Senior Seminar

Dr Soumhya Venkatesan (University of Manchester) Invocations of freedom and the creation of right-wing publics in England Isaiah Berlin remarks that ‘almost every moralist in history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little...

Dr Maurizio Esposito La Rossa (LSE) Complicate jokes: political rivalries, royal diarchies and joking relationships among the Sakalava of Madagascar If political rivalries have interests that motivate them, and strategies through which they unfold, they also have a particular form through which they express themselves...

Dr Maya Mayblin (University of Edinburgh) Shadow Partners and Virile Celibacy: priests, sex, and secular politics in Brazil In this talk, I explore the stories of a group of Catholic priests who enter the world of municipal government, and examine how queer, celibate, and heteronormative concepts of gender and sexuality...

Dr Rosie Jones McVey (University of Cambridge) Learning From The Herd?: Ethics and Intercorporeality in Equine-Assisted Therapy Horses are being harnessed for a new sort of work, as therapists’ assistants. Within equine-assisted therapy programs, the nature of horses – as herd and prey animals - is thought to make them...

Dr Judith Scheele (EHESS) A deliberate oversight? Bourdieu at the Kabyle assembly Pierre Bourdieu’s fieldwork in Algeria was foundational for the development of his main theoretical concepts. These, in turn, continue to loom large in the social scientific common sense. Recent research has conclusively analysed the many...

Professor Hannah Knox (UCL) Commoning Data: Informational politics in the Energy Crisis In this talk I will draw on recent research with two projects that have been pursuing energy activism through data practices, to reflect on the role that informational mediations of energy relations come to play in the enactment of...

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...