School of Social and Political Science

Description

For an anthropology of the screen

We live among screens. These unavoidable objects point to fundamental transformations in social and cultural life. In this inaugural lecture, I reflect on this ubiquitous interface between form and life to theorise a contemporary world suffused with screens. To do so, I turn to an archive of fieldwork footage and photographs dating back to the start of this century, when I first undertook ethnographic fieldwork with screen practitioners in Bangladesh. Presented as a visual essay, I develop an anthropological approach to the screen through an engagement with my fieldwork footage. In this, I am led by my interlocutors, who are theorists and practitioners both, and who hold firm to the idea that aesthetic forms can act in the world, inaugurating change as they go.

Please note that this lecture might be filmed.

Timings: 4.15-5.30pm: Lecture in Adam House, 3 Chambers Street, in the basement lecture theatre.

Followed by a reception until 18.15.