Urban photography summer school 2013
Goldsmiths, university of london

Designed for photographers, artists and urbanists whose work address notions of urban space and culture, the international Summer School provides a highly intensive two-week practical and theoretical training in key aspects of urban visual practice. The course aims to offer participants a wide range of relevant skills resulting in the production of a photography portfolio drawn from London’s urban environments, combined with a collective final exhibition.

The programme has been developed in collaboration with Urban Encounters (Tate Britain), the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR), Photofusion and the International Association of Visual Urbanists (iAVU). The course is taught by experienced tutors from Goldsmith’s top-ranked Sociology Department and the international MA in Photography and Urban Cultures. The programme draws on the advanced theoretical, research and practical image-making specialisms of key practitioners in the field.

Summer School tutors include: Paul Halliday (MA in Photography and Urban Cultures Course Leader),Beatriz Véliz Argueta (Coordinator/Goldsmiths), Les Back (Goldsmiths), Caroline Knowles (CUCR Director), Mandy Lee Jandrell (Southampton Solent University/Goldsmiths), Peter Coles (Oxford/ Goldsmiths), Alex Rhys-Taylor (Goldsmiths), Manuel Vazquez (Goldsmiths),  Laura Cuch (Goldsmiths) and Jasmine Cheng (Goldsmiths).

The programme will explore how the practice of urban image making informs the development of a reflexive and critical research perspective and will include assignments and guided fieldtrips focusing on(1) urban landscapes, (2)  street-based photography and (3) material objects.

The Summer School will take place from 19 – 31 August 2013. Application deadline is June 10.

http://www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/summer-school/

The 2013 annual Visual Research Conference of the Society for Visual Anthropology will begin with an informal no-host dinner open to all SVA members on Monday evening November 18th followed by interactive presentations on Tuesday November 19th and Wednesday November 20th at the beginning of the 112th American Anthropology Association meetings in Chicago. These presentations are scheduled for about 45 minutes and are formatted to allow for viewing of visual material, as well as several question and answer periods during each presentation, thus facilitating much lively discussion. Each year this conference provides visual anthropologists a unique opportunity to meet and interact with others who do anthropological and anthropologically related research on visual signification, visual communication, and visual forms of representation. We invite all SVA members, from graduate students to retired professors, to submit proposals and attend the conference.

THE 2013 DEADLINE FOR VISUAL RESEARCH CONFERENCE SUBMISSIONS IS MIDNIGHT MARCH 31, 2013, GUAM TIME.

Contact: Craig Campbell or Stephanie Takaragawa
Phone: Craig (512) 226-3972
E-mail: ethnographicterminalia@gmail.com
Website: www.ethnographicterminalia.org
ETHNOGRAPHIC TERMINALIA 2012: SAN FRANCISCO
Exhibition & Opening Reception

Audible observatories are points of sensory convergence.  They are nodes where worlds perceived through the senses intersect and begin the labor of transforming independent events into knowable and meaningful claims. They speak and they are spoken to.

Ethnographic Terminalia is a curatorial collective that hosts an annual exhibition of international artists and researchers working at the intersection of art and anthropology. In November 2012, the Ethnographic Terminalia Curatorial Collective welcomes visitors to the Audible Observatories exhibition. This year’s show is organized in collaboration with Thor Anderson and is scheduled to coincide with the 111th annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).

Ethnographic Terminalia brings anthropologists and artists together in the gallery space to investigate the borders and blurrings of contemporary art practice and alternative modes of cultural inquiry and representation.  Ethnographic Terminalia is an exploration of what it means to exhibit anthropology - particularly in some of its less traditional forms - in proximity to and conversation with contemporary art practices.

Now in its fourth year (following Montréal, New Orleans, and Philadelphia), Ethnographic Terminalia represents an international array of creative material, conceptual, and new media engagements where anthropology and art intersect. For Ethnographic Terminalia 2012: Audible Observatories the curators have selected over twenty five artists and cultural researchers including: Steve Feld, John Wynne, Rupert Cox & Angus Carlyle, and Roxanne Varzi.

Urban photography summer school 2012
goldsmiths, university of london

Designed for photographers, artists and urbanists whose work addresses notions of urban space and culture the international Summer School provides a highly intensive two week practical and theoretical training in key aspects of urban visual practice. The course aims to offer participants a wide range of relevant skills resulting in the production of a photography portfolio drawn from London’s urban environments combined with a collective final exhibition.

The programme has been developed in collaboration with Urban Encounters and the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR). The course will be taught by tutors from Goldsmith’s Sociology Department and the international MA in Photography and Urban Cultures. The programme draws on the advanced theoretical, research and practical image-making specialisms of key practitioners in the field. Summer School tutors include: Paul Halliday (MA in Photography and Urban Cultures Convener), Beatriz Véliz Argueta (Coordinator/Goldsmiths), Les Back (Goldsmiths), Caroline Knowles (CUCR Director), Mandy Lee Jandrell (Goldsmiths), Peter Coles (Oxford/ Goldsmiths), Alex Rhys-Taylor (Goldsmiths), Manuel Vazquez (Goldsmiths), Michael Wayne Plant (Goldsmiths), Laura Cuch (Goldsmiths) and Jasmine Cheng (Goldsmiths).

The programme will explore how the practice of urban image making informs the development of a reflexive and critical research perspective and will include assignments and guided fieldtrips focusing on (1) urban landscape, (2) street photography and (3) material objects.

Application deadline: June 3rd, 2011
For more information: www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/summer%20school/

Call for Papers

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, November 2012

Panel Title: “Mediating Numbers: Representations of Data, Measurement, and Assessment Across Borders”

Organizers: Damien Stankiewicz (Temple University) and Rebecca Howes-Mischel (New York University)

Numbers are today a ubiquitous medium for the representation of global realities, likely because they are understood to move across boundaries and borders in stable and “objectively” verifiable ways (Ong and Collier 2005). They seem able to “translate” the messiness of qualitative, local, and individual events into quantitative, mobile, and comparable measures. Economic indices; UN data on refugees; comparisons of radiation in Japan and Chernobyl; households with internet; average age of retirement; “happiness scales”; rankings of access to health care; child mortality-these are the numbers that order communities, nations and a world across mass media, governmental institutions, and people’s everyday lives.

This panel, about the mediation of numbers and the numbers of media, seeks to set science studies and media studies into generative conversation: How can approaches developed by anthropologists of law, science, and technology help us to understand media and mediation as claims about “objectivity”; reciprocally, how can the anthropology of media and mediation contribute to our understanding of quantitative assessments and data as narrative and representational? Working across these subdisciplines, we mean to ask both: what kind of media are numbers/data/statistics? And, how do media convey data?

In pursuing these parallel questions, this panel means to examine how quantitative and statistical measurements and assessments move across the borders and boundaries of different kinds of global scales, and how they help us to understand the uses and forms of numbers that travel. Data and statistics are powerful technologies of assessment and evaluation understood to map onto material realities that are abstract and thus, transcend culture-yet how do numbers and measurements, as these are generated by and for institutions and governments, change or take different forms as they move across and through national borders and boundaries? In what ways do they remain bordered or beholden to the national and local contexts in which they were generated? How do the social actors who produce these data, statistics, and indices understand them, like media, to be intended for particular “readings” or receptions? How are these numbers and data therefore anticipatory and performative? We mean to excavate the social relations and processes of production embedded in these mobile and mobilized data.

This panel hopes to bring together innovative scholars working across a variety of geographic regions who would like to think further about the intersection of measurement and mediation. Empirical objects might include television ratings; epidemiological statistics; corruption indices; indicators of economic behavior; or demands on digital bandwidth, inasmuch as these reveal the (in)stability, malleability, and performativity of numbers that mediate.

If you are interested in participating in this panel, please send an abstract of 250 words to Damien Stankiewicz at damien@temple.edu and/or Rebecca Howes-Mischel at rhm222@nyu.edu by April 1st.

ON THE BORDERS OF THE IMAGE: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON VISUAL ETHICS

Chairs: Sara Perry & Jonathan Marion

This roundtable discussion, organised on behalf of the Society for Visual Anthropology’s (SVA) Ethics Committee, seeks to continue the SVA’s now six-year-old tradition of nurturing debate and critical reflection on the ethics of anthropological imaging. Building on this year’s conference theme of “Borders and Crossings,” we aim to probe anthropologists’ ethical negotiations with image creation, circulation and consumption within and across disciplinary boundaries. Of particular interest is the iterative and unstable nature of image use-the navigation of visual value systems and moralities across time, space, cultural and institutional context, particularly when circumscribed by programmatic ethical review models. How have histories of anthropological, scientific and related social scientific practice impacted on our contemporary management of imagery? Where is representational authority situated in unstable, multiply-occupied/authored anthropological contexts? How are shifting visual technologies and intellectual paradigms disrupting or rearranging our ethical priorities? How do we anticipate and negotiate future relations with pictorial materials?  And what legacies are our current approaches to image ethics likely to leave behind?

Taken together, the intent of this roundtable is to give practitioners an opportunity to discuss the ethical implications of in-progress or recently-completed visual research, and to draw upon the collective input of roundtable attendees to plan for or rethink our visual responsibilities.

Deadline:

For those interested in participating, please provide a brief description (max. 150 words) of the particular scenario or issue you wish to contribute to this year’s discussion as soon as possible, and by 5 April at the latest. Decisions will be made by 10 April, and contributors will need to register for the conference via the AAA’s web-based system by 15 April. All correspondence should be sent to Sara Perry <sara.perry@york.ac.uk>.

The roundtable will take the form of a series of brief, 10-minute presentations by participants, culminating in an extended period of group discussion and debate.

Please note: As per AAA participation rules, presenting as part of a roundtable counts as a person’s one “major” role, the same as giving a paper or poster.

The annual Visual Research Conference takes place with an informal no-host dinner on Monday evening, followed by interactive presentations on Tuesday, and Wednesday at the beginning of the AAA Annual meeting. These presentations are 45 - 50 minutes in length and allow for extended viewing of visual material and lively discussions. This is a wonderful way to meet and interact with others who do anthropological and anthropologically-related research on visual signification, visual communication, and visual forms of representation.

This year’s Visual Research Conference will take place in San Francisco, November 12-14, 2012.

Find out more by clicking on the “Visual Research Conference” menu items at

http://societyforvisualanthropology.org/?page_id=1665

deadline for submissions: Sunday, March 25, 2012, 11:59pm, Hawai’i time

Jeni Wolowic (U. British Columbia) presents her film 'For Our Street Family' at the 2008 Visual resaerch Conference.

AAA Annual Meeting 2012 - San Francisco, Borders and Crossings

Session proposal: Crossing paths with Johnny Cash: Anthropological musings on the man in black

Organizers: Paul Christensen, Union College
Eric J. Cunningham, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

U.S. born singer/songwriter Johnny Cash remains a profoundly influential, albeit controversial, figure in the lexicon of American popular music. His genre-crossing songs earned critical accolades and commercial success, and remain popular today among a diverse and diffuse fan-base. Through his distinct voice and compellingly understated lyrics, Cash urged audiences to consider the morality of prisons, the consequences of war, the horrors of Native American genocide, the grace of spirituality, and the darkness of humanity. However, Cash’s fame was about more than his music. Conveying an overtly masculine, often unabashedly Christian, persona, Cash presented a sound and image that felt and sounded quintessentially American. He was the man in black, “an embodiment of the American male’s most flattering picture of himself” (McClintock 1978). He was also contradictory, rubbing shoulders with political and religious elite, yet remaining a rebel who pushed the sensitivities of a pre-Woodstock America, struggled with addiction, and helped fuel the rise of rock and roll.

The organizers of this panel are both fans of Johnny Cash who feel there is power, message, and meaning in his songs and life. However, we are also detractors in various senses, recognizing that no man can be a saint without blemish. Still, in the “man in black” we find profundity, humor, insight, and indignation, as well as good rhythm. Thus, our goal is to create an entertaining and intellectually rigorous panel that draws on the life and work of Johnny Cash. Papers in this session will use the music and mystique of Johnny Cash as starting points for anthropological discussions concerning persistent issues of contemporary relevance. Our hope is that specific songs will serve as cues for focused and general conversations on the ongoing importance of anthropology, possibilities from within the discipline for social change, and the role of popular culture in scholarly discourse. Put simply, we feel that songs and artistry matter and thus take time to muse on the man in black, and thereby give notice to meaningful areas of ongoing attention in anthropology. (more…)

Panel on Art and Anthropology
“Painting My Fieldnotes: Rethinking the strange crossings between artists and anthropologists”
Sponsor: Irving C Johnson, National University of Singapore
Please contact Irving Johnson for details at: seajic@nus.edu.sg

Description:
I am looking for anthropologists who would like to be on my panel at the AAA in San Francisco in November 2012. If you are interested, please respond to seajic@nus.edu.sg by 3/15/2012 with an abstract of your proposed talk (250 words).

Panel Abstract:
For much of its disciplinary past, anthropologists have constructed the arts (music, painting, dance, etc) as a unique dimension of human existence. Early anthropological writings were seemingly fascinated in the cultural symbolisms one could read from so-called “primitive” art. Later anthropological observations of places as diverse as pre and post-colonial Bali (Geertz ) and the small English village of Wimbledon with its Thai Buddhist temple (Cate) , have shown how such clearly mapped categories may not be realistically applicable. Art is part of much larger cultural processes often crisscrossing national, emotional and ethnic borders. Nevertheless, despite the recognition given to the arts as a multi-sensory organism with tentacles spreading into diverse cultural and historical universes, many anthropologists have continued to write about the arts as if they were divorced from their scholarly lifeworlds. The arts are an integral part of the social world of their practitioners but these worlds seem to be separated from those of the observing anthropologist. Anthropology and its myriad of theories produces the epistemological language upon which the arts and artists are produced and ‘studied’. Yet, what happens when the anthropologist is himself or herself also an “artist”? In this panel, we will attempt to question the seemingly clear binarisms that have traditionally existed between art and anthropology through a rich ethnographic engagement with the crossings that move between both frames. One question that the panel will focus on is on the process by which ‘art’ is produced - the “how” of art, not merely by its practitioners but also by the anthropologist who is an artist. Like the men and women they study, anthropologists are also engaged in art worlds - they paint, dance, sing, collect art pieces, and so forth. How do anthropologists who are also artists reconcile their own reflective and creative selves with their academic training? How then does this shift the way art is thought about in anthropology and what would an anthropology of art eventually look like when the borders of both disciplines are torn apart?

Forbidden No More: The New China in Ethnographic Film festival and 
conference will take place at Haverford College on February 24 & 25, 2012, 
focusing on new ethnographic films about contemporary China.  Across two 
days, FORBIDDEN NO MORE presents a series of films and conversations 
exploring the changing social landscape of China. Featuring works by 
ethnographer-filmmakers Tami Blumenfield, Jenny Chio, Kenneth Dean, Maris 
Gillette, Steve Harrell, Benjamin Gertsen, Tik-sang Liu, J.P. Sniadecki,
and  Angela Zito,  the festival considers contemporary China through a
myriad of  lenses‹rural-urban relations, popular religion, gender norms and
family constitution, economic privatization, ethnic minorities, tourism,
political transformation, and differences between China’s coast and
hinterland.

For a schedule of events, directions to Haverford, and filmmakers¹ bios,
visit:  http://www.haverford.edu/forbiddennomore/