A A A

Anthropology in the Professional World Seminar Series

The seminars will be held on Wednesdays at Daryll Forde Seminar Room from 6pm to 8pm. All welcome.

Spring 2013

In the Spring Vocational Talks series, anthropologists working in industry talk about their work. Exploring the relevance of anthropological ideas, the talks are generally informal and conversational in nature, looking at how, why and where people do anthropological work, the benefits and the problems.

Wednesdays 6pm in the Daryll Forde Seminar Room (unless otherwise stated)

27th February - Anthropology and Design at Intel
David Prendergast, Chiara Garratini

6th March - Anthropology at Canonical
Charline Poirier

13th March - Anthropological Consultancy
Simon Roberts, ReD Associates

20th March - Social Design Roundtable
7pm Daryll Forde Seminar Room

Please make a note in your diary to come along and meet the speakers.

Organisers: Adam Drazin, Stefana Broadbent

Autumn 2012

21st November - "Filmic experiments between art, ritual and ethnography"

The first Anthropology in the Professional World event this term is a screening by an Aboriginal film collective from Australia, followed by a discussion.

Film Screening



5th December - "Zuckerberg on a Matatu: understanding local context to revolutionise the startup world"

Franco Papeschi (World Wide Web Foundation)

Mobile Innovation Labs in Africa. Currently active in Kenya, Ghana, Senegal - the labs aspire to be community catalysts, training centres and incubation hotspots for transforming ideas into start-ups able to generate useful, sustainable services to local communities.

Spring 2012

18th January - "Global Design Research: Local Fieldwork, Global Insights"

Geke van Dijk, Baas Raijmakers from STBY in London and Josephine Wong and Daniel Szuc from Apogee in Hong Kong

In this presentation some of the partners in the Reach network (a network of user research companies in Europe, India, China and Japan) help organisations to develop global insights from connected local studies. Together they explore people's practices and preferences, to identify new opportunities for service innovation. The talk will be given jointly by Geeke and Baas who are based in Europe and Josephine and Szuc who are based in Hong Kong.

25th January -  "Mobile technology, innovation and entrepreneurship: A view from the grassroots"

Ken Banks from Kiwanja.net and Frontline SMS

In his talk, Ken will discuss the impact of mobile technology in developing world - with an emphasis on the African continent - and how local entrepreneurs are finding new and innovative ways of exploiting this rapidly advancing technology. It will also discuss how this empowers grassroots NGOs, provide the history and background to the FrontlineSMS text messaging platform, and highlight some of the challenges in developing usable, human-centred mobile tools which work in resource-constrained environments".


22nd February - "Doing semiotics"

Sam Barton from Added Value Cultural Insights Team

In the eighties a number of marketers started trying to apply semiotics and structuralism to the commercial world. Whats at stake for the commercial and academic worlds when they come together like this? 


CANCELLED 29th February - "Zuckerberg on a Matatu: understanding local context to revolutionise the startup world"

Franco Papeschi and Aman Grewal from World Wide Web Foundation

Mobile Innovation Labs in Africa. Currently active in Kenya, Ghana, Senegal - the labs aspire to be community catalysts, training centres and incubation hotspots for transforming ideas into start-ups able to generate useful, sustainable services to local communities.

21st March -  "Tales of entanglement from Microsoft"

Richard Banks and Alex Taylor from Microsoft Research in Cambridge

As part of a social science-led group in Microsoft Research, we've spent a lot of time thinking about the relations between design, social life and technology. Predictably, we've been concerned with technological innovation. However, using perspectives from both design and sociology, we've also pondered on the seemingly endless entanglements between the social and technological. In this talk we'll discuss examples of our work and offer a flavour of applying these perspectives in a corporation like Microsoft.