MASS SHOOTINGS AND THE QUEST FOR FAME |
Friday Dec. 13th at 6:30 PM @Slought
A conversation with survivor and activist Samantha Fuentes about the representation of mass violence from David Bowie to Parkland
Slought and the SP2 Social Justice and Arts Integration Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce "Mass Shootings and the Quest for Fame," a public conversation on Friday, December 13, 2019 from 6:30-8:30pm. The event will explore
how the quest for fame motivates mass shooters, and will feature survivor and activist Samantha Fuentes and cultural anthropologist Eric Montgomery in conversation, and will be moderated by artist Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri.Keep
Reading...
Month in Review
MEDIUM/ARCHIVE | Audio Presentation
An Augmented Audio Presentation by Ernst Karel (CEE Fellow Fall 2019) and Veronika Kusumaryati
CEE Visiting Fellow Ernst Karel and collaborator Veronika Kusumaryati presented a provocative preview of an augmented sound work composed from the resulting 37 hours of tape in the audio archives resulting from the ‘Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands
New Guinea’ organized by filmmaker Robert Gardner 1961. The piece deeply engages with questions about the colonial presents (and histories) of ethnography using largely unedited sound from the HPENNG archives pieced together into a masterful crescendo. Michael
Rockefellers boyish voice---sometimes muffled, sometimes clear, and always tense with excitement---indexes narrow slices of Hubula landscapes and lifeworld that are both strikingly intimate (such as a woman washing clothing while laughing at him) and immersive
on a grand scale (a suspended moment where the sounds of a swarm of bees overwhelm the ears). The ending is not to be missed.
Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati respond to audience questions after the audio preview of their provocative augmented sound work.
IMPLOSION | Multimodal Exhibit
Implosion is a Multimodal Exhibition put on by graduate students in the ANTH 541 Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s) course. These amazing, interdisciplinary, and collaborative projects were the products of semester-long work. Students took
inspiration from the conceptual work of Donna Haraway and Joe Dumit to implode on combat medic trenches, an ebola epidemic, a data center, Monsanto´s glyphosate, and Mirena IUD technology, and then built multimodal installations out of the exercise.
Experiments in Audio Ethnography | Student Presentations
This past weekend, students from CEE Fellow Ernst Karel's course, ANTH 559/MUS 559, ‘Audio Ethnography’, presented a tremendously immersive set of final sound works in the Rainey Auditorium of the Penn Museum. The artists featured are as follows:
Winnie W.C. Lai presented "Stand with Hong Kong: Sounding Pain and Roar Through the Lennon Walls" Chase Castle presented "Breaking Boundaries" Florence Madenga presented "Night and Day" Juliet Glazer presented "Power Tools / Tones" Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo presented "Rivered Landscapes and Hidden Rivers" Nightplant Radio presented "Home Depeauxwave: Exposure Vigils" Jacob Nussbaum presented "What the Garden Belongs To" Austin Fisher presented "250kVA" Armaghan Fakhraeirad presented "Building Morality"
RITUAL REALITIES Lunch and Multimedia Presentation with Va Bene Elikem Fiatsi
Following a lunch presentation at the Center for Experimental Ethnography, Va Bene Elikem Fiatsi performed an intimate and collaborative self-curated work,RItual
reALITiesat Slought, followed by a conversation with CEE Postdoc Alissa Jordan. In "RItual reALITies," Fiatsi engaged in a part-performance and part-discussion that explored identities as rituals that are produced collaboratively if not
always conscientiously between individuals and societies. Detangling the notions of ritual, free will, and collaboration at the core of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ violence on the world stage, Fiatsi asks: what collaborative rituals are used to make certain
identities "real" and others "unreal" at State borders? and "Can the idea of "Reality" itself be seen as part of political rituals and ritual identity claims? LISTEN TO DISCUSSION BY CLICKING IMAGE BELOW.
Spring Courses
Museums, Colonialism, and the Question of Property | IT WAS THE LAW AT THE TIME |
Prof. Dr. Wayne Modest
CEE Spring Fellow 2020
Current discussions about who owns cultural property, especially in relation to objects acquired under and during Europe's colonial project, form their arguments, limits and possibilities around international legal instruments.
Like broader claims for reparations by formally colonized peoples, legal demands for reparations or restitution with regard to cases of colonial injustice often run up against responses such as 'it was the law at the time' ... Proposed
solution for these conflicts almost always circumvent questions of ownership (at the time) or other legal possibilities. They are sought in extra-legal ways. While the legal limits of current claims form part of the investigation of many of these studies,
they often fail to pay serious attention to the relationship between the law and the colonial project itself. Importantly, they also fail to explore the relationship between the law, questions of property and the 'creation' of the colonized subject. This seminar
will focus on this nexus and will interrogate the role of law within the colonial era, especially with regard to the legal fashioning of hierarchies of colonial subjects and colonial objects. Keep
Reading...
Edited for length by CEE staff
MODALITIES OF BLACK FREEDOM AND ESCAPE | Ships
Dr. Grace Sanders Johnson
Emily Carris
CEE Spring Fellow 2020
Joanne Douglass
The artistic and community practice of boating/shipping is the touch point for this course. The course revolves around three major projects. First, the seminar readings and discussion will prime students with ethnographic, historical,
theoretical, and technical understandings of boats and shipping. Second, students will share-collect oral histories with members of the black West and North Philadelphia boating communities. With these narratives, course participants will craft a sail that responds
to the immediate concerns and aspirations regarding black escape and freedom. Students will design, assemble, and mount the sail onto a boat at the end of the semester. In the process of creating the sail, studying community practices, and mapping routes of
escape for Philadelphia communities, students will also earn their boating license (surprisingly, this does not require getting on a boat).
Dancing the African Diaspora | AFR 245 (Undergraduate Course)
Dr. Jasmine Johnson
This seminar/studio course introduces students to theories, debates, and critical frameworks in African Diaspora Dance Studies. It asks: What role does dance play throughout the African diaspora? What makes a dance 'black'? How
do conceptualizations of gender and sexuality inform our reading of dancing bodies? Using African diaspora, critical dance, performance, and black feminist frameworks, we will examine the history, politics, and aesthetics of "black dance". Through a keywords
format, we'll construct both a vocabulary: a body of words used to describe a phenomena, and a grammar: a body of rules that lay bare the operations between terms. This course recognizes the fluidity of meaning between words depending on the context, geography,
and circumstance of their evocation. Our key terms will allow us to examine a number of dancers, choreographers, companies, and movement practices. Moving across an African diasporic map, this course explores the politics of black choreography, and the political
significance of black bodies in motion.
Performance Studio | FNAR 585
Dr. Sharon Hayes
This course supports the individual and collaborative production of performance works. As the medium of performance consists of diverse forms, actions, activities, practices and methodologies, the course allows for an open exploration
in terms of material and form. Students are invited to utilize technologies, materials and methodologies from other mediums and/or disciplines such as video, photography, writing and sound. In addition to the production component, the course will examine multiple
histories of performance through readings, screenings and directed research.
Visual Legal Advocacy | LAW 979-001
Dr. Regina Austin
Visual Legal Advocacy will introduce students to the art of making short nonfiction advocacy films on behalf of actual individual clients and/or groups devoted to the advancement of the cause of social
justice. Instruction will track the steps in the production of a nonfiction or documentary film, starting with pre-production planning (including writing treatments and shooting scripts, budgeting, and scheduling), going on to the rudiments of production (including
introductions to camera, lighting, and sound equipment), and concluding with post-production (including making paper edits and an introduction to editing). Participants will be divided into several working groups that will be responsible for the production
of a short piece of visual legal advocacy, most likely a video clemency petition made on behalf of a formerly incarcerated person whose employment opportunities are limited by her/his criminal record or a victim impact statement made on behalf of a person
harmed or injured by Philadelphia's gun violence.
Ethnographic Film Pt. II | EDUC 586 | ANTH 583
Dr. Kathy Hall
Dr. Amit Das
This ethnographic methodology course considers filmmaking/videography as a tool in conducting ethnographic research as well as a medium for presenting academic research to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. The course engages
the methodological and theoretical implications of capturing data and crafting social scientific accounts/narratives in images and sounds. Students are required to put theory into practice by conducting ethnographic research and producing an ethnographic film
as their final project. In service to that goal, students will read about ethnography (as a social scientific method and representational genre), learn and utilize ethnographic methods in fieldwork, watch non-fiction films (to be analyzed for formal properties
and implicit assumptions about culture/sociality), and acquire rigorous training in the skills and craft of digital video production. This is an ABCS course, and students will produce short ethnographic films with students in Philadelphia high schools as part
of a partnership project with the School District of Philadelphia. Due to the time needed for ethnographic film production, this is a year-long course, which will meet periodically in both the fall and spring semesters.
