EVENTS
UPCOMING EVENTS
Christian McBride & Sonia SanchezPlease join us for this very special discussion, moderated by Dyana Williams, and duo performance in celebration of Christian McBride’s The Movement Revisited: A Musical Portrait of Four Icons (Mack Avenue Records) at Penn Museum’s Widener Lecture Hall. Attendees are invited to visit the new Africa galleries from 5-6:30pm.
When Philadelphia-born bassist and bandleader Christian McBride arrived in New York in 1989 as a Juilliard student, he was the “Godchild of the Groove” with unlimited potential. Today, with over 300 recordings as a sideman and 11 critically- acclaimed albums as a leader, he now reigns supreme as the “Lord of the Lower Frequencies.” He’s the influential and ubiquitous bassist of his generation, as evidenced by his quintet Inside Straight, his big band, his trio and his work with everybody from James Brown, Pat Metheny, Chick Corea and Wynton Marsalis to Sting, The Roots, Bruce Hornsby and Paul McCartney....Keep Reading |
FEB 17 | 6:30 PM-7:30 PM
Photo of Christian McBride by Anna Webb
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DEMAGOGUERY & FREE SPEECHThe Documentaries & the Law lecture series on Media and the First Amendment, sponsored by Stephanie Abrutyn L’91, will consider the impact of the first amendment in documentaries and modern media.
This year’s lecture will be a Dialogue On Demagoguery and Free Speech between Professor Patricia Roberts-Miller, Professor and Director of the University Writing Center, Department of Rhetoric, The University of Texas at Austin and Professor Seth Kreimer, Kenneth W. Gemmill Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Demagoguery has been a frequent topic of American documentary films. Demagoguery is also seen as posing a threat to news media around the world today. But what precisely is “demagoguery”? Where does the power of its appeal of populism and irrational prejudice come from? American demagoguery has a “peculiar” relationship to the First Amendment. Freedom of speech allows demagoguery to develop, yet free speech is generally among its targets. Nonetheless, a democratic society that pursues a political praxis of robust debate and disagreement is best able to fend off and recover from demagoguery’s polarization and factionalism. Can we trust the First Amendment to right the ship of state if it is overtaken by demagoguery and bring about a return to democratic deliberation? Professor Roberts-Miller, a distant relative of Penn Law’s own Justice Owen J. Roberts, is the author of Demagoguery and Democracy, a pocket-size primer from Experiment Books. Professor Seth Kreimer is a constitutional law scholar who has represented plaintiffs in a range of constitutional litigation. |
FEB 20 | 5:00 PM-7:30 PMGITTIS 214 | HAAGA CLASSROOM
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CONVO & BOOK LAUNCH |
FEB 22 | 3:00 PM
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CEE Affiliated Faculty Grace Sanders Johnson and CEE Director Deborah Thomas will engage in a conversation and reception on Saturday, February 22nd at the African American Museum in Philadelphia.
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RECENT EVENTS
MEET THE SPRING 2020 FELLOWSEmily Carris began her presentation posing a question she first asked in England, while contemplating an image of a slave ship in a tumultuous ocean, "what does salt know?" Seven years after her work in England, Emily returned to Philadelphia to work on developing institutional space for art as scholarship, which culminated in her founding the Art Dept. Collective. Engaging with Black women’s traditions of quilting, textile work, and healing, one of Emily’s most exhibited pieces features indigo and silk matta root embroidered over the raised whip scars on a famous portrait of “Peter,” an enslaved man who escaped from a Louisiana plantation in 1868. She is following this interest in textiles and quilting to explore the concept of armor as clothing, and the powerful historical intersections of quilting and warrior culture.
Following Emily Carris's presentation, dr. Prof. Wayne Modest began by introducing his current project as the Director of the Research Center for Material Culture (RCMC). He began his talk with an insightful provocation: “What happens to a history of design if we look outside the West...or teach a history of photography starting in 1842 in Jamaica rather than one starting in 1839 in Europe?” Wayne then drew attention to the histories that remain to be written, and the voices that remain to speak, Wayne argued that ethnographic objects in these collections carry within them ways of thinking history and write history otherwise. Throughout his presentation, Wayne highlighted that decolonization also requires that we challenge the taken-for-granted assumption that museums are inherently socially useful institutions; they may or may not be such, but assumptions around the "obviousness" of their value to society serve to hold critique back about how things could be different, or transformations could be made in the role they play in society. These presentations were followed by a lively discussion session and lunch that grappled with the complicity of scholars, academics, and artists working in institutions deeply involved in the colonial project. Several attendees highlighted how uncomfortable such institutional complicity is, and in response others spoke of the need to live with and in this discomfort rather than dismiss it: Institutional repair requires work, and part of that work can be done by laying claim to institutional spaces in the way we speak, move, and gather, and in so doing carve out spaces for other voices and other histories. Following this discussion, other smaller discussions occurred around repatriating photography, the question of archival and imagery ownership, and the revolutionary histories embedded within objects that we are obligated to preserve though we may not yet be able to hear them. |
JAN. 2020
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MEDIUM/ARCHIVECEE Visiting Fellow Ernst Karel and collaborator Veronika Kusumaryati will present and discuss their work in the audio archives resulting from the so-called ‘Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea’ in 1961. This was a large-scale anthropological expedition organized by filmmaker Robert Gardner to what is currently West Papua with the intention, as he put it, to carry out “a comprehensive study of a single community of Neolithic warrior farmers.” Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donations, and consisting of several of the wealthiest members of American society wielding 16mm film cameras, still photographic cameras, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a microphone, the expedition settled for five months in the Baliem Valley, among the Hubula (also known as Dani) people. It resulted in Gardner's highly influential film Dead Birds, two books of photographs, Peter Matthiessen's book Under the Mountain Wall, and two ethnographic monographs. Michael Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller (Standard Oil) family, was tasked with taking pictures and recording sound in and around the Hubula world. Ernst Karel works with sound, including experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, electroacoustic music, and postproduction sound for nonfiction vilm [film/video]. His work focuses on the practice of location recording and composing with unprocessed location recordings; in performance he sometimes combines these with analog electronics to create pieces which move between the abstract and the documentary. His work has been presented at Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; Arsenal, Berlin; and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, among others. Sound installations with Helen Mirra have been exhibited at the Gardner Museum in Boston, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and in the 2012 Sao Paulo Bienal. Video with multichannel sound collaborations include Ah humanity! (2015, with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel) and Single Stream (2014, with Toby Lee and Pawel Wojtasik). He completed his PhD on the anthropology of sound in the Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago, in 2003. At the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, he collaborated on sound for vilms including The Iron Ministry, Manakamana, and Leviathan, and developed and taught a practice-based course in 'sonic ethnography.' Currently he is working through the archive of tape recordings from the so-called Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea, 1961, in collaboration with Veronika Kusumaryati.
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MON, DEC 2 @ 5:30PM
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ON LOCATION AND OTHER STORIES
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tUES. NOV 26 @ 1:30pm
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VA BENE ELIKEM FIATSI
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THURS. DEC 5 @ 1PM
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IMPLOSIONS AT THE INTERFACE OF SCIENCE(S) AND JUSTICE (S) |
WED DEC 4 @ 6:30 PM
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Save the date for an exhibit showcasing the end-of-semester interdisciplinary and collaborative works by Penn graduate students in Kristina Lyons' (Penn Anthropology) seminar, "Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s) "
WE DON'T NEED A MAPDir. Warwick Thornton (2017) (Australia)
Watch Trailer HERE The Southern Cross is the most famous constellation in the southern hemisphere. Ever since colonisation it’s been claimed, appropriated and hotly-contested for ownership by a radical range of Australian groups. But for Aboriginal people the meaning of this heavenly body is deeply spiritual. And just about completely unknown. For a start, the Southern Cross isn’t even a cross - it’s a totem that’s deeply woven into the spiritual and practical lives of Aboriginal people. One of Australia’s leading film-makers, Warwick Thornton, tackles this fiery subject head-on in this bold, poetic essay-film. We Don’t Need a Map asks questions about where the Southern Cross sits in the Australian psyche. Imbued with Warwick’s cavalier spirit, this is a fun and thought-provoking ride through Australia’s cultural and political landscape. |
NOV 10 @ 2PM
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PAST EVENTS
NOVEMBER THIRD THURSDAYOn Nov 19th, CEE hosted a lunch conversation with Lisa Britton, from Penn's French and Francophone Studies. She spoke on an video/audio that records the story of Moussa SY, a French-Senegalese descendant who, on any given day of the year, will don the uniform of his great-great-grandfather and walk 30 km from his home in Soissons to the memorial sites along the Chemin des Dames. Moussa Sy is a modern griot of sorts, a wandering storyteller eager to engage with those he encounters along his path, promoting the Senegalese perspective on the Great War and strengthening the connections of American-French-and Senegalese people.
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The great grandson of a Senegalese Tirailleur and an American professor of French are walking along a road in Picardie (Photo Courtesy Lisa Britton)
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OCTOBER THIRD THURSDAYOn October 17th, we joined colleagues at Annenberg for a lunch and a book talk by Alex Fattal, author of Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Columbia. In his talk, Alex Fattal drew from demobilization marketing campaign videos and print advertisement to explore how the market has become a principal ground for counterinsurgency warfare and the imagination of post-conflict futures in Columbia.
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#FROMNO2LOVEBLACK Feminist Centered Forum on Disrupting Sexual Violence in PhiladelphiaThere isn’t a more significant time to lift the courageous, intergenerational, diasporic Black voices in NO! The Rape Documentary, and love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse anthology than now. Fall 2019 marks both the 25th anniversary of the first pre-production meeting for the internationally acclaimed documentary film, NO!, and the forthcoming publication of the love WITH accountability anthology. Each of these works are groundbreaking, prevention resources that unwaveringly center diasporic Black survivors of adult rape and child sexual abuse. To commemorate the convergence of these milestones, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, the award-winning director of the film, and the editor of the anthology, partnered with the University of Pennsylvania, the Just Beginnings Collaborative, Feminist and Gender Studies Program at Colorado College, Scribe Video Center, African American Museum in Philadelphia, Leeway Foundation, and other sponsors/partners to present, #FromNO2Love: Black Feminist Centered Forum on Disrupting Sexual Violence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 31, 2019 - November 1, 2019. This gathering lifted the long-term and new survivor-led work that addresses, disrupts, and works to humanely end child sexual abuse and adult rape in Black and marginalized communities.
#FromNO2Love attendees/presenters |
Oct. 31 & Nov. 1
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HOSTILE TERRAIn 94A project cosponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Center for Experimental Ethnography, Cinema and Media Studies Program, Latin American and Latino Studies Program, Penn Provost, Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and SACHS Program for Arts Innovation, University of Pennsylvania
Hostile Terrain 94 is a participatory political art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project based at UCLA. The project memorializes and bears witness to the thousands of migrants who have died as a result of Prevention Through Deterrence, the U.S. immigration policy between Mexico and the United States. The pop-up installation at Penn Museum—to be on display September 25th for one day only—will be created by hundreds of people throughout Penn and Philadelphia. Volunteers will meet at various locations to handwrite on toe tags the identifying details of the nearly 3200 people whose bodies have been recovered along the Southern Arizona border since 2000. The time commitment is 30 minutes.
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EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY AT THE INTERFACES OF THE ARTS & SCIENCES
GRADUATE STUDENT INSTALLATIONS
April 30, 2019
5:00 - 8:00 PM
Please join the graduate students from ANTH 551 as they exhibit their final projects for Kristina Lyons's course on Experimental Ethnography at the Interfaces of the Arts & Sciences, which forms part of the curriculum for the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Students will be sharing their sound, photo, print, drawing, poetic, narrative, video, and light installations in Classroom 2 of the Penn Museum on Tuesday, April 30th from 5-8 pm.
April 30, 2019
5:00 - 8:00 PM
Please join the graduate students from ANTH 551 as they exhibit their final projects for Kristina Lyons's course on Experimental Ethnography at the Interfaces of the Arts & Sciences, which forms part of the curriculum for the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Students will be sharing their sound, photo, print, drawing, poetic, narrative, video, and light installations in Classroom 2 of the Penn Museum on Tuesday, April 30th from 5-8 pm.
7th ANNUAL SSMFRendering Matters of Concern and Present Histories
March 30-31, 2019 The Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) provides a creative, collaborative space to explore the affordances and challenges of multimodal strategies in research, and to interrogate their social implications. SSMF is a hybrid between a traditional academic conference and a film/media festival that fosters the intersection of art and science across disciplines since 2013. Rendering Matters of Concern and Present Histories is the theme of SSMF2019, and scholars, educators, artists, activists, visual legal advocacy and digital humanities groups are welcome to participate. This year, SSMF will feature works rendering matters of concern and the present histories of indigenous people, persons under any form of detention, diasporic communities, LGTB+ collectives, and environments in conflict. Learn more here. |
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An Opera of the Worlddirected by Manthia Diawara
Wednesday 27th March, 2019 Location: Scribe Video Center, 3908 Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19104 7:00 PM Manthia Diawara’s film is based on the African opera Bintou Were, a Sahel Opera, which recounts an eternal migration drama. The Bintou Were opera, filmed on location in Bamako, Mali in 2007, serves as a mirror for Diawara to build an aesthetic and reflexive story, through song and dance, about the current and yet timeless drama of migration and the ongoing refugee crises. The success and limits of fusing African and European perspectives are tested by interlacing performances from the Bintou Were opera, past and present archival footage of migrations, classic European arias, and interviews with European and African intellectuals, artists and social activists. |
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Mathangi Subramanianauthor of A People's History of Heaven
Monday, March 25 - Tuesday, March 26 Please join the South Asia Center in welcoming Mathangi Subramanian for a Creative Ethnography Workshop for Students at 12:00 PM on March 25th, followed by a book reading of "A People's History of Heaven" at 5:30 PM at Penn Book Center. She will also be participating in a Book Panel with GSE Faculty on Tuesday, March 26th at 12:00 PM in Silverstein Forum of Stiteler Hall. Please register for the Creative Ethnography Workshop at southasiacenter.com |
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Camae Ayewa Performancein honor of Marian Anderson
Wednesday 27th February, 2019 Location: Arthur Ross Gallery 6:00 PM Camae Ayewa premiered a new piece in honor of Marian Anderson, on her birthday. She developed the new work after a period of research conducted in the Anderson archives held by the Kislak Center. Her piece was accompanied by a trio, including a saxophone, vibraphone, and viola. |
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CEE Launch PartyFebruary 15th, 2019
Location: Penn Museum 5:00 pm -10:00 pm Join us for the CEE launch party! We will begin in Widener Auditorium at 5:00pm with a screening of students’ films from McArthur Genius Fellow and Fall 2018 CEE Visiting Fellow Louis Massiah’s Course “Films of Utility” (5:00- 6:30 pm). Then join us in the Upper Egypt Gallery for refreshments, live music, special performances, and a DJ (6:30 -10:00 pm). |
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Time PassesFebruary 2nd, 2019
Location: Christ Church, Philadelphia 12:00 PM Time Passes is an ongoing collaboration between Brooke O’Harra and Sharon Hayes that takes the audio book of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse as its spine. On February 2, it comes to the Neighborhood House stage! The performance is an 8-hour continuous event with Brooke, Sharon, their kid Alice, and their dog, Cosmos. Interested in “time,” they perform with and through To The Lighthouse in its entirety as a proposal-in-performance to occupy Woolf’s deeply gendered containers of time and thought. O’Harra and Hayes are motivated by the way in which To The Lighthouse embraces landscapes of thought over –or as– action, and take up Woolf’s challenge of form to find a new relationship to live performance. Funded by the Velocity Fund |
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AN EVENING WITH LOUIS MASSIAH-In conversation with John L. Jackson, Jr., the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dec 3rd, 2018 Location: Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum 5:30-7:00 pm The evening featured a screening of Massiah's new work-in-progress, the T.C.B. School of Organizing, a film that presents a biography of Toni Cade Bambara as a primer for social justice. The film catalyzes a conversation about using culture to organize community, and helping young activists to generate sustainable movements for social change. |
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MAKING SWEET TEA ROUGH CUT SCREENINGNov 13th, 2018
Location: ICA, 118 South 36th Street 4:30-6:30 pm "Making Sweat Tea" is a feature documentary from John L. Jackson Jr., E. Patrick Johnson and Nora Gross on the lives and loves of southern black gay men. This event was hosted by CAMRA. |
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PRODUCERS' FORUM: THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLORNov 7th, 2018
Location: Scribe Video Center, 3908 Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19104 The School of Social Policy and Practice and the Center for Experimental Ethnography co-presented a screening of The Rape of Recy Taylor directed by Nancy Buirski (USA, 91 mins, 2017). Director Nancy Buirski was present via Skype. The screening of The Rape of Recy Taylor was preceded by When We Came Up Here: Adeline Behline (USA, 2016, 6:06 min) by Tina Morton. |
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BECKETT SHORTSDirected by Dr. Marcia Ferguson
November 1, 2018 - November 4, 2018 Location: Bruce Montgomery Theatre This event featured a performance of Samuel Beckett’s rarely seen short plays, including a screening of his one and only film (entitled Film), starring Buster Keaton. These extraordinary, tragicomic short plays – Footfalls, Rough for Theatre I, Come and Go, Catastrophe, and his film Film – are full of humor, darkness, and humanity reduced to its essence. This was an unprecedented collaboration of the Theatre Arts and the Cinema and Media Studies Programs that engaged Beckett’s legacy in two dimensions, live and onscreen. |
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TRANSLATION: Scholarship, Dissemination, Impact
April 6, 2016
A roundtable discussion featuring Peter Galison (History of Science and Physics, Harvard); Laura Kunreuther (Anthropology and Experimental Humanities, Bard); and Louis Massiah (Founder, Scribe Video Center).
A roundtable discussion featuring Peter Galison (History of Science and Physics, Harvard); Laura Kunreuther (Anthropology and Experimental Humanities, Bard); and Louis Massiah (Founder, Scribe Video Center).
BLACK LIVES MATTER IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
April 2, 2016
An Experimental Ethnography @Penn panel at the Screening Scholarship Media Festival featuring Kurt Orderson (Filmmaker, South Africa), Christen Smith (Anthropologist, UT-Austin), and Quinsy Gario (Performance Artist, Amsterdam).
An Experimental Ethnography @Penn panel at the Screening Scholarship Media Festival featuring Kurt Orderson (Filmmaker, South Africa), Christen Smith (Anthropologist, UT-Austin), and Quinsy Gario (Performance Artist, Amsterdam).
VISUAL AND PERFORMATIVE ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HUMANITIES, SOCIAL SCIENCES, AND LAW
A Provost’s Interdisciplinary Seminar
March 19-20, 2015
The past twenty years have witnessed an “ethnographic turn” across the humanities and social sciences, and in professional schools, fine arts and architecture. Whether in business, medicine, or law, photography, sculpture, or performance art, qualitative social science methods have become more common as scholars and practitioners seek insights into the everyday worlds and ideas of those with whom they work. At the same time, contemporary developments in technology have made new representational techniques widely available and familiar, especially to younger generations now moving into academia. These transformations have forced us to confront new questions: How are we thinking about what the digital age means for humanistic, social scientific, and professional inquiry and practice in today’s world? How are we using both old and new technologies to advocate for and work with communities? What tools for research and communication should we offer the next generation of Ph.D. students, and how do we prepare them and others to assess non-text based research?
March 19-20, 2015
The past twenty years have witnessed an “ethnographic turn” across the humanities and social sciences, and in professional schools, fine arts and architecture. Whether in business, medicine, or law, photography, sculpture, or performance art, qualitative social science methods have become more common as scholars and practitioners seek insights into the everyday worlds and ideas of those with whom they work. At the same time, contemporary developments in technology have made new representational techniques widely available and familiar, especially to younger generations now moving into academia. These transformations have forced us to confront new questions: How are we thinking about what the digital age means for humanistic, social scientific, and professional inquiry and practice in today’s world? How are we using both old and new technologies to advocate for and work with communities? What tools for research and communication should we offer the next generation of Ph.D. students, and how do we prepare them and others to assess non-text based research?
Seminar talks:
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