Senior Seminar

Senior Research Seminar 21st November with Professor Tom Yarrow (Durham University) Life Restored: heritage steam nostalgia and the past at the end of time Through an ethnographic account of steam railway enthusiasm, this paper explores how the restoration of steam railway infrastructure is bound up with the restoration...

Senior Research Seminar 14th November with Professor Madeleine Reeves (University of Oxford) Ashar: politicising shelter and its absence in a state ‘without homelessness’ madeleine_reeves_image.png How to make homelessness visible in a country where it officially did not exist? In the capital of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist...

Senior Research Seminar 7th November with Dr. Chloe Nahum-Claudel (University of Manchester) The witch hunter as big man in post-colonial Papua New Guinea This paper focuses on the management work that precedes and follows a witch hunt in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea. The argument is that, just as the...

Senior Research Seminar 31st October with Dr. Lilith Mahmud (University of California Irvine) The Tale of the Chocolate Man: Masonic Friendship and the Consumption of Race in Postcolonial Italy Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that “we are all cannibals.” Eating the other is a way to identify and commune with them. Drawing from...

Senior Research Seminar 24th October with Professor Richard Vokes (University of Western Australia) The Road to Tweheyo’s House: Infrastructure, Auto-construction and State-making in Post-development Uganda Recently, the Government of Uganda has embarked on the largest road building programme in the country’s history. Over...

Senior Research Seminar 17th October with Professor Sarah Green (University of Helsinki) European Border Bystanders: Animals, Plants and More Than European Borders European borders exist everywhere, providing traces of colonial, among other, histories. Those European borders also leave traces of cross-border travels, both...

The ephemerality of encounters: notes on Hindu-Muslim interactions in upwardly mobile Karachi Dr Ammara Maqsood Abstract To speak of friendships is to is to speak of a sense of familiarity and place. What, then, are the possibilities for and limits of relationality when one side can be rendered stranger at any moment? In...

The ephemerality of encounters: notes on Hindu-Muslim interactions in upwardly mobile Karachi Dr. Ammara Maqsood (University College London) To speak of friendships is to is to speak of a sense of familiarity and place. What, then, are the possibilities for and limits of relationality when one side can be rendered stranger...

Social Media Tribes: Renegotiating the State-Society Divide in Jordan Dr. Geoffrey Hughes (University of Exeter) Dominant depictions of social media have often focused on its technical dimensions, especially the growing ability of individuals to disseminate words and images through far-flung networks thanks to the...

God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End Dr. Casey Golomski (University of New Hampshire) 30-05-25_casey_golomski_image_300x300_1.png A new work of creative ethnographic nonfiction, God's Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life's End (Rutgers University Press and Wits University Press) shows how older ‘racist’...