Past events
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Megnaa Mehtta (University College London). Retreat or Remain? Notions of a full life and a slow death from Sundarbans’ eroding coastlines
15:00 - 17:00 10 November 2025
As sea level rise erode coastlines of the Sundarbans, “managed retreat”—a process of relocating people to supposedly safer areas—is put forth by policymakers globally, and in India, as an adaptation solution. Through long-term ethnographic research with residents of Sundarbans’ coastal communities, this paper examines their desires to...
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Charlotte Al Khalili (University of Sussex). Scales of justice in post-Assad Syria
15:00 - 17:00 17 November 2025
This paper proposes an ethnographic exploration of post-Assad Syria that focuses on ideas and practices of justice in the aftermaths of mass atrocities. Based on fieldwork in the city of Daraa, it describes the different scales and registers of justice on which Syrian former detainees and families of disappeared and missing build their accountability...
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Gaudenz Metzger (University of Manchester). Life in Limbo: Hospice care, photography, and the performance of the everyday
15:00 - 17:00 24 November 2025
Modern Western societies have struggled to find appropriate ways of dealing with the existential situation of dying and death. Under the influence of biomedicine, rationalisation, and secularisation, death has increasingly been framed as a medical problem, stripping it of its social and spiritual dimensions. Frequently observed effects of the medicalisation...
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Ana Gutierrez Garza (University of St Andrews). Making it Through Activism: Precarious masculinities in Madrid
15:00 - 17:00 1 December 2025
Economic exclusion and poverty can create problematic masculinities as they challenge social structures of gender dominance, class mobility and social status. In this paper, I analyse the impact that precarity has on masculinities among housing activists involved in the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform of People Affected by Mortgages)...
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Charis Boutieri (King's College London). Speaking Freedom: The Tunisian public sphere between revolution and democracy
15:00 - 17:00 8 December 2025
This talk will present my forthcoming book, which interrogates the historical formations and contemporary reconfigurations of the Tunisian public sphere. While profoundly delimited under the French Protectorate (1861–1956), the nationalist single-party regime of Habib Bourguiba (1956–1987), and the authoritarian police state of Zine El Abidine...
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