Senior Seminar

Dr Natalia Buitron (University of Cambridge) An Amazonian Subjunctive: How to Transform the World by Playing Others

Dr Iza Kavedžija (University of Cambridge) Embodying Emptiness: Enskilment and the artistic imagination in Japan

Professor Michael Schnegg (Hamburg University) Affective Closures: When Sharing Becomes Shameful Sharing has long been a valued practice in Namibian communities. Being dependent in terms of economic goods, labor, and food was seen as the usual contribution to shared affectivity in the group. In recent years, however...

Dr Rebecca Prentice (University of Sussex) Between the Technocratic and the Unruly: Work, Labour and Precarity in Times of Crisis Anthropologists of work and labour have developed a unique understanding of precarity, based on extended ethnographic encounters with workers both ‘at work’ and in their lives and reproductive...

Professor William Mazzarella (University of Chicago) Advertising as Integral Magic: An Afterlife What if one were to take seriously the proposition that advertising isn’t like magic, rather it is magic? And further, what if advertising isn’t just a matter of manipulation, but also, for the magician themselves, a question...

Prof Laura Rival (University of Oxford) Alejarse Is Not Aislarse: Constructing Anthropological Solidarity With Indigenous Strategies For Legal Empowerment This paper builds on the expert witness statement I was asked to write as part of my work for the Petitioners’ legal team that is challenging the state of Ecuador in the...

Dr Alex Pillen (UCL) The reflexive pronoun: Notes on an anthropology of language As language folds back onto itself and reflects itself, the surface of the utterance becomes a kind of dwelling for the anthropologist. This is not about deep structures unearthed by Lévi-Strauss or the observable reality of linguistic...

Dr Magnus Course (University of Edinburgh) Three Ways to Fail: clown / witch / usurper This talk constitutes a narrative exploration of how thinking through archetypes of failure might offer glimpses of what it means to live well. Failure is something that we, as humans, do. Here I tell the story of how I learned to fail...

Dr Maka Suarez (University of Oslo, Norway) NOW ON ZOOM - After Debt: Transnational migration, counter-speculation, and the right to housing What kind of politics are possible and necessary after mortgage default? How do people rebuild their lives after eviction and foreclosure? In this talk I address these questions by...

Dr Mareike Winchell (LSE) Ghostly Invasions: Political Theologies of Fire in Post-Coup Bolivia Massive wildfires erupted across Bolivia only months before the violent ousting of the country's first Indigenous president, Evo Morales Ayma, in 2019. Media critics depicted his mainly-Indigenous followers as ghostly "invaders"...