Senior Seminar

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. Geoff 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’...

Caring beyond death: Narrative reorientation and the ethics of recognizing dying in Indonesia Dr. Annemarie Samuels (Leiden University) a_samuels_hr_300x300_1.png In a time of ever expanding, and expensive, medical possibilities to postpone death, in which dying is increasingly shaped by prognosis and decision making, how...

On becoming a ‘Victim’: some observations from Bangladesh Professor Katy Gardner (London School of Economics) katy_gardner_300x.png Based on ethnographic research in a feminist NGO in Dhaka, this paper examines the bureaucratic processes whereby people are classified as victims. In particular, the paper focuses on young...

Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being Professor Naisargi Davé (University of Toronto) indifference_on_the_praxis_of_interspecies_being_200.png Indifference is an ethnographic exploration of interspecies life in urban India across a range of contexts, both surprising and expected. In addition to showing how...

(Re)Generating Kinship: Intimate Encounters and the Making of 'New Worlds' in Canada's Climate Crisis Dr. Koreen Reece (University of Bayreuth) koreen_reece_300x.png Canada currently faces unprecedented climate disaster – from devastating wildfire to drought and flooding. Evoking a global array of other crises, from...

Arts of Irreconciliation and the Futuring of Bangladesh Professor Nayanika Mookherjee (University of Durham) photo_nmwebpage_2023_2.png Irreconciliation focuses on the less examined but frequent ethnographic instances when survivors refuse to forgive in response to persistent impunity of past injustices, particularly, in...

Kinship and Tourism Earnings in Papua: The Indigeneity of Commodification Professor Rupert Stasch (University of Cambridge) rupert_stasch_300x300.png Since the 1990s, Korowai of Indonesian Papua have been globally iconic subjects of primitivist tourism and television, due to foreigners’ idealization of them as living...