Senior Seminar

Professor Patricia Spyer, (The Graduate Institute Geneva) Extreme Perception and the Work on Appearance Drawing on my forthcoming book, Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia (Fordham University Press 2020), the presentation addresses a momentous transformation of the terrain of the visual...

Dr Alice Street (University of Edinburgh) Humanitarian entrepreneurs: Hype and hope in Boston’s biotech hub What happens when speculative capitalism collides with humanitarian concern? Boston’s biotech hub, long established as a premium location for commercialising life-science research, is also home to a growing number of...

Dr Taras Fedirko (University of Cambridge) Follow the money: suspicion and expertise in an offshore investigation What role does suspicion play in investigations of offshore corruption? What does suspicion ‘feel’ and look like? And how does one learn to suspect? Building on fieldwork with anti-corruption investigators and...

Professor Tone Bringa (University of Bergen) To know one's grandfather's name: Bosniak Turks between kin and state The early 20 th century saw hundreds of thousands of people migrating from the Balkans eastwards to Turkey (and the late Ottoman Empire). This massive movement of people, its causes and effects on sending and...

Professor Harri Englund (University of Cambridge) Africa as an Altar of Sacrifice: The Struggle for Epistemic Justice Taking my cue from Talal Asad’s claim that secular redemptive politics has no place for the idea of the redeemer submitting him- or herself to suffering, I ask how epistemic justice would look like if it...

Peter Lockwood (University of Cambridge) 'Greedy Eaters' and their moralisers: A moral economy of continuity and consumption in central Kenya Beyond the tranquil northern suburbs of Nairobi lies the burgeoning peri-urban sprawl of southern Kiambu County - a criss-crossing network of towns punctuating the patchwork...

Dr Sazana Jayadeva (University College London) Learning to move: An ethnographic study of how social media is facilitating transnational student mobility from India Drawing on fieldwork focused on student migration from India to Germany, this paper examines the increasingly central yet understudied role of social media in...

Dr Maxim Bolt (University of Birmingham) Bureaucratic complicity and the temporalities of the law: property inheritance and the post-apartheid state in urban South Africa In the wake of political transition, how is bureaucracy positioned between popular expectations and a state’s deep continuities? The end of apartheid in...

Dr Judith Bovensiepen (University of Kent) Fiat infrastructure: Anticipation as transformative action in Timor-Leste’s oil boom Focussing on different media of public persuasion, this paper analyses the interconnections between speech and infrastructure in a large oil development project in Timor-Leste. It examines how...

Dr Rosie Jones McVey (University of Cambridge) Seeking 'contact': British horsewomen and the ethics of communication British horsewomen aim to forge a connection with their horse that is so close, it feels as though the two partners move and think as one. Their ambition is to reach such a level of embodied attunement that...