Past events
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Alistair Lomas (University of Manchester). Revolution, salvation, seaweed: Toward an anthropology of hype
15:00 - 17:00 29 September 2025
While undertaking research into seaweed cultivation on the west coast of Scotland in 2022-23, I struggled to understand a gap between what was being written and spoken about seaweed farming in the media, industry reports and conferences, and what I was observing empirically in my fieldsite. According to the former, I was seeing the beginning of...
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Declan Murray (University of Manchester) The Plastic Divide: Global environmentalism and the search for life in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
15:00 - 17:00 6 October 2025
On 1 June 2019 plastic bags were banned in Tanzania. The ban was driven by a global environmentalist narrative that plastic bags harm marine life and livestock; contribute to flooding events; and produce unsightly litter. Five years later, small polyethylene pouches remained integral to daily life for the majority of residents in Tanzania’s biggest...
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Kwame Phillips (University of Southampton). The Multisensorial as Maroon
15:00 - 17:00 13 October 2025
Collins, et al. (2017) invite anthropology into a renewed engagement with contemporary media ecologies and with the transformative potentialities of the multimodal. This position advocates for embracing the multicultural and polyvocal, and encourages academics to be imaginative, creative, boundary-pushing, and system-challenging. In this talk,...
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Sarah O'Brien (University of Manchester). Landscapes, timelessness and ambivalence in the nuclearised peninsula of La Hague
15:00 - 17:00 20 October 2025
Abstract to follow. Sarah O'Brien is a Research Associate (Mimesis in Action) in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.
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Emmanuelle Ricaud Oneto (CSGA, Dijon). "Our children? Sold to the State. They will come back in cans of tuna”: Analysis of a rumor on social policies in the Peruvian Amazon
15:00 - 17:00 27 October 2025
This presentation suggests taking seriously a rumor circulating among the Maijuna, a Western Tukanoan indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon, regarding social policies such as cash transfers, school food, and old age pensions implemented since 2012. Based on a long ethnographic investigation among the Maijuna, it examines how this rumor constitutes...
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