Events
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Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (University of Kent) "From Recognition to Misrecognition: Indigeneity, the AI Dialectic and the Anthropomorphic Temptation"
15:00 - 17:00 9 November 2026
Abstract: What happens when a social anthropologist conducts a sustained dialectical exchange with an AI system on a topic he knows intimately through decades of ethnographic fieldwork? This paper presents an experiment in which I repeatedly challenge my AI interlocutor, Mirror-Mirror, to explain and justify its representations of Emberá indigeneity...
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Yael Navarro (University of Cambridge) "Fieldnotes, Library Scans and the Ethnographic Narrative After Catastrophe"
15:00 - 17:00 16 November 2026
Abstract: In this seminar, I will give an account of my return to my field notebooks and library materials on Antakya, Turkey, after the city’s complete destruction with the earthquakes of 6 and 20 February, 2023. How do fieldnotes read after catastrophe? What temporal framework and narrative structure might one adopt when the context for one’s...
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Ana Carolina Balthazar (UCL, London) "Shame, Anger, and the Emotional Logics of British Politics
15:00 - 17:00 23 November 2026
Engaging critically with recent interdisciplinary arguments linking repressed economic shame to anger and resentment among right-wing voters, in this paper I draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Thanet, a seaside area in South East England that has witnessed the growth of right-wing sentiments, to ask whether what I call an "emotional logic"...
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Alex Ungprateeb Flynn (UCLA) "The Momentinho and the March: Temporalities of Struggle in Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement"
15:00 - 17:00 30 November 2026
Drawing on fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork with Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST), this talk presents material from the recently published Pathways to Utopia (Indiana University Press, 2025). Against accounts that locate political change in spectacular moments of rupture, the talk argues that transformation in the MST, one of the...
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Laurie Denyer Willis (University of Edinburgh) "Wife-Work in an Evangelical Rio: Pleasure, Protection and the Minimally Safe Bedroom"
15:00 - 17:00 7 December 2026
This talk begins from an unlikely scene: a sex costume party hosted by an evangelical pastor in a woman’s home in Rio de Janeiro, where lingerie is prayed over as a tool of marital protection. Drawing on ethnographic research in Rio’s subúrbios, women’s evangelical networks and digital spaces, I examine how conservative evangelical projects...
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