CEE | Center for Experimental Ethnography
Menu

Third Thursday with Krzysztof Wodiczko

11/1/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture

NOV 17th

REGISTER HERE

1:30 PM

VIRTUAL EVENT

Join us on November 17th at 1:30 PM for an exciting conversation with Krzystof Wodiczko, an artist whose avant-garde projections and slides have graced architectural facades around the world, engaging publics in the challenging social topics of war and its aftermath, and the effect of gendered violence and gendered silence in public life. He will join in conversation about two of these projects, "The Tijuana Projection" and "Loro" with Ken Lum, The Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor and Chair of Fine Arts at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Krzysztof Wodiczko

Speaker
Picture
Krzysztof Wodiczko is born 1943 in Warsaw, Poland, lives and works in New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Warsaw. His projections on architectural facades, and monuments as well as especially designed performative instruments give a public voice to the marginalized city residents. Krzysztof Wodiczko has held retrospective exhibitions at numerous museums and his work has been presented at Documenta, Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and many other art festivals.He received the 4th Hiroshima Art Price "for his contribution as an international artist to the world peace". He is a former director of the MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Professor of Art, Design and the Public Domain, Emeritus, at G.S.D, Harvard. His is presently teaching as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Weitzman School of Design, UPenn .

​The film documenting his artistic work.The Art of Un-War directed by Maria Niro and released in 2022, is distributed by New Day Films.Krzysztof Wodiczko’s books include Critical Vehicles, MIT Press, Krzysztof Wodiczko, The Abolition of War, and The Transformative Avant-Garde, published by Black Dog Press. ​

KEN LUM

Discussant
Picture
Ken Lum was born in Vancouver, Canada but presently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he is the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

From 2000 to 2006 Ken Lum was head of the graduate program in studio art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he taught from 1990 until 2006. Lum joined the faculty of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, in 2005 and worked there until 2007. He has been an invited professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and the China Art Academy, Hangzhou.

Lum is co-founder and founding editor of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He has published extensively; and recently completed an artists’ book project with philosopher Hubert Damisch that was launched with Three Star Press, Paris.

Lum was Project Manager for Okwui Enwezor’s The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 – 1994 (2001). He was also co-curator of the 7th Sharjah Biennial (2005), and Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945 (2005).

Lum has exhibited widely, including São Paulo Biennial (1998), Shanghai Biennale (2000), Documenta 11 (2002), the Istanbul Biennial (2007), and the Gwangju Biennale (2008), Moscow Biennial 2011 and the Whitney Biennial 2014.  He has published many essays on art.

He has also realized permanent public art commissions for the cities of Vienna, Vancouver, Utrecht, Leiden, St. Moritz, Toronto and St Louis.
0 Comments

"FIELD NOTES" WITH SAYA WOOLFALK

11/1/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture

DEC 9 

4:30 PM

MORGAN GALLERY

Join us for a conversation and catalog release party for "Field Notes from the Empathic Universe" with artist and CEE Fellow Saya Woolfalk on December 9th, 2022, at 4:30 PM.  The event will take place in person at Morgan Gallery on the First Floor of Weitxman Hall 205 S. 34th Street.  This richly illustrated catalog includes full color prints of Saya's current exhibit at the Newark Museum of Art.  No registration is required!

SAYA WOOLFALK

CEE Fall Fellow
Picture
Saya Woolfalk (Japan, 1979) is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions.  With the multi year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK,  Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity. 

She has exhibited at museums, galleries, and alternative spaces throughout Asia, Europe and the United States including solo exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ (2012); the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2014); the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2014); SCAD Museum, Savannah, GA (2016); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY (2016); Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE (2016); the Mead Museum of Art, Amherst, MA (2017) and group shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA., the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many others.
​

Works by the artist are in the collections of major institutions including, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Mead Art Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum; the Newark Museum; the Chrysler Museum of Art; and the Seattle Art Museum where her major multi-media installation, commissioned and acquired by the Museum, is on extended view.   Solo exhibitions of works by Saya Woolfalk are also currently on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO (through September 1, 2019) and the Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI (through August 18, 2019).

Woolfalk is the recipient of numerous honors, awards, and commissions. She has delivered numerous public lectures at museums and universities throughout the United States including a recent TED X Talk. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York and teaches in MFA program at Yale School of Art as well as in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons: The New School for Design

​
0 Comments

"CLAIMING BLACKNESS" WITH DAMANI PARTRIDGE

10/18/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture

DEC 1

5:00 PM

SLOUGHT 

Join us on December 1st at Slought Gallery for the "Claiming Blackness" event, to include film screening, conversation, and a book release with our Fall 2022 CEE Fellow Damani Partridge. At the event, Damani will discuss his Filming the Future of Cities project, as well as his new book "Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen, and Black Power in Berlin", released November 2022 with the University of California Press.

In this bold and provocative book, Damani J. Partridge examines the possibilities and limits of a universalized Black politics. Young people in Germany of Turkish, Arab, and African descent use claims of Blackness to hold states and other institutions accountable for their everyday struggle. Partridge tracks how these youth invoke the expressions of Black Power, acting out the medal-podium salute from the 1968 Olympics, proclaiming "I am Malcolm X," expressing mutual struggle with Muhammad Ali and Spike Lee, and standing with raised and clenched fists next to Angela Davis. Partridge also documents the demands by public-school teachers, federal-program leaders, and politicians that young immigrants account for the global persistence of anti-Semitism as part of the German state's commitment to antigenocidal education. He uses these stories to interrogate the relationships among European Enlightenment, Holocaust memory, and Black futures, showing how noncitizens work to reshape their everyday lives. In doing so, he demonstrates how the concept of Blackness energizes, inspires, and makes possible participation beyond national belonging for immigrants, refugees, Black people, and other People of Color.

DAMANI PARTRIDGE

CEE Faculty Fellow
Picture
Picture
Damani J. Partridge is the Fall 2022 Fellow at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He is also an affiliate with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and has published broadly on questions of citizenship, affect, urban space, sexuality, decolonization, post-Cold War “freedom,” Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, Blackness and embodiment, the production of noncitizens, the culture and politics of “fair trade,” and the Obama moment in Berlin. He has also made and worked on documentaries for private and public broadcasters in the United States and Canada, and currently directs the Filming Future Cities Project in Detroit and Berlin (see filmingfuturecities.org). His first book, Hypersexuality and headscarves: Race, sex, and citizenship in the new Germany, was published in the New Anthropologies of Europe series with Indiana University Press in 2012. His forthcoming book, Blackness as a universal claim: Holocaust heritage, noncitizen politics, and Black power in Berlin will be published with the University of California Press in 2022.

0 Comments

DEATH/FAST SCREENING

10/4/2022

0 Comments

 

RAINEY AUDITORIUM
​PENN MUSEUM

OCT 17 3:30 PM

Picture
Death/Fast is a 52-minute experimental video documentary about the 2,286-day mass hunger strike (2000-2007) undertaken by political prisoners contesting the regime of isolation in Turkey's newly instituted F-type, high-security prisons. Anchored in in-person interviews with survivors, the documentary recovers the experience of hunger strikers which serves as the disavowed condition of possibility for the retroactive self-authorization on the part of political organizations. Juxtaposing rehearsed narratives about their transformations in relation to time, to others, to truth—and to death—with imagery taken from everyday life in public locations across contemporary Istanbul, the documentary probes the (non)relation between the distinct temporality of the hunger strike and the heterogeneous temporalities of urban life immersed in daily activity/inactivity, between the violence of the prison and the violence hidden in everyday life.
Picture
Produced by Brian Karl and Özge Serin and first screened in 2017, Death/Fast uses ensembles of visual and audio techniques, including image flashes of extremely short duration, emulating the scar effects of long-term starvation on memory; extreme cropping within the larger frames of moving images, representing isolation outside prison; and the use of faint image-traces of speaking subjects, creating ghostly figures to suggest the ephemerality and tentativeness of any single subject position. Together, the combined effect of excerpts from interviews and formal choices in representation within the audio and video of the documentary challenge and loosen the conventional links between the experience of dying and those grammars that purport to represent and politicize it.
Picture

​Özge Serin
WHITMAN COLLEGE

Özge Serin received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics and Anthropology at Whitman College. Her research and writing are principally concerned with formations of violence, carceral regimes, and corporeal forms of resistance with a particular focus on the practice of hunger striking, its temporal structure, modes of strategic functioning, communicative force, and ethical vicissitudes. She has published articles and chapters in boundary 2, Kampfplatz, and Re-enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory. Her book manuscript, Writing of Death: Ethics and Politics of the Death Fast in Turkey, explores the divide between the incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked space-times of death and politics, and poses the question of the mediality of the hunger strike
Picture

BRIAN KARL
UC Berkeley 


Brian Karl has worked as a curator, producer and director at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Harvestworks Media Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art­in­General, Creative Time, and the Kitchen, along with serving as editor for Tellus, the Audio Art Magazine. His art criticism has been published in Artforum, Art Practical, Daily Serving, Hyperallergic and Yishu, among others. He has also produced multiple experimental documentaries screened at the Jewish Museum, the Whitney Biennial, and the New York and San Francisco Film Festivals, among other venues. He has taught courses widely in art, music, and cultural anthropology, including at the New School, Fordham University, Colby College, the University of Michigan, the California College of the Arts and San Francisco Art Institute.
0 Comments

OCTOBER THIRD THURSDAY: BILLY DUFALA

10/3/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture

OCT 20 

REGISTER HERE

12PM

VIRTUAL CONVERSATION

Join in virtual conversation with CEE for October's Third Thursday event, where Ken Lum is in conversation with Billy Dufala of RAIR (Recycled Artist In Residency). Billy is the Director of Residencies and Co-Founder of RAIR, a non-profit arts organization situated inside a construction and demolition waste recycling company called Revolution Recovery in northeast Philadelphia. RAIR's mission is to challenge the perception of waste culture by providing a unique platform for artists at the intersection of art and industry. 
​
Picture
Billy Dufala is a Philadelphia-based artist engaged in a variety of creative disciplines, including sculpture, performance, digital media, and drawing. He is co-¬founder of the artist collective Traction Company, and of RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residence), an arts organization operating onsite at Revolution Recovery, a recycling company in Northeast Philadelphia.

Dufala is best known for his ongoing collaborative work with his brother Steven; together they are known as the Dufala Brothers. The duo's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the West Collection; Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts; Space 1026; Fleisher/Ollman, and Fleisher Art Memorial; as well as in group exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, and others.

​In 2009, the Dufala Brothers were awarded the West Grand Prize, an international juried prize in its inaugural year. In 2015, RAIR received Center support to present Live at the Dump, an interactive, site-specific program that utilized a series of films, performances, and discussions to increase public awareness of the waste stream and the role of art in shaping social and environmental consciousness.
Picture
Ken Lum was born in Vancouver, Canada but presently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he is the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

From 2000 to 2006 Ken Lum was head of the graduate program in studio art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he taught from 1990 until 2006. Lum joined the faculty of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, in 2005 and worked there until 2007. He has been an invited professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and the China Art Academy, Hangzhou.

Lum is co-founder and founding editor of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He has published extensively; and recently completed an artists’ book project with philosopher Hubert Damisch that was launched with Three Star Press, Paris.

Lum was Project Manager for Okwui Enwezor’s The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 – 1994 (2001). He was also co-curator of the 7th Sharjah Biennial (2005), and Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945 (2005).
0 Comments

EXPERIMENTAL WRITING WEDNESDAYS

10/1/2022

0 Comments

 
Join CEE for Experimental Writing Wednesday's in the CEE Lounge in Room 438 of the Penn Museum. Find space and collective energy for your individual writing projects! Pop in and out at any point, or stay for a marathon day of writing.

We welcome transient visitors as well as regular writers who want to meet weekly. Right now, our cohort includes a mix of proposal writers, manuscript writers, and some multimedia editors. All kinds and levels of writing are welcome, including those experimenting with photography, film, and art in their writing.
​

Our meetings are largely devoted to individual writing time, but follow the general schedule. 
Picture

WRITING SESSION SCHEDULE

​10:00 AM: Check in with a brief discussion of your project and writing goal for the session [This is also when we sometimes have visitors to our group!]

10:20: Individual writing/editing time

12:00: Check in with a brief note (or progress report or lamentation) on our progress. 

12:30-1:00 Break for individual lunch (or keep writing if you choose!)

1:00 PM: Check in about big-picture structural plans (or other writing goals)

1:15-??: Individual writing/editing time.
0 Comments

CAMRA'S MULTIMODAL WORKSHOPS

10/1/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture

SECOND THURSDAYS

3-6PM
​CEE LOUNGE (438)

Join CAMRA at the CEE Lounge every second Thursday from 3:30PM to 6:00 PM to workshop your multimodal projects, ideas, or concepts!

Starting October 2022, 
CAMRA will be hosting a monthly workshop space for people to bring in, share, and work through their multimodal projects with a community of people interested in and/ or are engaged in multimodal work.

Expect visits from 
CAMRA mentors, faculty, members and alumni through the semester. We will be at the Center for Experimental Ethnography and will have access to video and audio technology for those who might need it. Some of us will also be using this space to work on on Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) submissions
​
  • Dates for Fall Semester: 13th October / 10th November / 8th December ( (second Thursdays)
  • Time: 3 - 6pm
  • Place: Center for Experimental Ethnography, Fourth Floor, Room #438, Academic Wing of the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphi
LEARN MORE
0 Comments

Third thursday

9/2/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
REGISTER NOW

​SEP 15 NOON

Meet Damani Partridge and Saya Woolfalk, and hear about their current projects, at our first Third Thursday event of Fall! This year, we are keeping Third Thursdays virtual, so you can join from anywhere...REGISTER NOW
0 Comments

GAZA ON SCREEN

3/31/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
The film screening and conversation series "Gaza on Screen" was curated by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Hadeel Assali. 

Friday, April 15th at 7pm
Gaza on Screen: Attending to the Fugitive 
A conversation and screening with Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Hadeel Assali, joined by Anna Shah Hoque. The evening  featured resistance videos and discussion. 

​Saturday, April 16th at 2pm 
Gaza on Screen: The Archaeological Imagination
Nadia Yaqub presents the films “Living Archaeology” by Forensic Architecture (10 min, 2022) and  “The Apollo of Gaza” by Nicolas Wadimoff (78b min, 2018). This will be followed with a Q&A led by Nadia Yaqub featuring Yasmine El Khoudary.
0 Comments

CAMRA THIRD THURSDAY

3/31/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
REGISTER NOW

For its annual Third Thursday event, CAMRA discussed the March 2022 Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) "Pause". Members of the CAMRA directors’ team and the SSMF planning committee discussed how they built, launched, and live-streamed this year's SSMF festival.  

Each year, the Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) provides a creative, collaborative space to engage with diverse multimedia projects. We explore the affordances and challenges of multimodal representational strategies in research, and we interrogate their social implications. SSMF is a hybrid between a traditional academic conference and a film/media festival. We strive to bridge the gap between art and science by bringing together scholars, artists, educators, and activists.
This year’s SSMF was organized around the theme Pause, understood as mobility and immobility, as waiting, as rest and recuperation, but also as a refusal and political strategy and action.

For whom is pause a privilege? For whom is it a need for existence? And how do our practices respond to the notions of pause? What do pauses encompass?

​The festival features projects that explore pause as an intentional engagement with suspension, as well as a way of being.

About CAMRA
CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts) fosters interdisciplinary collaborations amongst scholars, sensory ethnographers, artists and educators within and beyond the University of Pennsylvania to explore, practice, evaluate and teach about multimedia research and representation.

We ask questions about the affordances, challenges, and possibilities of multimodal scholarship in teaching, learning, mediamaking, and knowledge production. Our aim is to support media-based research and pedagogies, with an explicit focus on: (1) providing practical guidelines for evaluation of multimodal research; (2) utilizing participatory, digital, and ethnographic methodologies; (3) creating digital and physical spaces for multimodal work to be showcased; (4) critically examining how technology is changing the processes of teaching and learning.
0 Comments

MARCH THIRD THURSDAY

3/1/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
For March's Third  Thursday event, we joined in conversation with Shivaike Shah about his "Uprooting Medea" Tour.

In 2018, as a student at Oxford, Shah produced an on campus production of Medea, the institution’s first entirely BIPOC production. Shah believes Medea is a powerful story about “questions of home, identity, belonging and broken promises.”

After graduation, he began to develop a short, non-narrative film about the character of Medea, co-written by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers.
During his talk, Shah reflected on how Khameleon Productions’ effort to make space for BIPOC individuals in theater is reflected in the theme of belonging within the story of Medea.

Khameleon’s adaptation of Medea is currently being reviewed by multiple film festivals and will be released to the public when it is selected by one of the festivals.

REGISTER
0 Comments

MEET THE SPRING FELLOWS THIRD THURSDAY

2/2/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Join us for February's Third Thursday event where CEE spring Fellows Amitav Ghosh and Ali Sethi discuss their collaboration on a course they are teaching with Penn's own Brooke O'Harra.  Amitav, Ali, and Brooke are leading students in a rigorous process of research, development, and rehearsal, culminating in a public performance of a musical version of Ghosh's newest book Jungle Nama on March 2nd and 3rd (in-person and remote tickets available). 
​
0 Comments

Jungle-nama: A Story of the Sundarban

2/2/2022

1 Comment

 

MARCH 2 & 3

Picture
WATCH THE PERFORMANCE
The Center for Experimental Ethnography held a stage performance of Amitav Ghosh's adaptation of an episode from the legend of Bon Bibi, titled: "Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban." The performance will take place at the Montgomery Theatre at Penn Live Arts.
​
Jungle Nama is Amitav Ghosh's verse adaptation of an episode from the legend of Bon Bibi, a tale popular in the villages of the Sundarban, which also lies at the heart of the novel The Hungry Tide. It is the story of the avaricious rich merchant Dhona, the poor lad Dukhey, and his mother; it is also the story of Dokkhin Rai, a mighty spirit who appears to humans as a tiger, of Bon Bibi, the benign goddess of the forest, and her warrior brother Shah Jongoli. The original print version of this legend, dating back to the nineteenth century, is composed in a Bengali verse meter known as dwipodi poyar. "Jungle-nama" is a free adaptation of the legend, told entirely in a poyar-like meter of twenty-four syllable couplets that replicate the cadence of the original.

Illustration by Salman Toor
Picture
Picture
1 Comment

The Misplaced Concreteness of the Senses

1/25/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
JOIN WEBINAR

Jan 31 2022
noon

erin manning + brian massumi

The body’s sensing is inseparable from processes of abstraction that extend life into incorporeal realms. From sonsensuous similarity to amodal perception, from reaching-toward to preacceleration, from distantism to synaesthesia, from autistic perception to lived abstraction, sensation and perception exceed the model of sense impression inherited from classical empiricism. This talk will draw on the radical empiricism of William James and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead to explore the ways in which perception is already a mode of thought and thought is feeling.

This event (co-sponsored by the Graduate Group in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, the Department of English, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography) is part of the 2021-2022 Penn Anthropology Colloquium on “Sense.”  

Picture

erin manning

Picture

brian massumi

Erin Manning is a Canadian cultural theorist and political philosopher as well as a practicing artist in the areas of dance, fabric design, and interactive installation. Manning's research spans the fields of art, political theory, and philosophy.
Brian Massumi  is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, cultural studies, political theory and philosophy. His work explores the intersection between power, perception, and creativity to develop an approach to thought and social action bridging the aesthetic and political domains. He is a retired professor in the Communications Department of the Université de Montréal.[1]

0 Comments

JANUARY  THIRD THURSDAY

1/14/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
On Thursday, January 20 2022 we convened a lively conversation with Wazhmah Osman, Assistant Professor at Temple University, and Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, Director, Screenwriter, and Editor about their film projects, including Osman's "Postcards from Tora Bora" and "Smokescreen", and Alexandrowicz latest piece, "The Viewing Booth".

​
EVENT BRITE LINKS
DR. WAZHMAH OSMAN
Picture
Wazhmah Osman is an Afghan-American academic and filmmaker. She is an assistant professor in Media Studies and Production at Temple University. In her book Television and the AfghanCulture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists (University of Illinois Press, Fall 2020), she analyzes the impact of international funding and cross-border media flows on the national politics of Afghanistan, the region, and beyond. Her research and teaching are rooted in feminist media ethnographies that focus on the political economy of global media industries and the regimes of representation and visual culture they produce. In her recent work she extends these critical inquiries to the politics of representation and visual culture of "The War On Terror" including gender/sexuality discourses and how they reverberate globally and locally. Osman endeavors to intervene on these subjects beyond academia. She has appeared as a commentator on Democracy Now, WNYC, NPR, and Al Jazeera and works with community and activist groups. She has worked in television and film production for major American and international media institutions and as an independent journalist and filmmaker. Her critically acclaimed documentary films have screened in diverse venues, ranging from human rights organizations to national and international film festivals.
RA'ANAN ALEXANDROWICZ
Picture
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz is a director, screenwriter and editor. He is known for the documentary The Law in These Parts (2011), which received the Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival, a Peabody award, and numerous other prizes. His earlier documentaries, The Inner Tour (2001) and Martin (1999), were shown in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section and MoMA’s New Directors / New Films series. Alexandrowicz’s single fiction feature, James’ Journey to Jerusalem (2003), premiered in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and at the Toronto International Film Festival and received several international awards. Alexandrowicz’s films have been released theatrically in the United States and Europe, and broadcast by PBS, ARTE, the BBC, as well as other television channels. Ra’anan served several times as an editing advisor for the Sundance Documentary Fund and his film The Viewing Booth is supported by the Sundance Art of Nonfiction initiative.

​Projects

Picture
The Viewing Booth

Minimalist in approach yet far-reaching in its application and consequence, The Viewing Booth forms a one-of-a-kind cinematic testimony to the psychology of the viewer in the digital era. Recounting a unique encounter between filmmaker and a viewer the film is an exploration of the way meaning is attributed to non-fiction images in today’s day and age. In a lab-like location, Maia Levy, a young Jewish American woman, watches videos portraying life in the occupied West Bank. Maia is an enthusiastic supporter of Israel, and the images in the videos, depicting Palestinian life under Israeli military rule, contradict some of her deep-seated beliefs. Empathy, anger, embarrassment, innate biases, and healthy curiosity — all play out before our eyes as we watch her watch the images of military occupation. Six months later, Levy returns to watch more footage. This time, Maia views edited footage of herself while she was watching the images of the occupation. What is revealed in the process is multi-layered, puzzling, insightful and extends beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Maia’s candid and reflective analysis of her previous commentary gives the viewer a staggering demonstration of the idea that seeing is not always believing.


Picture

Postcards from Tora Bora
​

"Postcards from Tora Bora is a feature length documentary that follows Osman when she returns home to Afghanistan to piece together the life that was torn apart by the 1979 Soviet invasion. At the height of the Cold War, the Osman family frantically escaped from Afghanistan while leaving almost everything behind. In the ensuing chaos, their suitcase filled with family photos is stolen.

Now, after two decades in America, Wazhmah Osman, a young Afghan-American woman, returns to her childhood home. Armed only with rapidly fading memories, she recruits some unlikely and reluctant guides to put together the pieces of her past. On an alternately sad and humorous quest, she encounters confused cabbies, the enthusiastic former minister of the tourism bureau, a museum director who archives land mines and a group of angry street vendors.
As Wazhmah desperately searches for any tangible evidence of her former life, the journey leads her to many unexpected places. Amidst the rubble and destruction, she finds her estranged father, who in the aftermath of war chose his country over his family. On the road, Wazhmah frequently finds herself at a strange intersection where cultures clash, identities are mistaken and the past violently collides with the present. " from Al Jazeera 5 April 2008
0 Comments

Mexican Psychotic

12/3/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture

RAINEY AUDITORIUM

DEC 3 5PM

The Fellows Year-End Event "Mexican Psychotic ", is an experimental film led by Ricardo Bracho, followed by a panel discussion scholars and artists on Ramírez’s work and contemporary issues of incarceration, mental health, and artistry. This panel discussion included Ricardo Bracho in conversation with editor and animator Oludare Marcelle,  editor Emily Dunlop, Toorjo Ghose (UPenn), James Yaya Hough (Artist , and Aaron Alarcon-Bowen. 

Mexican Psychotic is an experimental video-in-progress on the life, art, and mythos of artist Martín Ramírez, who spent 30 years drawing beautiful works while incarcerated in California mental asylums. The film team includes Richardo Bracho as writer and director, Oludare Marcelle as lead editor/animator, Emily Dunlop as assistant editor, Nicholas Plante as assistant editor, and voiceover director.

Dr. Toorjo Ghose is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice whose work focuses on structural interventions in the areas of incarceration, substance use, homelessness, and HIV, both at the domestic and international levels.

Dr. Jennifer S. Ponce de León is an interdisciplinary scholar and Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, whose research focuses on cultural production and antisystemic movements in the Americas since the 1960s and critical theory.

James "Yaya" Hough is the inaugural artist in residence for the district attorney’s office of Philadelphia.
​

Aaron Alarcon-Bowen is the Executive Director of the Community Services Bureau in Concord, California.
WATCH THE DISCUSSION
0 Comments

AFFECT THEATER DECEMBER 6TH 5-7PM

12/2/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture

Dec 6th at 5 pm.

Our CEE Fellow Year-End Event "Affect Theatre" included a presentation followed by scenes  written and performed by graduate students in the Affect Theatre class, and lead by Cristiana Giordano and Greg Pierotti

How does an ethnographer remain affected by worlds encountered after leaving the field of research? How does a theater maker build theatrical worlds from empirical research that conveys not only story, but also affective experiences? Affect Theatre is a thinking and acting space for experimenting with these questions. During this lecture presentations students will present brief theatrical episodes which they will then explore and analyze with spectators in a group feedback process. CEE Fellows Cristiana Giordano and Greg Pierotti will give a talk laying out the practices and the theory underlying their collaborative experiment and methodology.
WATCH THE PERFORMANCE
0 Comments

RESPONSIVE ROOTS: VODOU BEATS ACROSS THE WATERS

12/1/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture

ABOUT THIS EVENT

The Center for Experimental Ethnography, WXPN, and Dr. Camee Maddox-Wingfield held a panel on Haitian Vodou inspirations and the roots of musical responses to social injustice, featuring Haitian and Haitian American artists  Manzè Beaubrun (Boukman Eksperyans), Malou Beauvoir (Malou Beauvoir), and Richard Morse (RAM and IMAMOU). The event was in English with simultaneous translation in Haitian Creole. Register now.

LISTEN BEFORE THE EVENT

In order for you to get the most out of the conversation, we suggest you listen to some amazing grooves by the artists who will be joining us on Dec 7! Scroll to the end of the post to find out more.
Picture

Mimerose ‘Manzè’ Beaubrun

Photo Above: Mimerose Beaubrun, courtesy of the artist

Mimerose ‘Manzè’ Beaubrun is the lead singer and co-founder (with Lolo Beaubrun) of Boukman Eksperyans and the author of Nan Dòmi, récit d'une initiation vodou (2011), translated into English as Nan Dòmi: An Initiate’s Journey into Haitian Vodou (2013), as well as a manbo (Vodou priestess). She received her BA in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Université d'État d'Haiti, and co-authored the 1998 book Livre ouvert sur le développement endogène d’Haïti, translated into English as Open Book on the Endogenous Development of Haiti.
Boukman Eksperyans (English: Boukman Experience) is a Grammy-nominated mizik rasin band. The band derives its name from a a tribute to the Jamaican born enslaved leader Boukman Dutty who launched the Haitian revolution in August 1791, and the Haitian Creole word for "experience" (Eksperyans), inspired by the band's appreciation of the music of Jimi Hendrix. One of the most important musical movements that swept Haiti in the years following the exile of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, mizik rasin combines elements of traditional vodou ceremonial and folkloric music with rock and roll. When Mimerose and Lolo began to seek their musical goals, they felt a strong desire to incorporate African elements in Haiti's culture into their music, combining roots music with vodou religious and musical traditions.
Since the beginning, starting with the first encounters made by the Beaubruns with deep African roots, Boukman Eksperyans has remained steadfastly linked to the Ginen ("Guinea") vodou line. The band calls it vodou adjae after a vodou ceremonial dance. This was also the title of their first album, released in 1991.
Boukman Eksperyans first became famous in 1990 when they presented their song "Ke'm Pa Sote" at the Carnival celebration in Port-au-Prince with its infamous lyrics: "My heart doesn't leap, I'm not afraid". These words were a grounded protest of the living conditions under the post-Duvalier interim military government of General Prosper Avril. Following the death of a young girl (who was shot by a soldier), Ke'm Pa Sote became an out-and-out battle hymn admonishing the government. The band continued to write and perform rebellious songs that depicted the reality of Haiti as they saw it. At the height of their popularity in 1991, Boukman Eksperyans fled Haiti to live in exile when Jean Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in a military coup d'etat. During their time abroad, the band performed and spoke out against the military dictatorship of Raoul Cédras. In 1994, after Aristide was restored to power, the band returned to Haiti, where they continued to play concerts, record albums, and perform at the Carnival celebrations.
Picture

MALOU BEAUVOIR

Above: Photo of Malou Beauvoir by Johnny Rodriguez, courtesy of Malou Beauvoir

Haitian-American performing artist Malou Beauvoir is a captivating, highly emotive singer-songwriter, actor and producer who brings to her artistry the unique amalgamation of her multi-cultural influences and experiences. A citizen of the world, she has lived in the US, Europe and Haiti, and traveled extensively; each culture she has encountered has impacted and informed her in different ways, reinforcing her openness to different perspectives and forms of spirituality. Malou has offered her performances and support to the “TIBET FUND Gala” in NY, the Fonkoze Gala in L.A, the Back Country Jazz fundraiser, and other non-profit organizations who are working to make this world a better place. For more info : maloubeauvoir.com

RICHARD MORSE

Richard Auguste Morse (born 1957) is a Puerto-Rican-born Haitian-American musician and founder of a mizik rasin band, RAM, named after his initials, and IMAMOU. Morse is married to RAM's lead female vocalist, Lunise Morse, and has two children. Morse also manages a famous hotel and venue in Port-Au-Prince, the Hotel Oloffso
In 1992, Morse and RAM adapted a traditional vodou folk song, "Fèy", to a rasin rhythm and instrumentation. Despite no overt references to the political situation, it was widely played on the radio and immediately taken up throughout the country as an unofficial anthem of support for Aristide. By the summer of 1992, playing or singing the song was banned under military authority, and Morse was subjected to death threats from the regime. In one particular instance, Morse was summoned before Evans François, the brother of Colonel Michel François, and his life was threatened. Over time, Morse, like many other Haitians, became disillusioned with Aristide and his new political party, Fanmi Lavalas.
RAM is a Haitian music band based in the city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The band derives its name from the initials of its founder, songwriter, and lead male vocalist, Richard A. Morse. The band’s sound reflects a mix of West African rhythms brought over on slave ships and Haitian rhythms influenced by indigenous cultures.
RAM began performing together in 1990, and recorded their first album in 1993. The band's music incorporates traditional Vodou lyrics and instruments, such as rara horns and petro drums, into modern rock and roll. The band's songs include lyrics in Haitian Creole and English. RAM first made the world scene in 1993, when one of its most popular singles, "Ibo Lele (Dreams Come True)," was included in the soundtrack for the major motion picture Philadelphia, next to famous musicians including Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young.
RAM is famous for its regular Thursday night performances at the Hotel Oloffson in downtown Port-au-Prince, attended by hotel guests and a wide spectrum of the country's political and racial groups. Yet throughout their 30-year career, the band has also performed at prestigious music venues around the globe including the Kennedy Center, Edinburgh Festival (Scotland), and New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. In 2021 RAM was featured in the Kanaval: Haitian Rhythms and the Music of New Orleans audio documentary.


The band’s discography includes:
Aïbobo (1993)
Puritan Vodou (1997)
Kite Yo Pale (2001)
MadiGra (2003)
Le Jardin (2003)
Manman M Se Ginen (2016)
RAM 7: August 1791 (2018)

Dr. Camee Maddox-Wingfield

Picture
Photo Above: Dr. Camee Maddox-Wingfield


Dr. Camee Maddox-Wingfield is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. As a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Maddox-Wingfield’s research interests center on cultural activism and identity formation in Caribbean and African diaspora dance communities, with a primary focus on the French Caribbean. She is especially interested in the various ways that dance expression intersects with cultural politics, spirituality, and healing in communities suffering from colonial and/or racial oppression. Her work also explores the ways in which dance becomes an expression of protest, resistance and solidarity.
Dr. Maddox-Wingfield is currently working on a book project that is tentatively titled Rhythmic Consolation: Bèlè’s Rebirth in Contemporary Martinique. The book interrogates the cultural politics and power dynamics that shape the contemporary discourse and practice of bèlè – a traditional drum-dance complex in Martinique . In this work, Maddox-Wingfield situates bèlè as a site for intervening in ongoing debates about (non)sovereignty and the complexities of French national secularism.
The book project is being developed along with a virtual exhibition that will serve as a multimedia companion to the book, promoting wider public engagement with digital scholarship on performative cultural traditions. Her research has been published in the journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, engaging bèlè performance from Black feminist perspectives to analyze the therapeutic impact and the function of sensual expressivity in bèlè for women dancers. She also contributed a chapter in a new edited volume titled Embodying Black Religions in Africa and its Diasporas published by Duke University Press September 2021.

Kanaval: Haitian Rhythms & the Music of New Orleans



From WXPN at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the producers of the Peabody-nominated and Regional Edward R. Murrow award-winning Gospel Roots of Rock and Soul, comes a new audio docu-series chronicling the history of Haiti and Haitian influences on the music, culture, and community of New Orleans and contextualizing the nation’s historical importance through its considerable artistic and musical traditions.

The nationally distributed production is hosted by Haitian-American and New Orleans-based musician Leyla McCalla, a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and is produced by Alex Lewis, and award-winning independent radio producer and musician.
The documentary features interviews and music from Haitian performers Boukman Eksperyans, Paul Beaubrun, RAM, Lakou Mizik, Chico Boyer, Win Butler & Regine Chassagne of Arcade Fire, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, Ben Jaffe of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and more.
https://xpnkanaval.org/doc/



PLAYLIST

RAM "Kite Jouda Yo Pale" (Let People Gossip)

Boukman Eksperyans "Jou Nou Revolte" (The Day We Revolt)

Malou Beauvoir "Kenbe M" (Hold Me)

RAM "Fey" (Leaves/Herbs)

Boukman Eksperyans "Ke M Pa Sote" (MY HEART DOESN'T JUMP)

Malou Beauvoir (feat. Paul Beaubrun) "Rasenbleman"

RAM " Se Pa Saw Te Di" (That's Not What You Said)

Boukman Eksperyans "Kan'w Pran'w Konen"

Malou Beauvoir "Nwaye" (Drown)

0 Comments

NOVEMBER THIRD THURSDAY- COLLABORATION

11/2/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​During our November Third Thursday convening, Sosena Solomon and Peter Decherney, directors of DREAMING OF JERUSALEM (a film about the Jewish community in Gondar), and Michelle Y. Hurtubise will discuss different forms of collaboration.  
REGISTER
Picture
​Sosena Solomon is an award winning social documentary film and multimedia visual artist from Ethiopia. Intuitively selecting subjects and stories, she is particularly interested in spaces of transition and change, acting as a cultural preservationist. Her work, whether presented as a film or an immersive 3-dimensional experience, explores cross sections of various subcultures and communities in flux, carefully teasing out cultural nuances and capturing personal narratives via arresting visual storytelling and cinéma vérité stylings. Sosena has worked for many years in the commercial and nonprofit sectors and has worked as a Director and Cinematographer on many short film projects including “Sole”, a documentary on sneaker culture that premiered on PBS affiliate MINDTV, and “MERKATO,” filmed on location in one of Africa’s largest open-air markets and exhibited internationally as an audio, visual, and sensory installation. Sosena earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Social Documentary Film from The School of Visual Arts in New York, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Television Production from Temple University. She is a recipient of The Leeway Foundation Art and Change grant (2013) and the Transformation Award (2014).
Picture
Peter Decherney is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and teacher. He is Professor of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and has been an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scholar, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a U.S. State Department Arts Envoy to Myanmar. Since 2015, he has directed a series of documentary and virtual reality films about global migration and on the political role of artists. FILMMAKING FOR DEMOCRACY IN MYANMAR (2015) took viewers into the world of Myanmar’s politically subversive straight-to-DVD film industry. His first virtual reality project explored an experimental refugee settlement in Kenya near the South Sudanese border. He followed with a 12-episode docuseries THE HEART OF PUERTO RICO (co-directed with Jean Lee) about artists after Hurricane Maria. The series won Best Virtual Reality Experience at the 2020 AT&T Film Awards. His most recent film, DREAMING OF JERUSALEM (co-directed with Sosena Solomon), about the Jewish community in Gondar, Ethiopia, is a Discovery+ Original. He is also the author or editor of six books including Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet and Hollywood: A Very Short Introduction. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, and Inside Higher Ed, among other places. His free online course on the history of Hollywood has enrolled more that 65,000 learners.
Picture
Michelle Y. Hurtubise (she/her) is a Visual Anthropology Ph.D. candidate at Temple University researching narrative sovereignty, Indigenous media, and diverse festival networks through the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and the development of Kin Theory, a global Indigenous media makers database. With a background in arts and activism, she did human rights and media work in Rio de Janeiro as part of her Master’s thesis at New York University, and she received a Master of Fine Arts in Theatre from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Michelle was a Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow and a Society for Visual Anthropology/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellow. Currently a research strategist at the Nia Tero foundation, she has also worked with the Center for Artistic Activism and the Center for Media, Culture, and History.
0 Comments

OCTOBER THIRD THURSDAY- (Un)usual Business

10/1/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Join us for  Business as (Un)Usual talkback with Maisha Akbar and Brian Shapiro
Business as s(Un)Usual, a multi-modal work written, produced and starring Dr. Maisha Akbar and Brian Shapiro, MA, satirizes the question “Why can’t white men listen to Black women?”  In this discussion of the film which premiered at 2020 the Philadelphia FringeArts Festival,  Akbar and Shapiro will address reactions to the film’s content as well as its methodology.  The discussion will also center upon  Business as (Un)Usual’s use of ethnographic practices as well as race, and gender issues as explored through personal narratives and music performances. The discussion will be recorded via video, with footage used to create a short film about the discussion itself. All participants will be provided a password-protected link to Business as (Un)Usual for viewing prior to the discussion.
courses. 

​​Maisha S. Akbar

Picture
Maisha S. Akbar, Ph.D., is Chair of the Communications and Culture Department at Fort Valley State University (GA). Her recent book Preaching the Blues: Black Feminist Performance in Lynching Plays (Routledge, 2019) documents the performance- based research she conducts as Director of FVSU’s Joseph Adkins Players student drama group. In May 2021, Dr. Akbar participated as a Collaborator in Data and Society’s workshop, “The Hustle Economy: Race Gender and Digital Entrepreneurship.” The American Society for Theatre Research awarded Dr. Akbar a 2020-21 Grant for Researchers with heavy course loads. She is also a 2020 -21 fellow of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) Artist Roster and now serves as the inaugural chair of FVSU’s Social Justice Task Force.

​Brian Shapiro

Picture
Since 1995, educator and performing artist Brian Shapiro, MA, has been exploring the endless nuances, challenges, and rewards the human communication process offers.  A writer, collaborator, and performer of numerous original performance works, Brian’s also a musician with the Philadelphia art-rock quartet, Brian Shapiro Band. An instructor at the Wharton School and an affiliated faculty member at Penn’s Organizational Dynamics program, he also designs and delivers professional development programs across multiple industries, including Philadelphia International Airport, the Port of Portland (OR), Siemens Industry, The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce/Arts and Business Council, Do it Best Corp., IBM, and Comcast. Brian’s authored three books, including Exceptionally Human: Successful Communication in a Distracted World and The Exceptionally Human Airport Experience, and he’s a dedicated tai chi, yoga, and meditation practitioner. Brian attended a doctorate program in Performance Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, and holds a BA (San Diego State University) and MA (San Francisco State University) in Communication Studies.
0 Comments

SETTLER COLONIALISM, SLAVERY, AND THE PROBLEM OF DECOLONIZING MUSEUMS -  conference Oct 20-23 2021

9/21/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
0 Comments

Ethnographic Praxis, Relationality, Multi-Modality

9/20/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
In this panel, Aimee Cox (Yale University), Peter Morin (Tahltan Nation, OCAD University), Ayumi Goto (OCAD University), Marlon Swai (University of Cape Town), Dara Culhane (Simon Fraser University) explored artistic modalities and co-laboring as ways of knowing that offer a multi-modal attunement without pinning down or leaning on a redemptive ‘truth’. The panelists offered reflections and performances that attend to institutional and epistemic violence reproduced in the academy, state or extra/judicial systems. They looked to spaces and ways of making knowledge differently that challenge us to reimagine ways of being together and collaborate in research; modes of knowing that refuse and unsettle the ‘comforts’ provided by established canons of what constitutes ‘good’ research methods, conceptual conceits and community entanglements. Together, they reflected on on praxis, reciprocity, and esthetic engagements as ways of being and knowing in this particular moment of reckoning with liberal academic discourses on anti-racism and decolonization. Watch the full event here. 

​ The event was sponsored by the Wenner Gren and 
Organized by the Association of Black Anthropologists, Anthropology Southern Africa, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, and the Transformative Memory Network ,
0 Comments

september third thursday - MEET THE FELLOWS EVENT

9/7/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
We were joined by the Center for Experimental Ethnography's Fall Fellows, Cristiana Giordano, Greg Pierotti and Ricardo Bracho. They discussed their fall classes as well as projects they are working on.
Picture

CRISTIANA GIORDANO

Cristiana Giordano is an associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.A. in philosophy from the University of Pavia, Italy. She works on foreign migration, mental health, the body, and cultural translation in contemporary Italy. Her research addresses the politics of migration in Europe through the lens of ethno-psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of inclusion/exclusion of foreign others; and through the lens of research on the human microbiome and migrant health in Europe. Her broader research interests also engage the relation between psychic life, therapy, clinical sites, and images. She is the author of Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (University of California Press, 2014), Winner of the Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology, Society for Psychological Anthropology, 2017; the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology, 2016 (second prize); and finalist for the 2015 PEN Center USA UC Press First Book Award.
Picture

GREG PIEROTTI

Greg Pierotti is an assistant professor of dramaturgy and collaborative playmaking at the University of Arizona, and an interdisciplinary theater artist. He and his collaborator Cristiana Giordano are currently investigating the intersection of ethnographic and theatrical writing and research practices. Pierotti’s devised theatrical works include, The Laramie Project, The People’s Temple and Laramie: 10 Years later. He is an Emmy nominated co-writer of the HBO teleplay of The Laramie Project. His work has been seen in venues around the world including Lincoln Center Theater and Brooklyn Academy of Music. He has developed new devised work at Berkeley Rep’s ground floor, Sundance theater lab, and Mason Dora Maar. He is the recipient of the Humanitas Prize, the Will Glickman Award for new plays, the San Francisco Critics award. He has been nominated for an Emmy award, a NY Drama Desk Award and the Alpert Award for outstanding individual contribution in the theater.



Picture

RICARDO BRACHO

Ricardo A. Bracho is currently Sachs Artist-in-Residence in the Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies program here at Penn, where he teaches creative and critical writing. His plays have been staged read, workshopped, and premiered in theaters and at universities nationwide.  He has a committed focus on working with feminist, queer, Latiina/o, community-based, and experimental theaters including Mabou Mines, INTAR, and Company of Angels. His plays have also been staged read and workshopped at Vassar, Stanford, DePaul University, and the University of California campuses at Riverside, Berkeley, Irvine, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara.  His past academic appointments include Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara and the Multicultural Faculty position at The Theatre School at DePaul University.  His plays include The Sweetest Hangover, Sissy, Mexican Psychotic, and Puto.  He has worked in independent film and video as an art director, in casting, and as a script, grant, and editorial consultant, primarily with queer, black, and brown makers, including Augie Robles, Cauleen Smith, and Ela Troyano. As a producer and dramaturge, he has helped stage anti-gentrification street theater in Boyle Heights and the works of Lisa Thompson, Brian Bauman, and Sigrid Gilmer. He began this theater career some thirty years ago as Assistant Director to Cherrie Moraga’s DramaDIVAS, writing for a performance workshop for queer and trans youth of color.  He was a co-founder of Proyecto ContraSIDA Por VIDA, a San Francisco based Latina/o LGBT HIV service agency.  He has also worked on curriculums, media campaigns, research and funding for FIERCE!, AIDS Project Los Angeles, and Center for AIDS Prevention Studies.  He was a researcher on The H.I.P. H.O.P. Project (Health in Prison, Health Outta Prison) for young men in San Quentin Prison. He was interviewed on The Blunt Project in New York. He is developing two chapbooks of poetry, The Salt of Him and Under Quarantine.
0 Comments

Physical Anthropology, Evolution, and Histories of Scientific Racism

5/10/2021

1 Comment

 

A CONTINUING CONVERSATION ABOUT MOVE AND THE PENN MUSEUM

Picture

MAY 12 

The recent revelations concerning the Penn Museum and human remains have raised a number of questions about the histories of anthropology and ethnographic museums, and about the practices of collecting, exhibiting, and researching:

  • Why do so many people end up in museums?
  • Within a forensic framework, the stated objective is to restore personhood to remains, but how is this possible when they are still held and addressed as specimens (which abstracts them from personhood)?
  • What guidelines exist to support ethical practices in fieldwork and with collections?
  • Should anthropology get out of the “body business”? Are there still important things human remains can tell us?
  • What could a community-led approach to research, exhibiting, and collecting teach us?
  • Listen to the conversation below.
Our guests Rachel Watkins (American University), Aja Lans (Syracuse University), and Delande Justinvil (American University) will help us think through these questions, and more…

OUR GUESTS

Picture

DELANDE JUSTINVIL

Delande Justinvil is a doctoral student in anthropology and 2021-2022 Peter S. Buck Predoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History and National Museum of African American History and Culture. His interests lie at the intersection of biocultural anthropology, cultural history, race and science, and Black study. His research mobilizes an anthropology of Black remains that brings together biological, archaeological, and archival methods to interrogate embodiments of violence in/as the afterlives of slavery, with a particular focus on the 19th and 20th century Mid-Atlantic. Delande has participated in excavations in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the U.S. as well as curatorial and collections-based initiatives concerning repatriation and racial equity in university museums. His dissertation project applies critical race theory and theories of violence to bioarchaeological analysis to investigate African American skeletal remains from recently discovered burials in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
Picture

RACHEL WATKINS

Rachel Watkins is a biocultural anthropologist with an emphasis on African American biohistory and social history, bioanthropological research practices and histories of (US) American biological anthropology. Initially trained in skeletal biology, her work focused on looking at relationships between health, disease, and social location in people whose remains are in the W. Montague Cobb anatomical collection and interred at the New York African Burial Ground. This research led to a broader interest in how African American skeletal remains and living populations were centered in the development of research practices and racial formation in US biological anthropology. Current projects continue to draw on intellectual and political work tied to Cobb and his laboratory from 1932 to the present as sites for understanding science as a social practice through a Black feminist lens. This includes: 1) traditions of Black scholar-activism contesting scientific racism; 2) our field’s efforts toward critiquing scientific racism without attending to structural racism; and, 3) the positionality of scientific researchers.
Picture

AJA LANS

I am a doctoral candidate in historical archaeology and cultural heritage preservation. My dissertation, ♀ Negro: Embodied Experiences of Inequality in Historic New York City, is a study of the skeletal and archival remains of black women who died in turn of the century New York City. Utilizing life course and intersectional approaches, I aim to better understand how race, gender, class, and place came to be literally embodied, and (re)insert physical remains into the wider discussion of black women’s histories in the United States.

PRE-READINGS / VIEWINGS

Blakey, M. L. (2020). “Archaeology under the blinding light of race.” Current Anthropology, 61(S22), S183-S197.
Justinvil, D. & Colwell, C. 2021. “US museums hold the remains of thousands of Black people. What can be done about it?” Available at:
Lans, Aja. 2020. “Decolonize This Collection: Integrating Black Feminism and Art to Re-Examine Human Skeletal Remains in Museums.” Feminist Anthropology DOI: 10.1002/fea2.12027
Watkins, Rachel. 2020. “An Alter(ed)native Perspective on Historical Bioarchaeology.” Historical Archaeology 53(4).
Reclaiming the Ancestors: Indigenous and Black Perspectives on Repatriation, Human Rights, and Justice, September 2020.


1 Comment

reggie wilson and "grounds that shout!!"

5/6/2021

0 Comments

 

REGGIE WILSON

MAY 1 


The event featured Reggie Wilson in conversation with CEE Director Deborah Thomas, Jasmine Johnson, John L. Jackson Jr. and Jawole Zollar 

ABOUT THIS EVENT

On May 1, we were honored to host a conversation featuring Reggie Wilson in dialogue with Jasmine Johnson, John Jackson, and Jawole Zollar regarding the film, “GROUNDS THAT SHOUT!...and others merely shaking.”  This film emerged from Reggie’s work in 2018-2019, sponsored by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage and organized through Philadelphia Contemporary, the Danspace Project, and Partners for Sacred Places.  For this project, Reggie curated dance with local choreographers and dance groups at historical churches in Philadelphia.  “Grounds that Shout!” was meant to explore the relationships between religion, movement, race, place, and the body, and to foreground how the histories of contemporary performance are intertwined with the legacies of African-American religious and religiously-affiliated spaces.  Graduate students in CAMRA documented the project, With generous support from the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, graduate students in CAMRA, and the resulting film, which was circulated ahead of time, provided the basis for our conversation.  The film bears witness to Reggie’s process, documenting the development of movement, the relationships between performers and space, and the city and its denizens.  The conversation was wide-ranging, addressing the overlapping circles of performance, method, and community-building, and the simultaneity of past and present.  Listening to the distinct sounds of places and bodies in the film became an important way of becoming literate, of being able to hear the ground shout.  And rapport with death, in this work, became a generative possibility where choreography was a practice of life. 

The film was Directed and Produced by Gordon Divine "Dee" Asaah. 
Executive Producer: Center for Experimental Ethnography in collaboration with CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts)
Watch the dicussion HERE
0 Comments
<<Previous

    Archives

    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    April 2016
    March 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Location

Contact Us

Picture

PENN MUSEUM 336
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
PHILADELPHIA, PA 19104

t: (215) 746-0440

e: experimental-ethno@upenn.edu

            © 2018 The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania
  • HOME
  • PEOPLE
    • WHO WE ARE
    • AFFILIATED FACULTY
    • FELLOWS
    • STUDENTS
  • EVENTS
  • COURSES
  • GRAD CERTIFICATE
    • CEE CERTIFICATE
    • SUMMER FUNDING
    • camra
  • EQUIPMENT LOANS
    • EQUIPMENT
    • EDITING LAB
    • PENN MEDIA MAP
  • CONVERSATIONS
  • CEE NEWS
  • PROJECTS
    • JUNGLE-NAMA LIVE
    • Mexican Psychotic
    • Affect Theatre
    • Contest Over Indigeneity
    • GROUNDS THAT SHOUT
    • FACULTY PROJECTS
    • AUDIO EXHIBIT
    • Making Sweet Tea
  • ABOUT
  • HOME
  • PEOPLE
    • WHO WE ARE
    • AFFILIATED FACULTY
    • FELLOWS
    • STUDENTS
  • EVENTS
  • COURSES
  • GRAD CERTIFICATE
    • CEE CERTIFICATE
    • SUMMER FUNDING
    • camra
  • EQUIPMENT LOANS
    • EQUIPMENT
    • EDITING LAB
    • PENN MEDIA MAP
  • CONVERSATIONS
  • CEE NEWS
  • PROJECTS
    • JUNGLE-NAMA LIVE
    • Mexican Psychotic
    • Affect Theatre
    • Contest Over Indigeneity
    • GROUNDS THAT SHOUT
    • FACULTY PROJECTS
    • AUDIO EXHIBIT
    • Making Sweet Tea
  • ABOUT