 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.
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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.
A Note from Ra' Anan:
Hello everyone,
I am privileged and grateful to be CEE fellow this semester and looking forwards to engaging with you all. Towards the upcoming meet-the-fellows event I am sharing links to 3 films I made about Israel/Palestine in the last two decades. The films disclose the way I position myself towards the place that I come from, and my effort to communicate my understanding of the conflict with audiences.
They also demonstrate a shift in my understanding of the power relations that underly my making these films over this period of time, and an aesthetical shift from a cinema that wants to capture beauty of landscapes and of faces; to explore people’s actions and body language - to an almost emotionless, claustrophobic, almost suffocated filmmaking. This trajectory was not premeditated – it was informed by the question that the very making, and releasing of each of these films into the world brought up and if interesting for the group I am happy to share some thoughts.
-Ra'Anan
Film Links:
The Inner Tour (2000)
password:
TIT111120
The Law in These Parts(2011)
password:
TLITP2023
The Viewing Booth (2019)
password:
SNFP2021
Hello everyone,
I am privileged and grateful to be CEE fellow this semester and looking forwards to engaging with you all. Towards the upcoming meet-the-fellows event I am sharing links to 3 films I made about Israel/Palestine in the last two decades. The films disclose the way I position myself towards the place that I come from, and my effort to communicate my understanding of the conflict with audiences.
They also demonstrate a shift in my understanding of the power relations that underly my making these films over this period of time, and an aesthetical shift from a cinema that wants to capture beauty of landscapes and of faces; to explore people’s actions and body language - to an almost emotionless, claustrophobic, almost suffocated filmmaking. This trajectory was not premeditated – it was informed by the question that the very making, and releasing of each of these films into the world brought up and if interesting for the group I am happy to share some thoughts.
-Ra'Anan
Film Links:
The Inner Tour (2000)
password:
TIT111120
The Law in These Parts(2011)
password:
TLITP2023
The Viewing Booth (2019)
password:
SNFP2021
Join us for the first meeting of the year for the Black Reproductive Working Group, which gathers together reproductive justice workers, scholars, healers, and community allies. This month we are joined by Dr. Jill Baker, the CEO of “A Tribe Called Fertility LLC” and Creator/Producer of “Maternal Health 911” Podcast, and the Executive Director of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication (CPTC) at CHOP. Lunch will be served with vegan and vegetarian options.
THE WORKING GROUP
What sites, processes, and practices constrain Black parental and reproductive autonomy in Philadelphia institutions and communities?
What are the outcomes and experiences of these constraints?
What strategies exist, or could exist, for transforming these?
We convened this working group in 2022 to study constraints on Black reproduction in contemporary, historical, and global contexts, especially as these freedoms are challenged through public health, reproductive medicine, legal systems, and economic practice.
Reproductive Justice (RJ) frameworks were created in 1994 by a group of Black women activists, including prominent RJ scholar Loretta Ross, to call attention to the racial and gendered disparities in reproductive rights, especially in the way these rights are conceptualized and applied. Through a RJ lens, reproductive rights involve the right to not have children, but also concomitant rights to have children, and to parent children in safe environments with dignity. These latter two sets of rights are of particular historical concern to black parents and parents of color, given that their rights to have children, keep children, and parent them safely have been routinely targeted in medical, legal, and economic domains.
By drawing together expertise from local Philadelphia communities, community organizers, and Penn scholars, we aim to conscientiously build a monthly community sharing space, develop our understanding of reproductive justice, and develop practical ideas for integrating RJ frameworks more deeply into our practices.
Our Third Thursday event for February explores BE HOLDING, an original performance created by poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, new music ensemble Yarn/Wire, and director Brooke O’Harra. Inspired by Philadelphia 76ers basketball legend “Dr. J” and his iconic baseline scoop in the 1980 NBA Finals, Be Holding meditates on America’s history of racial violence in search of Black genius, justice, and joy. Produced by Girard College, a tuition-free boarding school for underserved youth that was at the center of Philadelphia’s civil rights movement, Be Holding opens the school’s historic campus to the city and fosters conversation on social justice issues that continue to impact its majority Black population today.
This conversation brings together key creative voices including poet and performer Yolanda Wisher, poet and performer David Gaines, director/artist Brooke O'Harra, and Ross Gay himself.
This conversation brings together key creative voices including poet and performer Yolanda Wisher, poet and performer David Gaines, director/artist Brooke O'Harra, and Ross Gay himself.
MEET THE SPEAKERS
YOLANDA WISHER
Poet, musician, educator, and curator Yolanda Wisher is author of Monk Eats an Afro. Wisher performs a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters and produced their debut album Doublehanded Suite, released in 2022. Her writing has been featured in numerous literary journals as well as The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, CBC Radio, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and the Poetry Foundation's Audio Poem of the Day series. Wisher has been commissioned to create new works of poetry by ICA Philadelphia, Fabric Workshop and Museum, HealthSpark Foundation, The Public Interest Law Center, Philadelphia Peace Plaza Committee, Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, and Philadelphia Jazz Project, among others. Wisher has been a poet in residence at Hedgebrook and Aspen Words, and she has taught poetry at K-12 schools, community organizations, prisons, social service agencies, and colleges and universities. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change and was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow in 2022. She works as a Senior Curator at Monument Lab.
BROOKE O'HARRA
Brooke O’Harra (she/her) is a director, artist and performer. She co-founded The Theater of a Two-headed Calf. O’Harra developed and directed all 14 of Two-headed Calf’s productions including the OBIE Award winning Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (2007 HERE), Trifles (Ontological Hysteric Incubator 2010), and the opera project You, My Mother (2012 La Mama ETC, 2013, River to River Festival).
O’Harra conceived, directed, scripted, and performed in the Dyke Division’s live serial Room for Cream (Four seasons - 28 episodes) at La Mama, ETC 2008-10 and at the New Museum 2017. Brooke and the Dyke Division were also featured in The New Museum’s 40th Anniversary Show “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon.” For several years she has been creating and performing a nine-part directing/performance project, I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Studies in directing or nine encounters between me and you. Brooke is also the co-creator of a collaborative performance with artist Sharon Hayes called Time Passes. Time Passes is an 8-hour performance that uses the book-on-tape recording of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as its spine. Brooke is the Co-director of the Performance Intensive http://www.performanceintensive.org. |
ROSS GAY
Ross Gay is interested in joy. Ross Gay wants to understand joy. Ross Gay is curious about joy. Ross Gay studies joy. Something like that. ~ Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays--The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023. 
DAVID A GAINES
David A. Gaines is a writer, filmmaker and actor born and based in Philadelphia. His work examines Blackness, masculinity, Christianity and mental health through an intersectional lens. Dave is an award-winning, nationally touring poetry performer, a fellow of The Watering Hole and BlackStar Filmmaker Lab, and a Poet Laureate of Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County; and his work has been featured in the National Black Arts Festival, Button Poetry, Write About Now, VICE Media, among many others. When not writing, performing, or orchestrating films, you can find Dave teaching poetry to Philly youth, playing narrative-centric video games or spending quality time with nature.
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Our rescheduled "Meet the Fellows" event will take place on Friday, February 23rd, bringing together artist Ernesto Pujol and filmmaker Ra'anan Alexandrowicz in conversation with interim CEE Director Dr. Kristina Lyons about their courses and their plan for the semester.
While at Penn, Ra'anan is teaching an urgent course, "One Land, Two Cinemas" where participants function as a research team exploring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through historical facts and their cinematic representations.
In Ernesto's course, "Ethnography of Vulnerability" students will use readings, discussions, and an immersive spring break field trip to Puerto Rico hosted by a queer farming collective to engage with the instructor's approach to ethnographic vulnerability and/as a multi-disciplinary social choreography process.We are delighted to welcome our new Spring 2024 Fellows Ernesto Pujol and Ra'anan Alexandrowicz.
While at Penn, Ra'anan is teaching an urgent course, "One Land, Two Cinemas" where participants function as a research team exploring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through historical facts and their cinematic representations.
In Ernesto's course, "Ethnography of Vulnerability" students will use readings, discussions, and an immersive spring break field trip to Puerto Rico hosted by a queer farming collective to engage with the instructor's approach to ethnographic vulnerability and/as a multi-disciplinary social choreography process.We are delighted to welcome our new Spring 2024 Fellows Ernesto Pujol and Ra'anan Alexandrowicz.
 ERNESTO PUJOL Ernesto Pujol is a multi-disciplinary queer maker who conceptualizes & curates group performances as social choreography; designs native edible horticultural spaces of historical memory for collective healing; and generates creative critical writing and transformative field education workshops. Pujol's complex projects result from trust-based ethical collaborations with gatekeepers & stakeholders in communities across the globe. Pujol believes the creative tools of ecologically and socially-engaged cultural producers are more relevant than ever within increasingly diverse impoverished societies seeking sustainability in the Post-Democratic Age of Extinction. Through grounded psychic acuity, Ernesto portrays the human condition's ongoing desire for transcendence in the face of human rights violations & climate crisis. Ernesto counteracts the cult of speed and the culture of spectacle by revisiting emblematic architecture and mythical landscapes through contemplative presence. These public interventions have consisted in full-immersion environments and repetitive cartographic walks with menus of minimal gestures, from slowness to stillness, all shrouded in silence for deep listening to encourage the awakening of consciousness. Ernesto Pujol is the author of Sited Body, Public Visions (2012) and Walking Art Practice (2018). Artist interviews & essays are found in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail (Vulnerability as Critical Self-Knowledge, 2013), Fernweh: A Travelling Curators’ Project (An Atlas of Small Places, 2015), and Awake: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004).  What if we could practice a radical ethnography of vulnerability because we believe that truly democratized, ethical engagement requires the unconditional vulnerability of the ethnographer: the relinquishing of all academic, professional, and project power bullying through a humble transparency and personal permeability that immediately triggers trust by de-enshrining the intellectual, by bravely including the emotional and spiritual life of the empathic ethnographer. Most of reality is invisible; the deeper communal paths are psychic. I am a veteran, multi-disciplinary social choreographer who has intuitively employed ethnographic tools and strategies for the past 30 years, collectively producing transformative performative portraits of threatened communities. For this graduate and undergraduate seniors workshop, I wish to invite students into my field process, in terms of my readings and roamings through the world. The workshop experience will culminate in a field trip to San Juan under the auspices of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, to visit historic colonial sites and contemporary model projects such as El Departamento de la Comida, a queer farming collective. Travel over the week of spring break is required for our course, with airfare, in-country travel, room and board covered completely for all students (thanks to generous support from the Padeia program). |  RA'ANAN ALEXANDROWICZ Ra'anan Alexandrowicz is an Israeli filmmaker and screenwriter currently living in Philadelphia . Some of his achievments include the Grand Jury Award at Sundance and a Peabody award for his experimental documentaries that deal with the violence, ethical suspensions, and military, legal, and visual frameworks underlying the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (and the treatment of Palestinians in Israel). Films include The Inner Tour, The Law in These Parts and The Viewing Booth. While a fellow at CEE and in light of the devastating events in Palestine / Israel, Ra'anan's seminar will pivot to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through cinematic reflection. The course, featuring film screenings of Israeli and Palestinian works, will delve into key historical periods in the conflict to foster a more nuanced understanding of the present. It will use cinema as a lens to study the century-long war and critically assess the role of audio-visual media in historical narratives. The main goals are to provide students with nuanced knowledge about the history of the conflict and create an inclusive space that allows an open and honest dialog about facts and events - as well as an inquiry into the very language we use to speak of them. Using the history of both Israeli and Palestinian cinemas as a vehicle to study history of the conflict itself provides an engaging way to look into the two peoples and the century long war between them, but also an opportunity to critically look at the positive and negative roles of the audio-visual medium in the context of historical narratives and events.  The seminar will be structured as collaborative research in which the class, functioning as a research team, will explore both the historical facts and the cinematic representations of these facts. Provoked by films and clips we screen; we aspire to familiarize ourselves with the roots of the conflict, learn the facts about key events; deconstruct and evaluate narratives and myths that enable it and address the core questions that it raises. At the same time, we will study and scrutinize the cinematic representation of the historical events and ask ourselves if cinema is a reflection of the painful reality of the conflict or one of the drivers of it? Was it used to create myths or rather to undo them, or did both? The outcome of the course will be a collectively written paper about Israeli and Palestinian Cinema to which each student will contribute a chapter. |
DEC 9 | 5PM | ADDAMS GALLERY |
A Video Installation Exhibit
Join us on Saturday, December 9th for our end-of-fellowship event with Sosena Solomon, who will present and curate a multi-projection exhibit consisting of the experimental video documentaries of students in her fellows course. The exhibit will take place at Addams Gallery at Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall at 200 S 36th Street.
| Featuring works by | Claire Elliot, Jixuan Guo, Di Tian, Tairan Hao, and Jiachen Sun |
SOSENA SOLOMON
 | 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. |
DEC 1 |
4PM |
PUBLIC TRUST
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Strategies on Black queer feminist freedom-making
CEE Fellow Jennifer Harge will present her ongoing archival project that houses movement scores, maps, prayers, and citations she's utilized over the last decade to craft a Blackqueer feminist creative praxis as a dancemaker in Detroit, MI. In this presentation, Harge will share choreographic entry points into the archive and discuss the permissions she has given herself and her work to build a practice rooted in Black longevity. Harge will be joined by scholar-practitioner and assistant professor of Africana Studies, Jasmine Johnson.
JENNIFER HARGE |
JASMINE E. JOHNSON |
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Jennifer Harge is an interdisciplinary choreographer, performance artist, and educator based in Detroit, MI. She approaches creative practice as a space to design and execute strategies to thrive in Blackqueer flesh. She privileges her interiority and subjectivity as form to move from/move with/reroute/reimagine/reinvent the stories sitting in her blood memories.
She most recently served as the Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair in Dance at UCLA where she taught studio courses on Black Feminist spatialities and Black compositional thought (word to Torkwase Dyson). She is currently developing FLY | DROWN, a multi-form fable series centering Black sovereignty. While in residence at the Center for Experimental Ethnography, Harge will teach a graduate seminar on Black Feminist Thought and Performance Composition. Informed by theories of time, space, presence, and the body, the course will work from movement-based investigations prompted by a range of Black feminist texts and performances to position performance composition as a site of research, intervention, ritual, and protest. |
Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies. Her work explores the politics of black movement including dance, diasporic travel, and gentrification. Johnson's interdisciplinary research and teaching are situated at the intersection of diaspora theory, dance and performance studies, ethnography, and black feminisms.
Her first book project, Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora, is a transnational ethnography on the industry of West African dance. Johnson has received a number of fellowships and grants including those from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has been published by The Drama Review, ASAP Journal, Dance Research Journal, Africa and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Theater Survey, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Aster(ix) and elsewhere. She serves as a Board Director for the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance and for the Dance Studies Association. |
THURS NOV 16 | NOON Virtual |
This talk reflects on the collaborative construction of a multimodal platform aimed at seeking integral restitutive justice for the victims of prison massacres in Ecuador. In making ethnographic multimodality adequate for accompanying victims and reclaiming justice, the platform – Prison Observatory 593 – brings together families of prisoners killed while incarcerated, human rights lawyers, liberation theology priests, and decolonial scholars. Building on our experience with the Observatory, this talk is an invitation for an interdisciplinary conversation about how the notions of cinematic accompaniment and decolonial reclamation can help us contribute to an abolitionist intervention against the carceral state.
Jorge Núñez  Jorge Núñez holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis. He is 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. Jorge is currently a visiting scholar at SUM – Center for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. His new research project explores the decolonial potential of Earth observation technologies by collaborating with Indigenous scholars and space experts in the production of satellite visualizations aimed at defending the rights of nature in Ecuador. | KRISTINA LYONS  Kristina Lyons’ current research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, feminist science studies, and legal anthropology in Latin America. Her manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke 2020), moves across laboratories, greenhouses, forests, and farms in the capital city of Bogotá, Colombia and the Andean-Amazonian department of Putumayo. In 2015, Dr. Lyons directed a popular education documentary film project based on farmer-to-farmer alternative agricultural practices called Cultivating a Bien Vivir (Living Well) in the Amazon. Her current work focuses on the memory and mourning of water, geological processes, participatory forms of territorial planning, socionatural disaster, and water-inspired subjecitivities. |
Indigenous activists everywhere are attempting to steer the world away from climate collapse. The films in this year’s series depict efforts to reclaim land in order to save all beings on the earth and for a more livable future.
The Bishnoi: India's Eco-Warriors
Dir. Franck Vogel and Benoit Segur, 2011, 52 min.
For centuries, the Bishnoi of Rajasthan in India have been stewarding and preserving the biodiversity of their land. They follow a 500 year old philosophy that all living beings have the right to survive and share all resources. Filmmakers Franck Vogel and Benoit Segur share the stories of three Bishnoi people: Khamu Ram Bishnoi, who fights against plastic pollution; Rana Ram Bishnoi, who has planted over 22,000 trees in the desert; and Ranveer Bishnoi, who hopes to become a priest.
Presented with new subtitles created for this screening
Screening followed by a conversation with filmmaker Franck Vogel and Dr. Nikhil Anand, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.
Please come to the small Diwali reception after the screening.
Dir. Franck Vogel and Benoit Segur, 2011, 52 min.
For centuries, the Bishnoi of Rajasthan in India have been stewarding and preserving the biodiversity of their land. They follow a 500 year old philosophy that all living beings have the right to survive and share all resources. Filmmakers Franck Vogel and Benoit Segur share the stories of three Bishnoi people: Khamu Ram Bishnoi, who fights against plastic pollution; Rana Ram Bishnoi, who has planted over 22,000 trees in the desert; and Ranveer Bishnoi, who hopes to become a priest.
Presented with new subtitles created for this screening
Screening followed by a conversation with filmmaker Franck Vogel and Dr. Nikhil Anand, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.
Please come to the small Diwali reception after the screening.
THURS NOV 2 | 4-6PM |
Join GSWS, CEE, and members of the public for an exciting showcase of films from Ricardo Bracho and his students!
Videos in this showcase were made by students in Ricardo Bracho's courses (Surrealism in the Americas, Planets in my Pen), in indepent studies, and in collaboration on theater productions, for a Sachs mini-grant and when Bracho was a Fellow with the Center for Experimental Ethnography. You'll experience wild pink ladies, the US/Mexico border, Brazil's fashion industry at war with its military dictatorship and so much more!
Videos in this showcase were made by students in Ricardo Bracho's courses (Surrealism in the Americas, Planets in my Pen), in indepent studies, and in collaboration on theater productions, for a Sachs mini-grant and when Bracho was a Fellow with the Center for Experimental Ethnography. You'll experience wild pink ladies, the US/Mexico border, Brazil's fashion industry at war with its military dictatorship and so much more!
GSWS/FQT Center Suite 345 Philadelphia, PA 19104
Join a workshop directed by Victoria Costa and Kristina Baines, co-directors of Cool Anthropology, focused on public scholarship in anthropology. Workshop attendees will participate in exercises that explore how to make their research more accessible to the public through various types of media.
Penn undergraduate, graduate, faculty, and staff are invited to join in this free event.
FILM SCREENING | PENN MUSEUM |
Join us for a Second Sunday Culture Film screening followed by conversation with filmmaker Alexi Liotti and Pacheedaht First Nation Elder Bill Jones.
A peaceful indigenous-led movement to protect the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek watershed in the last of British Columbia’s untouched Old Growth forests has become Canada’s largest act of civil disobedience. Named the best environmental film at the 2023 Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival, Rematriation follows concerned citizens exploring the confluence of scientific, cultural, economic and sociopolitical perspectives, as they take a stand to protect the last big trees from being cut down.
The Second Sunday film series is organized by the Penn Museum and co-sponsored by the Center for Experimental Ethnography, the Wolf Humanities Center, the Cinema and Media Studies Program at Penn and the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities.
A peaceful indigenous-led movement to protect the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek watershed in the last of British Columbia’s untouched Old Growth forests has become Canada’s largest act of civil disobedience. Named the best environmental film at the 2023 Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival, Rematriation follows concerned citizens exploring the confluence of scientific, cultural, economic and sociopolitical perspectives, as they take a stand to protect the last big trees from being cut down.
The Second Sunday film series is organized by the Penn Museum and co-sponsored by the Center for Experimental Ethnography, the Wolf Humanities Center, the Cinema and Media Studies Program at Penn and the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities.
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LGBT CENTER PENN | FRIDAY 13th 1 PM |
Calling all collaborators and volunteers for CAMRA! If you are interested in participating in this student-led collective, please fill out the form by Friday the 13th. On Friday, October 13th at 1:15pm in the Student Lounge at Penn’s LGBT Center, CAMRA will have the first Open Meeting of the year. Come and join us to imagine what this year will look like! We extend the invitation to returning and potential new members to brainstorm our vision for CAMRA and discuss our plans for the year ahead.
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.
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.
ANDREA BALLESTERO | OCT 5 2023 4PM |
Andrea Ballestero (Associate Professor of Anthropology, USC Dornsife) will present "Aquifers: Ehtnography at the edges of a concept," in this second installment of the "Elemental Thinking: Troubling States of Matter in the Americas" lecture series sponsored by the CLALS Interdisciplinary Research Cluster (IRC). This IRC is led by Penn professors Kristina Lyons (Anthropology) and Jon Hawkings (Environmental Sciences) in collaboration with other professors and graduate students across Penn’s schools and partners from Latin America and the U.S.
RSVP HERE to attend in person.
RSVP HERE to attend by Zoom.
Imagining what life will become in the near future, public officials and community members in Costa Rica are coming together to take responsibility for underground water worlds. In the process they oscillate between two concepts: groundwater and aquifers. Groundwater efficiently conveys a sense of water as a fungible unit that can be exchanged, banked, or spent. In contrast, the figure of the aquifer activates a grounded concept whereby land, liquidity, and history are inseparable. This paper queries the technical and legal tools people use to move from groundwater to aquifers, and back. Focusing on questions around jurisdiction and database making, I consider the everyday tasks required to align the world that is with the world that could be.
The elements have been taken up as a heuristic in the Arts and Sciences to understand environmental systems and change across geographical and cultural contexts. The approach to studying environments through the elements – most notably the classical elements of fire, earth, water, and air – has been foundational to the composition of Environmental Anthropology and its configurations of expertise, as well as the Environmental Sciences. However, the stakes of our current socio-ecological crises demand we engage with the elements as more than only taxonomies, statistics, and natural resources. This proposed interdisciplinary research cluster focuses specifically on socio-environmental conflicts and justice struggles involving these elemental assemblages. Our IRC cluster will engage with these pressing issues by placing the social studies of science & technology (STS), environmental law/justice, and the natural and environmental sciences in conversation through the combination of several activities: talks with invited guests and the organization of workshops and roundtables. We will focus on both case studies and broad trends occurring across the hemisphere in academic scholarship, scientific knowledge production, and public praxis. (Written by Kristina Lyons)
 | ANDREA BALLESTERO Dr. Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Ethnography Studio at the University of Southern California. Her book A Future History of Water (Duke 2019) examines how people engage with the world as it is, but differently and do so by creating endless bifurcations. In Costa Rica, the latter are means to create a difference between water as a human right and water as a commodity as material and political projects. She is co-editor of Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis (2021), a collection of essays and protocols to inspire creative analytic ethnographic work. C Currently, Dr. Ballestero is writing a book that explores cultural imaginaries of the underground as a new planetary frontier. In recent publications she has explored aquifers as a financial frontier, practices of touching with light through GIS technologies, physical models as hydro-geo-social |
choreographies of responsibility, and has developed the concept of casual planetarities. Her scholarship is located at the intersection of feminist STS, legal anthropology, and social studies of finance and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright program.
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