ANTH Seminar Series | More State? What People Speak About When They Speak About Government
In this presentation I engage debates on democracy and the state in contemporary Latin America through the analysis of a set of ethnographic episodes in which different Venezuelan citizens lament that “there is no government” in their country. I will show that all those episodes express inter-subjective conceptions of injustice in parallel to the acknowledgement …
ANTH Seminar Series | Digging the Future: Mining Voids as Potentiality, Contest and Destruction
Throughout New South Wales, mining has come to play a central role in imagining of local futures, whether as dystopic or utopic imaginings of a time ahead. The role of mining in informing the materiality of place and people’s connections to place have been explored, with concepts such as solastalgia (Albrecht 2005) bringing attention to …
ANTH Seminar Series | “Do You Even Lift?”: The Social Lives of Image and Performance Enhancing Drugs
It is increasingly recognised that drugs have social lives. Drugs gain meaning through social relations, and have implications for social interactions. This is particularly true of image and performance enhancing drugs (IPEDs) which literally shape people. For the past 4 years I have been immersed in online bodybuilding communities, exploring the practice, experience and meaning …
ANTH Seminar Series | Victim Regions of Pollution: Dictatorship, Chemical Violence and Transitional Justice in Post-revolutionary Tunisia
Is toxic chemical pollution a from of state violence? While in the Anthropocene all living and non-living beings are connected through industrial chemical relations, inequality, power, and politics shape the distribution of harm from noxious chemicals unto the human and non-human. Toxic pollution in other words is shaped by forms of governance. Drawing on several cases …