, in-person) - Dr Chihab El Khachab (University of Oxford)
Notes on the Difficulty of Studying State Archives in Egypt

27 October (4-6pm, DFSR, in-person) - Professor Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen)
Evolution Without Inheritance: Steps Towards an Ecology of Learning

3 November (4-6pm, online) - Dr Radhika Govindrajan (UW University of Washington)
“This Village is No Longer a Village”: Sex, Scandal, and Rurality in Himalayan India

 

Spring Term 2022

12 January (11am-1pm, online & in-person) - Dr Luke de Noronha (Sarah Parker Remond Centre, UCL) 
Deporting Black Britons: An Ethnography of Expulsion

He is the author of Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica (Manchester University Press, 2020, British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Memorial Prize) and co-author of Empire’s End Game: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021).

19 January (11am-1pm, online & in-person) - Dr Amelia Odida (Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS)
Decolonising Policy, Analysis, Research

Her PhD thesis applies decolonial strategies to the analysis of the UN policy of constitutional assistance (UCL Department of Political Science, September 2021). She works with theories of decoloniality and coloniality developed by scholars such as Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano, and teaches Decolonising World Politics. In this talk she will depict Decolonising as a Research Method and present the various strategies we can use.

26 January (4-6 pm, online) - Prof Janet McIntosh (Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University)
Necropolitical head games: Twisted language and 'misbehavior' in the US military

She is the author of The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast (Duke University Press, 2009, Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion) and Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans (University of California Press, 2016, Honorable Mention in the 2018 American Ethnological Society's Senior Book Prize, and Honorable Mention in the 2017 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing). In this talk she will present new material and push some provisional ideas forward.

2 February (3-5pm, online) - Prof Elisabeth Povinelli (Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University in the City of New York)
Heritability and the Ancestral Present - A New Project

She is the author of Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke University Press 2016, Lionel Trilling Book Award) and The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Duke University Press, 2002, Art Forum Best Book of the Year).  She will talk about a project she is just beginning to work on.

9 February (4-6pm, online) - Prof Christina Leza (Associate Professor in Anthropology, Colorado College)
Centering Anti-Racism in our Curriculum: Critical Race Studies and Black Feminism in Anthropological Theory

She is an anthropologist and Yoeme-Chicana activist scholar, author of Divided Peoples: Policy, Activism and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border (University of Arizona Press, 2019) and co-author of the Handbook on Indigenous People's Border Crossing Rights Between the United States and Mexico, an online community resource, 2019. She is currently experimenting with centering critical race theory and Black feminist anthropology in teaching her department's core anthropological theory class. Her presentation will draw from both classroom experience and her recent discourse-focused research on Critical Race Theory debates to discuss the benefits and challenges to this anti-racist work.

23 February (11am-1pm, hybrid/online) - Dr Izzy Gibbin (Researcher, Social Life, London)
Barbicanos and their Bullshit

Their PhD thesis  explained the persistence of social inequalities in the British arts sector, using the anthropology of value, language, ritual, and urban space (UCL Department of Anthropology, March 2021).  They were recruited by Social Life in August 2021 and work with community groups and residents at sites across London to understand the relationship between the built environment and social cohesion. They will talk about the usefulness of 'value' to the theory and method of ethnographers working with elites.

! Seminar cancelled due to the strike action! 2 March (11am-1pm, online) - Prof Patrice Maniglier (Département de philosophie, Université Paris Nanterre)
The 'Geological Turn': The Practical and Epistemological Refoundation of Anthropology in the Context of the Emergence of the 'Terrestrial' as a Central Question

He is Maître de Conférences in the Philosophy Department at the Université Paris Nanterre, a philosopher and public intellectual. He has written on Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, Latour. He is the author of La Vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2006), La Perspective du Diable, Figurations de l'espace et philosophie, de la Renaissance à Rosemary's Baby (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010), Foucault va au cinéma (Paris: Bayard, 2011).

9 March (11am-1pm, hybrid/online) - Dr Rosalie Allain (ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford)
Generativity and Technicity on a Cameroonian Resource Frontier

Her PhD thesis explores practices and conceptions of generativity in a situation of scarcity through an examination of artisanal mining amongst Gbaya-speaking people in the East Region of Cameroon (UCL Department of Anthropology, February 2021). She is a founding member of the new Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity at UCL and is a member of the Anthropologie de la Vie research group at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale in Paris. She will present aspects of her current post-doctoral research.

16 March (11am-1pm, hybrid/online) - Prof Danny Miller (Department of Anthropology, UCL)
The Irish and the Philosophers

What should the relationship be between anthropology and philosophy? This talk suggests that the way anthropologists have tended to look up to philosophy may be detrimental to the discipline of anthropology and suggests an alternative more sideways relationship. The argument is made through a summary of a book currently being developed - The Irish and the Philosophers, in which each chapter of an ethnography set in Ireland is juxtaposed with an analogous philosophical discussion. The philosophers range from encounters with Socrates, the Stoics, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Rawls. Topics include freedom, ethics, place, sports, community and the purpose of life.

Social Anthropology Seminars 2020-21

Autumn 2020

7 Oct - Toussaint Losier (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
A Protracted Punitive Turn: Black Radicalism and the Crisis of Mass Incarceration in the postwar US

14 Oct - Emma Abotsi (Goldsmiths) 
Title: Marking cultural boundaries: Transnational education and the making of ‘African’ children among British-Ghanaian families

21 Oct - Zerrin Özlem Biner (University of Kent)
Digging the Historical and Encountering the Spiritual: Ordinary Life and Dispossession of Ruined Heritage in Mardin, Southeast Turkey.

28 Oct - Shaheed Tayob (Stellenbosch University)
Islam as a Lived Tradition: Embodied Articulation and Muslim Food Practice in Mumbai

4 Nov - Heonik Kwon (University of Cambridge)
Morgan’s civitas and modern civil war

Spring 2021

 

Social Anthropology PhD Student Presentations 2021

28 April – Chair: Rafael Fuentes Tarin

Jake Cassani (LM)
Bread and Salt: Syrian Refugee Labourers and Lebanese Hashish Farmers in the Northern Biqa'a Valley, Lebanon

Charles Beach (LM)
Emprendedores Forzados: Ex-Smugglers of Venezuelan Petrol Turned Unwilling Entrepreneurs in the Colombian Border-City of Cúcuta

5 May – Chair: TBA

Ioanna Manoussaki-Adamopoulou (RM & CS)
From People on the Move to Lives at a Standstill: Refugee Rights, Politics of Care and Production of Otherness at Europe's borders

Juliet Brown (MS & AA)
Immersive Encounters with Developmental Trauma

12 May – Chair: TBA

Victoria Tecca (RM)
The Production of Violence: Migrant Illegalisation and its Consequences along the French-British Border

Kelsey Weber (RM)
Practices of Belonging: Identity Among Polish Tatars

Social Anthropology Seminars 2019-20

Autumn 2019

2 October - Ruba Salih (SOAS University of London)
“Fossilised lives!” Refugees, settler colonialism and the reordering of life and non-life in Palestine

9 October - Iza Kavedžija (University of Exeter)
An attitude of gratitude: older Japanese in the hopeful present

16 October - Linda Barwick (University of Sydney/SOAS University of London)
Songs at the interface: community interactions with online collections

23 October - Olly Owen (University of Oxford)
Syncretism, popular culture and ethnogenesis: interpreting Nigerian soldiers' WW2 experiences through song

30 October - Janet Carsten (University of Edinburgh)
Marriage and Self-making in Penang, Malaysia: Transformations of the Intimate and the Political

Spring 2020

15 January – David Graeber (London School of Economics)
From the Indigenous Critique to the Invention of the Left: or, on the origins of the question of the origins of social inequality

22 January – Deborah Reed-Danahay (University at Buffalo)
'A sense of one's place': Bourdieu, social space, and (im)mobilities.

29 January – Mike Rowlands and Stephan Feuchtwang (UCL & LSE)
It's time to reintroduce an anthropology of civilisations

5 February – Karin Barber (University of Birmingham & LSE Centennial Professor)
(RAI President's Lifetime Achievement Award 2019: Karin Barber CBE:

Karin Barber is Emeritus Professor at the University of Birmingham in African Studies and a Centennial Professor in the Anthropology Department at the LSE, and is known for her long-term work amongst the Yoruba, especially in their theatre and language. Her works have won numerous prizes, as has her doctoral supervision, and she has performed various voluntary roles with conspicuous success, including being a Vice-President of the British Academy, President of the African Studies Association, and has been given additionally a Yoruba chieftaincy title). Popular poesis: How Yoruba texts are made in everyday life.

12 February – Camilla Power (University of East London)
Gender and ritual power among African hunter-gatherers

[Cancelled due to UCU strike action] 26 February – Zerrin Özlem Biner (University of Kent)
States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey

[Cancelled due to UCU strike action] 4 March – Megan Laws (London School of Economics)
All things being equal: uncertainty, ambivalence and trust in a Namibian conservancy

[Cancelled due to UCU strike action] 11 March – Hedwig Waters (UCL)
A deserving share: the cosmo-economics of commodity chains in the Mongolian borderlands.

[Cancelled] 18 March – Heonik Kwon (University of Cambridge)
‘Civil War and Communitas’ draws upon After the Korean War: An Intimate History, CUP due to be out in March 2020). 

Social Anthropology Seminars 2018-19

Spring 2019

9 January Stephen Lyon (Aga Khan University)
Political Kinship in Pakistan: Affective and Strategic Dynastic and Marital Network

16 January Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (University of Kent)
Iphigenia’s dream: generational accountability in times of austerity

23 January Stefaan Jansen (Manchester University)
Anthropological (in)fidelities to Alain Badiou

30 January Naomi Leite (SOAS)
Rethinking Rationality: On Comparison and the Kinship ‘I’    

6 February Dana Walrath (Global Brain Health Institute, Trinity College Dublin/UCSF)
Birth, Death, and Working at the Edges

13 February READING WEEK – No Seminar

20 February Judith Scheele (Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin)
Fifty shades of khaki: military urbanism in the Chadian Sahara 

27 February  Sarah Green (University of Helsinki)
Geometrical anthropology: on the continued importance of being somewhere in particular (in the Mediterranean, for example)

6 March Andrea Muehlebach (University of Toronto)
A Vital Politics: Water Insurgencies in Europe

13 March Michael Herzfeld (Harvard University)
Subversive Archaism: Why Governments Attack Loyal Citizens

Contacts: Ruth Mandel (r.mandel @ucl.ac.uk) and Charles Stewart (c.stewart@ucl.ac.uk)

---

Autumn 2018

3 October - Ramon Sarro (Oxford University)
The City of the Future and The Forest of the Ancestors: Prophetic Landscapes in Northern Angola

10 October - Anne Christine Trémon (Université de Lausanne)
Acting Like the State: Public Goods Provision and Tributary Social Reproduction in an Urbanized Village (Shenzhen, China)

17 October - Akira Takada (Kyoto University)
Environmental perception and wayfinding practices among the San of the Central Kalahari

24 October - Jamie Barnes (University of Sussex)
The Ontological Implications of Spirit Encounters

31 October - Rebekah Plueckhahn (UCL)
The prism of quality – Urban ethics and ownership in Ulaanbaatar

7 November READING WEEK - NO SEMINAR

Enquiries to Jerome Lewis (jerome.lewis@ucl.ac.uk)