Alanna Warner-Smith is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Syracuse University and SAR’s 2020 Paloheimo fellow.
In her talk, Warner-Smith will be discussing the ways in which “slow science” and “slow archaeology” might be applied to bioarchaeology by looking at the Huntington Anatomical Collection and specifically focusing on the collection’s Irish immigrants, who lived, worked, and died in New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the skeleton as a record of lived experience, life-course approaches interpret evidence of health and activity across individuals’ entire lives. A “slow” approach also draws together multiple lines of evidence—skeletal, archival, and material—to disentangle the processes shaping bodies and lived experiences. Warner-Smith’s presentation will examine the ways in which a “slow bioarchaeology” informs the categories we use, the questions we raise, and the phenomena that form the focus of our studies.
This event is part of the 2020 fall scholar colloquia series.
Each year, incoming resident scholars introduce their work to the SAR community through a presentation and Q&A. This year’s talks are hosted online and continue to be free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Stephen Sullivan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Northwestern University and SAR’s 2020 Mellon fellow.
What does gentrification sound like? Previous scholarship tends to analyze the social and material processes of gentrification separately. Popular studies of urban sound, meanwhile, focus narrowly on noise complaints, without attention to the political and historical conditions they reflect. Sullivan’s dissertation research instead uses the concept of “soundscape” to offer a more integrated, on-the-ground account of gentrification and its discontents. During this talk, Sullivan will present preliminary findings from ethnographic fieldwork he conducted over the past year in a working-class, gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. Amid rapid demographic and social change, proposed changes to housing and land policy by elected officials, and heightened forms of policing under city leadership, sound in general and noise in particular have become sites of neighborhood contestation and dissent.
This event is part of the 2020 fall scholar colloquia series.
Each year, incoming resident scholars introduce their work to the SAR community through a presentation and Q&A. This year’s talks are hosted online and continue to be free and open to the public. Registration is required.