Here it is, May already! We are wishing health and healing for all of you and your loved ones during this continued period of self isolation. In the past month, CEE has been settling into new rhythms of working remotely, coordinating events across home offices in Philadelphia (and beyond). At the end of April, the CEE faculty advisor board met via Zoom for an annual end-of-year recap. During the meeting, we reflected on the past year---both before the pandemic and in the current moment as it endures. Faculty recounted their experiences of suddenly switching to remote teaching and learning, and their reflections and ideas about virtual group learning. We were also able to look toward the future, discussing additional courses to be added to the Certificate Program in Experimental Ethnography and we are solidifying our annual theme for 2020-2021, as we look forward to the fourfellows that will be joining us.
As you may have seen in our event reminders this past month, we have launched a virtual installation,Experiments in Audio Ethnography, which revisits the final projects of students from our Fall 2019 fellow, Ernst Karel's, CEE course "Audio Ethnography". This week we are featuring Juliet Glazer's work "Power Tools/Tones" on our social media channel and website. We are also lucky to be able to offer weekly short film screenings, courtesy Scribe Video Center. These films, which are part of the Precious Places Community history project, are made by Philadelphia community organizations and are available for one week each. This week we are featuring"Where Art Lives"by the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. Read the entirefilm schedulehere.
We are reminded in these times about just how much has changed and how much hasn't. We encourage everyone to stay engaged on our social media outlets during this time, to send along your ongoing projects or works-in-progress, or just scream into a pillow and know that we can hear you in spirit.
NEWS
"Where Art Lives" by West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance/Paul Robeson House & Museum (2018, 10:42 min)
Inspired by Paul Robeson, a man who used his artistic voice as an instrument against racism and oppression all over the world, the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance/Paul Robeson House & Museum---from its namesake to its founding and its community programming---symbolizes the man.
We are pleased to announce that Professor Guthrie Ramsey has been elected to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Ramsey is an accomplished composer, pianist, and musicologist, and is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, in addition to being an affiliated faculty member of the CEE. Learn more about Dr. Ramsey's latest musical project, "A Spiritual Vibe, Vol. 1" below! Congratulations, Dr. Ramsey!
"Power Tools/Tones" by Juliet Glazer (2019, 13:52)
Juliet Glazer, a PhD Student in Anthropology and Music (Ethnomusicology) uses a range of methodologies and frameworks from Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology to understand the social worlds surrounding musical instruments and other ‘material’ aspects of musical traditions. Her experimental audio ethnography, "Power Tools/Tones", is composed from field recordings made over the course of a semester in the Fabrication Lab at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.
Jasmine Blanks discusses Theatre as a Health Intervention
Jasmine Blanks, CEE Student and founder of B4 Youth Theatre group in Liberia, has been bringing her performance expertise to bear on the problem of misinformation during COVID-19, speaking out in Penn GSE News and in B4 Youth Theatre's webinar series, Conquering COVID/Lessons from Liberia. In the most recent conversation, performers and participants held a thoughtful discussion of how to translate prevention awareness messaging from the Ebola crisis to the COVID pandemic.
"Making Sweet Tea" is Making a Splash!
A big congratulations to John L Jackson Jr. and Nora Gross, directors of "Making Sweet Tea," which has met with critical success on film circuits throughout the United States. Since heading out on the festival trail, the film has been collecting honors and accolades, including: Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Out on Film: Atlanta LGBTQ Film Festival 2019, an AARP SIlver Image Award at the Reeling 2019: 37th Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, winning Best LGBTQFilm at the San Diego Black Film Festival 2020, Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Kansas City FilmFest International 2020, and Judges Choice for Documentary Film at Longleaf 2020. Keep Reading...
CEE Student receives Sach's Award for "Audible Metropolis"
Elizabeth Bynum, the recipient of the School of Arts and Sciences Student Arts Innovation Grant, is forging ahead on an audio documentary related to her dissertation in Music and Anthropology. Titled,"Audible Metropolis", her piece will weave together multiple kinds of audio to explore the relationship between citizen and government practices of measuring, evaluating, and controlling sound in Mexico City. Bynum will also facilitate two one-day workshops at Penn where graduate students will be invited to share and workshop sound-based research projects, so stay tuned for more information on these events.
FALL COURSES
Anthromedialities
Steven Feld
2020 CEE Fellow
In recent years much has been made of the “beyond text” turn in anthropology, specifically the need to re-evaluate the singular authority of “writing culture.” Several new approaches advocate for non-textual medialities, with representations originating in both sonovisual media and performance. Less, however, has been theorized and advocated about intermediality and the multicompositional practices of transmediality and plurimediality, specifically their more transgressive multisensory epistemology. .Keep Reading
Black Speculative Futures
Christina Knight
2020 CEE Fellow
Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar’s exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance....Keep Reading
Critical Ethnography
Jasmine's Johnson
"Translating experiences into text", although seemingly straightforward, requires layers of interpretation, selection, and the imposition of a viewpoint or politics. While ethnography is often narrowly conceived of as a methodology, this course considers ethnography as a mode of inquiry, as a philosophy, as an ongoing question and performance...Keep Reading
Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities
Kristina Lyons
This course is inspired by the need to attend to environmental challenges as inherently social concerns. The course is co-taught by faculty from the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine, and will address the challenges and possibilities of working across disciplinary boundaries, building collaborative affinities, and negotiating frictions between diverse methodologies and epistemological approaches...Keep Reading
Bodies of Water: Conflicts and Collaborations Around Wetlands and Watershed
Kristina Lyons & Marilyn Howarth
The objective of this seminar is to interrogate the kinds of conflicts and collaborations that emerge around diverse relations with water, and to think about the ways our human bodies are inseparable from the “natural” world and the multiple bodies that compose it. This seminar asks students to reflect on these issues through the lenses of ethnography, feminist science studies, legal philosophy, and environmental anthropology in different U.S. and global contexts...Keep Reading
Making Space and Public Art
Kenneth Lum
Spatial practice is a key concept in the modern understanding of the city as a society of abstract space, one in which the problem of human alienation is riven with the logic of spatial spectacularization. Public Art is often employed to address or mollify such urban problems through concepts of historical reconstruction or institutional critique, including possibly testing the limits of public expression.Keep Reading
Duchamp is My Lawyer
Peter Decherney & Kenneth Goldsmith
This course examines the impact of copyright law on artists and creative industries. Looking at publishing, music, film, and software, we will ask how the law drives the adoption of new media, and we will consider how regulation influences artistic decisions. A mix of the theoretical with the practical, this course will be using UbuWeb (the largest and oldest site dedicated to the free distribution of the avant-garde) as our main case study.Keep Reading
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
Guy Ramsey's "A Spiritual Vibe" Vol. 1
Take a look at Dr. Guthrie Ramsey's latest music project, "A Spiritual Vibe, Vol.1," in this sizzle reel, hot off the press! Ramsey is an author, composer, musician, and scholar, as well as the founder of the popular blog Musiqology.com. Ramsey is also the composer and performer of music for the film Making Sweet Tea, by Nora Gross and John L. Jackson, Jr. which has been winning awards at film festivals across the country.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Visual and Performative Ethnography Symposium | In March of 2015
As we spend time both thinking about the current moment and reflecting on another fruitful year, we are reminded of the conversations that led to the founding of the Center for Experimental Ethnography. The conversations had and questions asked during theVisual and Performative Ethnography Symposiumset the stage for folks to congregate under one institution and respond to the "ethnographic turn" across all disciplines. We invite you to rewatch some of the remarks from 2015, as these conversations are ongoing and continue to influence our work at the Center each day.
Visual and Performative Ethnography
A provost's interdisciplinary seminar. Watch & Listen
