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Spring 2024
Wednesdays 1.00 - 2.00pm | Daryll Forde Seminar Room | Department of Anthropology
Bring your own lunch!
17 January – Harshadha (Harsha) Balasubramanian (UCL)
“Designing Non-visual Access to Virtual Reality with Independent Artists from the UK”
At a moment when the hype around virtual reality (VR) is sharply declining, why are some independent artists still hoping for the medium to be accessed by new audiences, particularly in non-visual ways? How are these VR novices transforming digital accessibility through their approaches and justifications rooted in “art work”- performance, film, fashion, and photography? What might all this mean for virtual, reality, and the in-between?
Please come to co-reflect by means of, as my interlocutors would say, dialogue, description, and performance.
Harshadha (Harsha) Balasubramanian (UCL) is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Digital Anthropology at UCL and teaches on inclusive design at the Royal College of Art.
31 January – Abhishek Mohanty (SOAS)
“Intersectional Analytics: Classical ethnography in an emergent Digital World”
During my fieldwork, I adopted an intersectional analytic. This was a response to the diversity of my fieldsites and the issues of comparison. In particular, I will talk about this experience of (and what it means to be) carrying out classical ethnography on an evolving and emergent digital world.
Abhishek Mohanty is a PhD researcher in Social Anthropology at SOAS, studying how health app start-ups imagine futures. He also teaches a module on the anthropological perspectives of AI and social robotics. His background includes management consulting and entrepreneurship with prior research on teleconsultation (India), online representations of mask-wearing (UK), alternative ontologies adopted by tech start-up founders (India), online governance during COVID19 (UK), as well as propositions curated in digital spaces by tech companies (India and Romania).
21 February – Amelia Hassoun (Cambridge)
“Making Space for the Future: Imagining the Smart Nation in Singapore”
Through an ethnography of two “Smart Nation” smart home projects in Singapore, I detail how state planners project and replicate future and sometimes exclusionary imaginaries and how residents materially engage with these, sometimes replicating and sometimes reimagining them, through navigating their “technological everyday” (Amin 2007).
Amelia Hassoun is an anthropologist, currently a Junior Research Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge and a Research Fellow at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge. She obtained her PhD while based at the Oxford Institute of Internet Studies.
20 March – Jennifer Cearns (UCL)
“Kinship as code: generating personhood and afterlives through AI”
Drawing on anthropological theories of personhood, dividuality and affect theory, this talk examines how emerging generative AI technologies are used to maintain relationships with departed loved ones and considers this development within the broader trajectory of the use of the techno-material to commemorate and actualise human relationships. Using code to define the ‘edges’ of the self creates new engagements with questions of both self and relatedness.
Jennifer Cearns obtained her PhD at the Dept. of Anthropology UCL and is an Affiliate Research Fellow of the Centre of Digital Anthropology and of the Alan Turing Institute, whose research addresses AI in the realm of the (inter)subjective. Her current project considers how AI might simulate empathy within the context of digital mental healthcare. She is author of Circulating Culture (University of Florida Press, 2023) and co-editor of Contraband Cultures (UCL Press, 2024).
- Autumn 2023
Wednesdays 1.00 - 2.00pm | 14 Taviton Street | Darryll Forde Seminar Room
11 October - Craig Ryder (SOAS)
"Digital capital as resistance in post-pandemic Sri Lanka"Craig will be introducing his experimental approach that marries traditional ethnography and computational science to produce new and exciting results. His research includes six months in Sri Lanka collaborating and making content with what he calls “information influencers”, and six months training at the University of Helsinki where he learnt how to extract and visualise big data from Twitter. Taken together, Craig wants to advance the notion of an “augmented ethnography” (Pohjonen, 2020).
[CANCELLED] 25 October - Amelia Hassoun (Cambridge) - please note this seminar has been postponed until Term 2
"Making Space for the Future: Imagining the Smart Nation in Singapore"15 November - Silas Udenze (UCL)
"Sóró Sóké: Exploring Nigeria`s EndSARS Movement through the lens of Memory"22 November - Jo Krishnakumar (SOAS)
"Exploring Digital Activism and Advocacy: Insights from Sex Workers', Queer and Trans Rights Collectives in India"6 December - Fabian Broeker (LSE)
"Dating Apps and Narrativisation"- Spring 2023
Seminars marked "in person" are taking place in person in IOE - Bedford Way (20) C3.11.
Seminars marked "online" are taking place online only on Zoom.
Contact: Alecia Carter
[CANCELLED] 10 January Victoria Herridge (Natural History Museum) - in person
Title TBC17 January Andrea DiGiorgio (Princeton University) - in person
Bornean Orangutan Diet and Health - Novel Insights from Nutritional Geometry24 January Krishna Balasubramanian (Anglia Ruskin University) - in person
Unravelling the links between animal socio-ecology, human-wildlife interactions, & infectious disease ecology: insights from nonhuman primates31 January Habiba Chirchir (Marshall University) - in person
Title TBC7 February Alecia Carter (UCL) - in person
Primates' responses to death: insights into death awareness?Reading Week **NO SEMINAR**
[CANCELLED] 21 February Laura Lewis (UC Berkeley) - online
Title TBC[CANCELLED] 28 February TBC - online
Title TBC7 March Laura Lewis (UC Berkeley) - online
The Cognitive Foundations of Social Relationships in Great Apes14 March Wenda Trevathan (New Mexico State University) - online
Are Humans “Just Another Primate” in the Way They Give Birth?