Roundtable - Exhibiting Research

This roundtable brings together members of the Department of Social Anthropology to discuss recent and ongoing exhibition projects. Working in diverse contexts – Japan, China, the UK, and Senegal – and in collaboration with artists, photographers, ceramic-makers, children, and long-term interlocutors, the speakers will each offer a short overview of their projects. They will reflect on the ethnographic and creative processes involved, and address the practical, ethical, and institutional challenges they have encountered along the way. This event is intended as the beginning of a wider conversation about what it means to exhibit research in the Department, and how such work might be supported and developed in the future.

For any questions, please contact Anna Wood (arw83@cam.ac.uk)

Speakers:

Dr Iza Kavedžija

Iza Kavedžija has co-curated several exhibitions with contemporary Japanese artists. The exhibition “Words Within” held in 2023 (and its earlier virtual counterpart) has served as a core element of the AHRC-funded project on creative practice of contemporary artists in Osaka, exploring their everyday processes of making.

Dr Kelly Fagan Robinson

Kelly Fagan Robinson conducted a year long programme on ‘inReach’, aiming to reshape elite institutions as inclusive domains through centrally placing work by people otherwise absent in traditional arts and academic spaces. This series critically questioned and therefore set to prove false the too-common trope that certain people are ‘hard to reach.’ By bringing artists, academics, and key local publics together via CRASSH, inReach hoped to amplify the underacknowledged value of lived expertise of socially marginalised people, while also fostering ongoing debates about transience, stigma and inequality in the UK. Reflecting on this experience, Robinson cautions other novice exhibitors on the pitfalls of attempting monumentalism during a first curatorial foray.

Dr Anna Wood

Anna Wood curated Xolu Dakar bi (the heart of Dakar), an exhibition held in 2025 in collaboration with two Dakar-based photographers and artists. The exhibition engaged with plans to resettle an informal settlement in central Dakar, the site of her research, and explored how visual collaboration can foreground lived experiences of urban transformation. It was exhibited at Cambridge Artspace as part of the Cambridge Festival, with discussions currently underway to present the exhibition in Dakar.

Zihan Xu

Zihan Xu is developing ‘Drifting Alone Together’, a co-creation project supported by the Public Engagement Starter Fund. Building on her doctoral fieldwork with young migrant creators in Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital, the project asks what it means to drift, and how drifting might open up otherwise ways of living well in an anxious world. Drawing on her dual role as an anthropologist-creator, Zihan will share this project-in-the-making, attending to the co-creation process through which content and form alike continue to evolve.