APRIL 26th | 7:30pm | Vox populiFor our Spring Fellow s final event , zavé martohardjono takes us into a soundscape of multichannel sound and performance, to set the room to facilitate our visualization of geological futures. Expanding a solo performance into a collaborative work with Philadelphia artists, zavé martohardjono is joined by performance into a collaborative work with Philadelphia artists , zavé martohardjono is joined by performers Mel Rodman and Amalía Colon-Nava and asmr4apocalypse features the biomaterial sculptures of Cecilia McKinnon. Music by Daphne Silbiger and spatialized sound design by Mike Clemow New choreographic research for this iteration was cultivated in zavé's Center for Experimental Ethnography at the Penn Museum course and local dance workshop made possible by the support of Leah Stein Dance Studios. 
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APRIL 30th | 12pm | Public trustJoin a presentation of student works culminating the CEE course “Activism, Ecology, Dance: Embodying Liberation”. Over the semester, students have been learning and creating performance scores and engaging in collective research practices on global legacies of anti-colonial liberation and ecology. Expanding the archive through auto ethnography, practices of critical fabulation, and searching for their ancestors’ revolutionary histories, students will share research, art works, and reflections from their hands on, collective learning.  APRIL 17th | 12NOON | CEE ROOM 438For our April Third Thursday, CAMRA Director Farrah Rahaman joins us in conversation about the upcoming Screening Scholarship and Media Festival, with events on April 11th and 23rd! Farrah will discuss the theme "Sound and Color" and share details about Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood performance, writer and professor Imani Perry and poet Sonia Sanchez presentation ,and performance by Huda Asfour and Farah Barqawi. Lunch and light refreshments will be served!  March 28th, 2025 12PM | Penn Museum Rm 438  An afternoon of poetry and conversation with Fukudapero, a poet, artist, and multimodal anthropologist living in Kyoto, Japan. In this lunch gathering, we will think together about the intersections between anthropological inquiry and poetic practice specifically, and more broadly about what happens when we let our creative talents inspire and enrich our research projects.
Bio: Fukudapero is a poet, artist, and multimodal anthropologist living in Kyoto, Japan. Employing various modes of expression, viz: text, drawing, photography, film to installation, his works question reality and how they are collectively constructed. Highly commended by Forward Prize for Poetry 2020 (flowers like blue glass), his poetry has appeared in prominent magazines such as Gendaishi Techo, Bungakugaki, Australian Poetry Journal and more. fukuda is currently working on his second poetry collection, how to eat a mackerel (working title), a collection which investigates globalization and transcontinental folk imagination. March 20th | 12pm | Room 438| Penn MuseumThis Third Thursday we will be joined by Omar and Cybille of Honeysuckle! Omar Tate and Cybille St.Aude-Tate are social entrepreneurs who believe in centering the Black experience and are fueled by the conviction that chefs have a social responsibility. Their overarching brand, Honeysuckle Projects, expands the mission of Honeysuckle Provisions into a network of community spaces centered around the values of ancestry, nourishment, and reclamation across pop-ups, dinner parties, and events.  Friday March 7 | Rainey | 6-8pmA chorus of voices from 1953 to 2024; interior subjectivities that render a spectral and meditative portrait of objects and remains – abducted, looted, and encased in centuries of deleterious colonial holding that nonetheless bear the faculty to speak back. The films in this program assert that there are as many paths to restitution as there are stolen objects and people. Millions, innumerable, unthinkable, with every person and item imbued with spiritual meaning and still worth imagining. At this screening we will be showing: Statues Also Die (1953) The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (2017) Dahomey (2024) YOU HIDE ME (1970)  MArch 15th 2025 | Rainey | 6PMA Story of Bones (2022, 95 min) tells the story of Annina van Neel as she works to reclaim the neglected history of St. Helena after the remains of thousands of formerly enslaved Africans are uncovered on the remote island. Following the film screening, we will host a talk back with Peggy King Jorde, the film's Impact and Consulting Producer, and a performance by the St. Thomas Kumina Collective. Kumina emerged in the parish of St. Thomas Jamaica when indentured laborers were brought from the Kongo region of Central Africa after the abolition of slavery in 1838, some of whom would likely have sojourned on St. Helena's island prior to being taken to Jamaica. The ritual builds a bridge to the ancestors through drumming, singing, and dancing, and unleashes its healing power to all who are present.  March 17th 2025 | 6pm | pub;ic trustThis Missing Image is a screening that involves a case study of the research, preservation and restoration of the audiovisual archives of the Senegalese Department of Cinematography. Retracing history through the recovered images of “Actualités Sénégalaises”, the post- independence newsreels This showing will include: IFE / 3ème FESTIVAL DES ARTS (1971) SÉNÉGAL AN XVI (1976) LE SÉNÉGAL ET LE FESTIVAL MONDIAL DES ARTS NÈGRES (1966)  Join us for February Third Thursday, where CEE Affiliate Dr. Margit Edwards will join us to talk about her ongoing research on the theatrical strategies employed in the staging of African concert dance through the lens of the Village on the Stage in neo-traditional and contemporary African dance productions. Lunch and light refreshments will be served! FEB 20th at 12 Noon  Join us for our Meet the Fellow event with our new CEE Spring Fellows Arielle Julia Brown and zavé martohardjono. Learn about their courses and upcoming works! We are happy to offer this excite conversation with you over refreshments and food. See you there  Join us for " Far From Philadelphia " our Fall Fellows Final Events on DEC 6 AT 6PM at Widener Auditorium Penn Museum. Recalling Far From Vietnam, collectively-made essay film from 1967. Video and sonic works with live elements. 90 mins including Q and A. by Alvin Luong, Ambika Trasi, Dylan Li, Nipun Kottage, Nora Wang. with 2024 CEE Fellows, CAMP (Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran)  In 1967, a group of filmmakers including Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda and Jean-Luc Godard made an essay film mostly from collected materials, titled Far From Vietnam. In it, they articulated the stakes for humanity, and their own stakes, at a distance, in the war in Vietnam. Stakes that are in Gaza today, and still in Vietnam.
This title recalls war at a distance, but also solidarity. We invert this collective gaze towards Penn and Philly institutions, movements, geographies, and our cohort's own recent experiences. We asked how local archives of protest, museum collections from far or near places, university histories of its own participation in past wars, the mapping and overflowing of the Schuylkill river, the deployment in literature, cinema and real estate of a place and utopia called Shangri-La, intersect with and effect other places and contexts. These are projects of relinking, rebuilding and "rear-guard" art, by an international and transdisciplinary group from a university, and a re-oriented Philadelphia, where such questions uniquely intersect. The evening marks the end of a semester with CEE Fellows CAMP (Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran), and their course: Footage Films, or Narrating a Dataset: 100 days without our own images Please join us Tuesday November 12th for a screening of " Songs From The Hole ( 2024) " at Public Trust with a discussion with film scholar Julia Alekseyeva and Director Contessa Gayles to follow.  Please join us in person for Third Thursday with Andrienne Palchick, Heidi Ratanavanich, and Connie Yu of the public project FORTUNE!  FORTUNE (b. Year of the Earth Pig 2019) is a Philadelphia-based print collective, assembled by and for queer and trans Asian publics. We approach printing and self-publishing as a practice of learning, gathering, remembering, and making multiple. Conceived by Andrienne Palchick, Heidi Ratanavanich, and Connie Yu, FORTUNE is a public project, tended to collectively. FORTUNE will describe their research and publishing practice, considering their positionality as queer diasporic Asians in the US. They will share examples of past and recent study, contending with varying levels of mediation — from archival inquiry to homeland tourism. Through creative, transparent, and participatory research, they offer artistic interventions of recontextualizing and recirculating these materials, by and for their communities.
 On October 12, Gabrielle Goliath's Personal Accounts will open at Jaou Tunis, a contemporary art biennial running from October 9-November 9. Personal Accounts is envisioned as a process of transnational, decolonial, black feminist repair addressing the global normativity of patriarchal violence, and foregrounding the many ways Black, brown, Indigenous, femme, queer, non-binary and trans individuals survive and thrive. In cycles produced in cities across the world, women and gender-diverse collaborators share their personal accounts of survival and repair. These are not only account of violence, but also of the creative and often fugitive ways in which survivors assert life and possibility within and despite conditions of negation. In a decision taken together with the collaborators, the spoken words of each account are withheld. What remains is a sonic stream of in-between moments: breaths, swallows, sighs, cries, humming, even laughter – invoking the beside, nearby, adjacent and beyond of what is said, not said, or if said, not heard. Foregoing lexicality, this is a gesture of care and recognition, disarming the preconditions of ‘legibility’ and ‘believability’ that so regularly undermine the testimonies and experiences of survivors. It urges us to embrace more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognize each other. At the opening, our own Deborah Thomas will be in dialogue with Gabrielle, poet Maneo Refiloe Mohale, anthropologist Meryem Sellami, and Sabah Ennaïfar (collection manager of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation).  We are also excited to co-sponsor the performance of Gabrielle Goliath's Elegy at the end of the Venice Biennale in November. Elegy is a long-term commemorative performance project, initiated in 2015 and staged in locations from Johannesburg to São Paulo, Paris, Basel, Munich and Amsterdam. Each performance gathers a group of seven female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over the course of an hour. Invoked in the ritual gesture of each performance is the absent presence of a named woman or LGBTIQ+ individual raped and killed in South Africa. For those immersed in its sonic wake, Elegy is an opportunity not only to grapple with a normative crisis of patriarchal violence, but to reaffirm the fullness, beauty and insistence of black, brown, femme and queer lives. For each performance, a eulogistic text is shared, scripted by a family member or friend of the individual commemorated. The performance in Venice has been designed to memorialize those individuals who were displaced or killed during the genocidal colonial project in Namibia, and a speculative reflection was written by scholar-activist Dr Zoé Samudzi.
OCT 17th 12pmJoin us for our new in-person Third Thursdays! Our next Third Thursday "Meet the Fellows" will introduce our Fall Fellows Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran who will discuss upcoming projects, their course, and collective CAMP. We will provide exciting discussion over snacks and refreshments  Oct 19th + 20th 12-2pm Offered is a critical somatic exploration. The intention is to provide space for embodied dialogue with what remains politically unrepaired and viscerally unpresenced across campuses and indeed, across the world. Politics are such that the proposed space cannot offer emotional safety because the parameters of engagement are not neutral. Neither can embodiment praxes stand-in for any kind of communal “leveling” or resolution. This offering is a guided non-verbal inquiry – of slow, moderate, and fast pacing – where people of various bodily abilities assemble to track the suspended breath that right now cannot exhale. One should indeed be suspicious of embodiment as container for assembly under current conditions. Independent of everyone possessing a body, neither visceral attunement nor movement can transcend what is unrepaired. However, movement does indeed have something to offer, though not because something about it is exceptional; rather, experiential embodiment in today’s world is an obscured terrain that places introspective feeling and moving – in whatever ways one can – in the realm of the less familiar. Proposed, thus, is an animated non-verbal experience that maymomentarily support touching into something unknown. The intention is not distraction. This is about sourcing that bit of air, when exhalation is not an option, because catastrophe’s next moves are unpredictable. Dress comfortably, bring a mat or cushion (if you can descend to the floor), as well as paper and pen. Walking, sitting, standing, running, and breathe may never be the same after this exploration.  Kesha Fikes
This inquiry is guided by Kesha Fikes (she/her), an independent scholar, somatic therapist, and social praxis facilitator. Her work centers the politics of everyday life, racial-gendered existence, global capitalisms, colonialisms, border politics, diasporizations, and politicized somatics. Her focus is creative disruption of the violence of universal reason in everyday life. Fikes holds a doctorate in anthropology and authored Managing African Portugal: The Citizen-Migrant Distinction (Duke U Press). She facilitates a psycho-political praxis she created, called Practicing Political Extimacy, which integrates somatics and political theory. Please join us for a conversation moderated by Eugene Lew with Germaine Ingram and Jungwoong Kim . Our first in person Third Thursday!   SUNDAY SEPT 15th AT 5PM |
 | In loss, there is transformation. Despite the thought that endings entail an absolute departure from “potentiality”, it is in endings, in losses, that we find some of the most obscured parts of ourselves. Death, an ever lingering loss, brings us to important divinations around what it was to be our tender selves. What we find in tenderness absent, are transformational sites in need of necromancy. And when conjuring may not be potent enough to harness certain chances at transformation, the dream of resurrection emerges to reanimate flesh in a bid to restart narratives. These narratives and knowledge are what bring us to spaces between the known and unknowns of history. |
Join us on Thursday April 25th at Rainy Museum for a screening of Tukdam: Between Worlds with filmmaker and scholar Donagh Coleman.
In what Tibetans call tukdam, deceased meditators show no signs of death for days or weeks. Juxtaposing ground-breaking scientific research and Tibetan perspectives, this creative documentary challenges our notions of life and death, and where we draw the line between them.
In what Tibetans call tukdam, deceased meditators show no signs of death for days or weeks. Juxtaposing ground-breaking scientific research and Tibetan perspectives, this creative documentary challenges our notions of life and death, and where we draw the line between them.
Finnish-Irish-American filmmaker-scholar Donagh Coleman holds degrees in Philosophy and Psychology and Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College Dublin, and an MA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley. Previous award-winning films with wide international festival and TV exposure include A Gesar Bard's Tale (2013) and Stone Pastures (2008). Donagh's films have also been shown at museums such as MoMA and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, and by the European Commission. Besides films and TV-documentaries, Donagh directs radio documentaries for the Finnish and Irish national broadcasters. His Radio Feature Gesar! was Finland’s entry for the 2012 Prix Italia competition, and his feature Do I Exist? was Finland’s entry for the 2015 Prix Europa competition. Donagh is currently pursuing a PhD in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley, continuing the research conducted for his 2022 feature documentary on Tibetan Buddhist tukdam deaths. He is a Dissertation Fellow in the ACLS / Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies.
THURSDAY | VIRTUAL |
Brooke O’ Harra leads a conversation with beat and investigative reporter Benjamin Herold and mother and education organizer Bethany Smith (whose experience in the Penn Hills suburbs is one of the case studies of his recent book Disillusioned). In Disillusioned, Herold investigates how heavily subsidized suburbs have allowed upwardly mobile white families to extract resources from communities only to leave behind the burden of bills on the Black and Brown families that follow them. This conversation will focus on the relationship between journalism and ethnography made evident in the collaboration between Bethany and Benjamin. Bethany wrote the epilogue to the book.
 | Through the stories of five American families, a masterful and timely exploration of how hope, history, and racial denial collide in the suburbs and their schools... Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system seemingly bent on punishing their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family relocates to an affluent suburban enclave, but can’t escape the changes sweeping the country. On Chicago’s North Shore, a multiracial mom joins an ultraprogressive challenge to the town’s liberal status quo. In Compton, California, whose suburban roots are now barely recognizable, undocumented Hispanic parents place their gifted son’s future in the hands of educators at a remarkable elementary school. And outside Pittsburgh, a Black mother moves to the same street where author Benjamin Herold grew up, then confronts the destructive legacy left behind by white families like his. Disillusioned braids these human stories together with penetrating local and national history to reveal a vicious cycle undermining the dreams upon which American suburbia was built. |
 BETHANY SMITHBethany Smith is an entrepreneur who champions public education through a fellowship with Education Voters of Pennsylvania. She helped author the critically acclaimed book Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs, which shares pieces of her life. Bio photo credit: E.A. Smith of CREW Production |  BENJAMIN HEROLDBenjamin Herold explores America's beautiful and busted public schools. His award-winning reporting has appeared in Education Week, PBS NewsHour, NPR, Huffington Post, WHYY, The Hechinger Report, and the Public School Notebook. Herold has a master's degree in urban education from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he lives with his family. Bio photo credit: Naomieh Jovin |
MARCH 19
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PUBLIC TRUST
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On March 19th, anthropologist and filmmaker Jorge Nuñéz will screen his documentary El Comité: La Toma del Penal García Moreno at 5 pm at The Public Trust (4017 Walnut Street)
Following the film, we will engage in a conversation with Jorge about Ecuador’s current prison crisis: How did Ecuadorian prisons evolve into spaces of extreme violence and dehumanization? How can we understand the spiral of organized crime violence? How did Ecuador go from being one of the safest countries in Latin America to being one the most violent in the region?
Following the film, we will engage in a conversation with Jorge about Ecuador’s current prison crisis: How did Ecuadorian prisons evolve into spaces of extreme violence and dehumanization? How can we understand the spiral of organized crime violence? How did Ecuador go from being one of the safest countries in Latin America to being one the most violent in the region?
EL COMITÉ: LA TOMA DEL PENAL GARCÍA MORENO
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Director: Mateo Herrera. Producer: Jorge Núñez
This ethnographic film follows a group of inmates that take over Ecuador's oldest maximum-security penitentiary, a late 19th-century panopticon in Quito. This is a story of prison revolt against corruption and institutional abuses experienced by people living behind bars.
Through El Comité, viewers are offered a window into the long-term history of Ecuador's current prison crisis. This film serves as an ethnographic critique of the state's role in exacerbating cycles of violence, pushes against policies favoring militarization and criminalization, and offers an insider view to inmates’ daily life and organizing struggles. |
Jorge Núñez
Jorge Núñez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is the cofounder of Kaleidos at the University of Cuenca, and codirector of the Ecuadorian Prison Observatory 593. He is also the lead designer of the digital platform EthnoData. Among other things, Jorge studies cocaine markets and state violence. He has conducted collaborative ethnography with prisoners and their families for twenty years.
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