Senior Seminar

Professor Marilyn Strathern, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, (University of Cambridge) Beings out of time, being out of time One of the virtues of ethnography is that it speaks of present times. But there are also various ways in which anthropologist might find themselves ‘out of time’. Using past events to...

Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa Associate Professor Jovan Scott Lewis This talk assesses how the 1921 race massacre's destruction of Greenwood in Tulsa, OK was reproduced by the insidiously violent processes of urban development, and how local responses to these circumstances have been...

Dr Alanna Cant (Univesity of Reading) San Jacinto or San José? Material Historicity in the Mis/Recognition of a Catholic Saint in Mexico In this talk, I investigate how people understand and experience the past through religious objects, and how their different perspectives about the past affect their experiences today...

Dr Andrea Mühlebach, Bremen Life as Debt or Debt to Life? Water Insurgencies in Europe This talk is an early attempt to think about two kinds of debt – and two kinds of forms of valuation – that come into play as public water utilities are financialized. On the one hand, the financialization of water utilities and...

Senior Research Seminar with Dr Alice Elliot (Goldsmiths) A tale of four miscarriages: loss, comparison, difference This paper is about shared loss within and beyond ‘the field,’ and the conceptual and political questions it opens for the classic anthropological problem of comparison, particularly in terms of the tensions...

Senior Research Seminar with Dr Casey High (University of Edinburgh) Translating Worlds and Defending Land in Amazonian Ecuador Based on fieldwork with Waorani communities in Ecuador, I explore emergent forms of collaboration that are becoming central social and political life in contemporary Amazonia. For an increasingly...

Revisiting stigma and dispossession: HIV prevention NGOs in Pakistan NGOs often portray commercial sex workers, injecting drug users, transgender people (hijrae), and homosexual men as quasi-legal persons who are locked in a policing- criminality relationship with the state, and who therefore need them to mediate this...

Ethnographic Betrayals: Secrecy, Loyalty, and Sovereignty in the Field Dr Salih Can Açıksöz (University of California, Los Angeles) Defined by the global surge of the far right and populist authoritarian leaders, our world-historical moment is flooded with discourses of betrayal. What does a global political climate...

The Psychopolitics of Vulnerability: Reflection on Moral Immunity and the Coronavirus Pandemic in Iran Dr Orkideh Behrouzan (SOAS, University of London) Please note the venue for this term's seminars is lecture theatre A, in the Arts School ( https://map.cam.ac.uk/Lecture+Theatre+A#52.203448,0.119533,17 ).

The Spirit of the Convention and the Letter of the Colony: Refugees and the Law in a British Overseas Territory Dr Olga Demetriou (Durham University) Through the legal case of refugees stranded on a British military base in Cyprus since 1998, this paper analyses how refugees may become empowered, through law, to redefine...