UCL Centre for Digital Anthropology Brown Bag Lunches

Our one-hour brown bag lunches are informal encounters where people associated with the department can tell us about their research. The idea is that they will speak for half an hour, or pre-circulate a paper and then we can discuss their work while eating our lunch during the house.

They will take place approximately every two weeks on Thursdays from 12.00-13.00 in the Staff Common Room.

Brown Bag Lunches this Term: 3 November, 24 November, 8 December

First Brown Bag Lunch – Visiting Researcher – Leah Junck

Thursday 3 November, Staff Common Room, Anthropology UCL

Leah Junck currently holds a Carnegie funded postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), for which she explores ways of imagining technology-driven healthcare-solutions in Mozambique. She previously worked as a journalist and conducted policy-oriented health research. Her interests include the social impacts of digital technologies and their role in establishing intimacy of various kinds. Furthermore, Leah seeks to contribute to an expansion of academic discussions towards the African continent through the Network for Digital Humanities in Africa, which she co-founded, and as junior editor of the Anthropology Southern Africa journal.

For this session, she will speak about her PhD research on loving, desiring and tindering in Cape Town. The Tinder dating application (and similar apps) have shaped what it means to get to know another individual beyond conventional sensory perceptions. Tinder has also become a household name for contemporary dating and is (in)famous for inventing a digitised ‘match-making’ process through typically quick, selective swiping motions on a touchscreen. This is a process that comes with frustration and disillusionment for users. Yet, the app remains widely used with people persistently deleting and re-downloading it. In this brown-bag talk, Leah encourages a conversation about how users straddle the tensions that come with this form of digitally enhanced experience.