Our CoLED network is unique in drawing together scholars with very different research practices and topics, all of whom are concerned in various ways with the processes of knowledge production, the hows of ethnography, and the heuristic of design as a way to think about what is possible in the world.
One of the exciting things about the network is a chance to come to know other scholars working on campuses in other parts of California, or colleagues doing ethnography in other departments just across the quad.
With this in mind, CoLED sends out semi-regular email dispatches of news from our network to our listserv. Here are some recent announcements from our network that have appeared in the our email news round-ups.
Article Publications
Marisol de la Cadena’s (UC Davis) article “Uncommoning Nature” is online in recent issue of the journal e-flux.
de la Cadena also co-edited a special feature in HAU with Marianne E. Lien. The multi-authored essay is titled “Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations.”
Fernando Dominguez-Rubio (UC San Diego) has an article titled “On the discrepancy between objects and things: An ecological approach” in the Journal of Material Culture.
Christiana Giordano (UC Davis) has two new articles on her research in Italy, one in Current Anthropology, “Lying the Truth: Practices of Confession and Recognition” on migration and applying for the legal refugee category of “victims of human trafficking,” and another in Medical Anthropology “Secular Redemptions: Biopolitics By Example” about how Catholic nuns negotiate secular and religious frameworks in their service work with migrant victims of human trafficking. See attached PDFs.
Joe Hankins’ (UC San Diego) article in a recent American Anthropologist that picks up the claim that there is a moral optimism at the core of sociocultural anthropology, arguing that this optimism operates in tension with a “rigorous skepticism interrogating the shifting conditions that give life to anthropology’s possibility.” The article, titled “The Ends of Anthropology: 2014 in U.S. Sociocultural Anthropology” can be found in American Anthropologist 117(3):554-564.
Lilly Irani (UC San Diego) has a new article from her ethnographic work on design scenes in India. The article, titled “Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship” is in a 2015 issue of Science, Technology, and Human Values.
An interview with Irani appears in the first issue of the new peer-reviewed online journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. In the interview, Irani discusses her decade of ethnographic research into globally distributed micro-labor, piecemeal work found and distributed via the digital tools like Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Kristina Lyons (UC Santa Cruz) has a new article in Cultural Anthropology titled “Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers under the Gun of the U.S.–Colombia War on Drugs”.
Book Announcements
Marisol de la Cadena’s (UC Davis) new book Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds has just appeared, also through Duke University Press. She writes, “ethnography at the limits…. or so I want to think about it.”
Bill Maurer’s (UC Irvine) new book How Would You Like to Pay?: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money is out through Duke University Press.
Roshenak Kheshti’s (UC San Diego) new book, Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music, was released in October 2015 with NYU Press.
Multimedia Projects
Cassandra Hartblay’s (postdoc, UC San Diego) ethnographic play I WAS NEVER ALONE, which she is developing in collaboration with director Joseph Megel, was workshopped in February 2017 at UNC-CH with support from UNC Performance Studies, Medical Anthropology, and Art @The Core. The workshop culminated in a staged reading. Along with Elana Zilberg and Deborah Stein, Cassandra received a FISP grant for $25,000 to bring the next iteration of the project – a process production of the play – to UCSD during 2016-2017. The play is based on her fieldwork with adults with disabilities in Russia.
Andy Rice (postdoc, UCLA) has just finished a new feature documentary with Zeinabu Davis (she is the director, Andy co-produced, edited, and shot it). Spirits of Rebellion provides intimate access to key filmmakers trained at UCLA who are identified with the movement known as the L.A. Rebellion, including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Barbara McCullough, Billy Woodberry and Davis herself, at work and in discussion. The film engages the origins of the name “L.A. Rebellion,” the importance of public education to this group and in today’s world, and the intriguing question, “What is a Black film?” A longer description and trailer at spiritsofrebellion.com. The film premiered at the Hammer Museum on Nov. 15.
Awards, Laudations, and Other Announcements
Congratulations to Yelena Gluzman (PhD Candidate, UC San Diego) and her collaborator Sarah Klein, who were awarded the Making & Doing Award at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science in Denver this November. Their award recognized their interactive presentation about experiments as sites of engagement across the social science/biological science divide. The Award seeks to “share scholarly practices of participation, engagement, and intervention in their fields of study. It highlights scholarly practices for producing and expressing STS knowledge and expertise that extend beyond the academic paper or book. By increasing the extent to which 4S members learn from one another about practices they have developed and enacted.”
Congratulations to Roderic Crooks (PhD Candidate, UCLA) who has been named a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow for 2016-2017 in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. His Mentor will be Dr. Geoffrey Bowker. The Postdoc was awarded based on his proposal, titled “Mining Urban Schools: The Production of Learning Analytics.” He writes, “Using a minority-serving public high school as a field site, this ethnographic project reconciles seemingly opposed strains of multidisciplinary research into technological innovation and education by exploring the institutional processes and labor that go into transforming daily educational activity into data.”
Congratulations to Yelena Gluzman (PhD Candidate, UCSD), who received a UCSD Frontiers of Innovations Scholars Program grant to support her performance-based ethnographic research in a cognitive neuroscience lab. She will develop the project under the supervision of Dr. Morana Alac (Communication & Science Studies), Dr. Jaime Pineda (Cognitive Science) and Dr. Julie Burelle (Theater).