Talks. Conferences. Presentations. Lectures.
Exposure and Their Bodies
Looking forward to participating in this panel, organized by Adam Sargen and Chitra Venkataramani, at the American Anthropological Association, in New Orleans!
Panel Abstract: Studies of exposure have brought attention to the fragile and entangled relations of bodies and environments. From toxic chemicals to changing climates, exposure challenges notions of bodies and selves as separable from the worlds in which they work, play, eat, and breathe. This panel builds on conversations on exposure from feminist studies of science and technology and environmental anthropology. These studies have drawn attention to how experiences of exposure are not simple facts but are rather caught up in epistemic struggles that materialize the impacts of exposure on some bodies and not others. They demonstrate ways exposure makes, even as it degrades, bodies and selves, inscribing local and global hierarchies of race, gender, and class in corporeal forms and capacities.
HSS Roundtable: Ecologies of Exposure
Co-organized with Sam Hege, this roundtable seeks to explore not only how the logics of exposure have become an integral component of environmental knowledge; by involving experts on the Mississippi Delta region, it also aims to activate conversation about how communities and social actors, past and present, have understood, withstood, or countered the material distributions and legacies of exposure within the environs surrounding this year’s HSS meeting. In doing so, it embodies a relational sensibility attentive to the complex entanglement of material vectors, elemental forces, and systems of multiple kinds. Participants will address how the knowledge and action of ecosystems, bureaucratic regulatory regimes, plantation economies, petrochemical infrastructures, medical understandings of health and climate, the logics of historical preservation, and modes of collective memory-making intersect with the deep histories of political and social stratification that characterize the region. Rather than positing natural processes or social structures as a priori determinants in ecologies of exposure, panelists will share how they combine various methods, such as ethnographic narrative, material analysis, GIS mapping techniques, and archival research, in order to unearth how more-than-human agencies become intertwined with anthropocentric legacies within materializations of exposure. Through this locally-grounded focus, our roundtable discussion will bring experts on the region from multiple disciplines into conversation with fellow colleagues visiting New Orleans to sketch out new trajectories, theories, and methods for understanding how both social histories and histories of science shape, and are shaped by, emergent as well as enduring ecologies of exposure.
With : Shannon Lee Dawdy, University of Chicago; Kathryn Olivarius, Stanford University; Ashley Rogers, Whitney Plantation; Leila Blackbird, University of Chicago
Photo: Mississippi River Birdfoot Delta in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana from space, May 2001. Produced by NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Sartorial Productions: Stitching Narratives of Migration in Germany’s Ruhr
Looking forward to participating in this wonderful panel “Upcycling — in an extended sense” at the upcoming German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology. I will be speaking about participatory art project that emerged out of a cooperation between Berlin-based artist Nadin Reschke and the International Bildungs- und Kulturverein für Frauen (IBKF) based in Castrop-Rauxel, Germany. Thematically the project conjoined a resurgent interest in textiles and handicraft among contemporary artists with the current urban trend of “upcycling” in its idea to establish a fashion label among women with a “migration background,” one that would produce and sell clothing designed in relation to the women’s particular biographical histories. In this article, I draw upon writers in film theory and feminism to argue that this project offered these women a mode of resistance and agency, both in relation to the “fashion industry” and within the socio-spatial politics of small-town Germany. Within respect to the former, I argue that by expanding clothing into a set of narrative objects and relocating labor in the hands of these woman--who thus acted both producers as well as models--the project inaugurated two “communities of sense” – that is, two new trajectories for “what can be seen, what can be said, and what can be done.” (Rancière 49) In doing so, the project inverted the normal everyday socio-spatial politics of Castrop-Rauxel, offering to participants a mode of belonging to the public commons on the basis of their migration experience, rather than in spite of it. More broadly, the project exemplifies an alternative practice for revalorizing discards and leftovers that contrasts with the dominant logic and imagery of the Ruhr's post-industrial renaissance.
Unsettling Exposure Workshop
This workshop approaches exposure as a documentary practice that has been foundational to certain forms of environmental thinking, as well as counter-documentation practices that disclose the relation between the unevenness of environmental exposure and histories of colonialism, extraction, imperialism, and racism.
Exploring exposure as a way of making sense of one’s surroundings, this workshop invites scholars, artist researchers, and members of various collectives to think through the potentials and limits of exposure as a form of environmental knowledge, a mode of collective action, and its relation to how we understand and write history in the present. for more information regarding the program, please visit the following website: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/unsettling-exposure-international-workshop
Translating Telemedicine: Parables from a Cambodian Clinic
Looking forward to being part of this panel in Race, Indigeneity, Caste, and Health Futures: Perspectives from the Global South at the 2024 American Anthropological Association Meeting in Tampa! More about the panel themes below:
Over the past three decades, anthropological research has established two interlinked dimensions of health: first, biological and social markers of identity (Race, Indigeneity, and now increasingly Caste) are central to health research; and second, identity (Race, Indigeneity and Caste positionalities) shapes experiences of health. While problems in and of the Global South have constituted empirical analyses in this scholarship, theoretical interventions rooted in the diverse realities of the Global South are limited, calling for a decentering of the “Euro-American canon” (Manderson and Levine, 2018). A focus on anthropological praxis, particularly on issues of health, wellbeing, disease and their relationships to social positionality, therefore, demands that conceptual interventions from the Global South assume centrality in anthropological theorizing. It would necessitate ethnographies that demonstrate how categories like Race, Indigeneity and Caste travel across the North-South divide; how identity shapes and is in turn shaped by myriad socioeconomic, biosocial and political contexts; and, how the complexities that arise from these mobilizations open up new theoretical possibilities.
Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) have shown how health innovations travel from the North to the South, often in search of conducive markets and new biomedical research domains (Petryna, 2009; Sunder Rajan 2017; Rudrappa, 2018; Alinechev and Nguyen, 2019). However, the aftermath of innovation needs a more careful and nuanced anthropological analysis: What happens when innovations travel, mapping along the way onto existing social hierarchies, that then encounter the situated lived realities of communities? How do assumptions of objectivity embedded in existing technologies pave the way for ever-innovative heath and biotechnological interventions that nonetheless consolidate universal notions of human difference? How do individuals, communities and experts engage with such interventions? What tensions arise when biomedical knowledge is juxtaposed against local systems of knowledge?
Envisaging an experimental conceptual space informed by ethnographic rigor, this panel invites contributions rooted in lived experiences of health inequities and health possibilities in the Global South to explore the theoretical potential embodied in this scholarship. We invite particularly contributions that discuss the intersectionality of health experiences through the positionalities of Race, Indigeneity, Caste, Class, Gender, Sexuality and Disability. This may include theoretical or empirical papers with a focus on historical, critical medical, queer, crip and feminist anthropology and STS.
The panel further seeks to include authors from diverse geographical locations. The objective is therefore to foster decolonial dialogues on “Health Futures” as radically imagined (Chao and Enari, 2021) from the perspective of the Global South. In the wake of a global pandemic, with the apprehensions of living on a rapidly changing planet, and ongoing wars, this panel will emphasize on the persistent and emerging health problems in the south to offer a chance at reimagining global health.
Tracing Exposure Land-Air Relations as Chokepoints in Rethinking Ecosystems
Looking forward to participating and presenting some new material and nascent thinking about ecologies of exposure this week at the 2024 History of Science Meeting in Merida, Mexico!
Troubling Exposure: 4S/EASST Panel Session
Acknowledging diverse forms of expertise, this three session panel will not only address how environmental exposure has become a troubling and widespread component of contemporary life through certain devices and regimes of scientific legibility; it will also explore how various coalitions, networks, and researchers collaborate to materialize exposure otherwise.
Making Sense of the Environs (Invited Talk)
This presentation explores the grammar and logic of environmental exposure through attention to noise. Tracing the transductions through which noise becomes registered within environments of underground mining, this talk discusses how the uncertainties and difficulties its ephemeral temporality poses as it becomes an epistemic thing within a science of exposure in the mid-twentieth century.
Sounding the Underground (Conference Talk)
The symposium “Documenting in Artistic Research” addresses the practices, discourses and power logics of documenting and places this in relation to artistic research that is constantly repositioning itself.
In lectures and performances, readings and roundtables by artists and scientists, power-effective formations of documenting will be discussed. Recording systems, feedback loops, scores and transformation and translation processes will be presented and discussed in the context of artistic research and artistic processes.
Curated by Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick, Binational Artistic PhD Program in collaboration with GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst.
12:45 Sounding the Underground CYNTHIA JEAN BROWNE (Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin)
“Water Under the Surface,” Roundtable
Looking forward to participating in the roundtable “Water Under the Surface,” co-organized by Manuel Tironi and Andrea Ballestero, at the 2023 American Anthropological Association meeting this fall.
Film Q and A: A Natural History of Destruction
A Natural History of Destruction is a montage of “poor images” (Steyerl); it provides a documentary witness to Ruhr’s material process of de-industrialization through experiences of collective spectatorship conveyed by a sequence of multiple, individual shots.
Ringvorlesung
Abstract: Steve McQueen’s Western Deep (2002, Super 8 film, transferred to video) opens with a barrage of sound within a pitch-black “cinema-like space”. Critics and observers have described the experience as one in which viewers are subjected to “an oppressive deluge of industrial rumbling sounds in which the “walls and floors shake.” Such vibratory exposure to sound in the viewing space is verbalized as enabling a documentary ‘mimicry’ close to what miners’ themselves experience daily experience. Such projections, however, overlook seminal phenomenological differences between the sensorium of the miner’s ear (Morris 2008) and those visiting venues of the artworld. In this paper, I draw upon my research on “noise-induced hearing loss,” an occupational health category that become formalized and bureaucratized in the 20th century, to begin mapping out differences in the transductive pathways of sonic exposure that shape its aesthetic, legal, and epistemic meanings; such pathways shape whether exposure operates as an aesthetic experience, form of clinical evidence, or a conduit of bodily discipline. In doing so, my work aims to contribute understanding on how the affordances of differently sensitive surfaces and their concretization within historically-specific technical modalities (“O’Gorman and Hamilton 2016) enabled the emergence of competing logics and forms of subjectivity in relation to conceptualization of injury, risk, and loss.
EXPOSURE, DOUBLED: SENSITIZED MATTER AND THE DYNAMICS OF DISCLOSURE
Panel Title: Exposure, Doubled: Sensitized Matter and the Dynamics of Disclosure
with contributions by: Ali Feser, Susan Schuppli, and Cynthia Browne
Discussant: Anna Polze
Abstract: In the wake of the 19th century invention of photography, the historical semantics of “exposure” broadened to encompass a technical meaning; “strictly speaking,” exposure refers to a measure of the light-energy which reaches the plate or film within a given amount of time (Turner 1940) Both wavelengths of visible light, as well as high frequency gamma rays—which are invisible to the human eye but registered in the more-than-human sensorium—can elicit changes on a sensitized surface, transforming it into a document. Photography and film, thus, do not merely represent a subject, but document the effect of exposure, materialized in the form of an object through the synthesthia of touch.
Exposure as a mode of objectification is thus dependent upon documentary devices, materializing in the felicitious mating of vectors and sentient matter, the properties of both conditioning the representational, epistemic, and aesthetic dimensions exposure acquires. As these objectified effects circulate, such acts of exposure acquire other semantic entailments: exposure as a matter of unrevealing or disclosing, proving events as forms of evidence and affecting different publics.
This panel explores this doubled aspect of exposure as both relation and effect, offering new insight into exposure’s conceptual and material valences as it becomes registered across a range of material surfaces and scales—planetary, geological, sonic, and corporate—and differentially mobilized in the making--or deferring—of political, scientific, and ethical claims.
Keywords: exposure, nuclear fallout, secrecy, disclosure, sensorium
Keynote: COLLABORATING ACROSS DOCUMENTARY PRACTICES
What does it mean to conceptualize the making of a documentary film as collaborative work? Can we understand collaboration as a reflexive lens that also attends to the power relations and social differentiations inherent within the film’s fabrication? Such is the proposition of this event. Through this frame we aim to emphasize not only the formal aesthetics of the cinematic object, but also its infrastructure and the work expended through more-than-human relations. Emphasizing flux and movement over genre and medium, the graduate research training group “Documentary Practices: Excess and Privation” investigates the manifold practices that are involved in the emergence of the document(ary), a process that entails the social production of evidence effects, legibility, and expressive value, as well as their contestations.
In this event, moderated by members from the graduate research training group, we will explore how filmmaking emerges through contingent and negotiated relations between filmmakers and film subjects, (recording) technology, rhythms (of the sea), and the sedimentations of history; we will also probe how the infrastructural conditions of collaborative work shape the ever-shifting horizons of the documentary imagination.