To register for this event, please click here.
Mayanthi Fernando, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California – Santa Cruz, and Weatherhead Resident Scholar, SAR
Mayanthi Fernando courtesy of UC – Santa Cruz
Why are scholars more open to accepting mosquitos, mollusks, and mountains—rather than angels, djinn, and other spirits—as historical actors with whom humans are always in relation? How does secular knowledge focusing on “the real,” that which is material and visible, make it difficult to think of “the supernatural” as part of nature and culture? And how might we re-entangle the supernatural with the human and the natural? This exploratory talk examines how and why multispecies and post-humanist scholarship expands definitions of being yet restricts other-than-humans to entities that have been understood as part of “the natural.” Reading against the grain and alongside traditions like the Islamic sciences of the unseen, Mayanthi Fernando argues that recent trends in post-humanist scholarship offer epistemological horizons beyond those of secular materialism.
This event is free and open to the public. The presentation will take place in the Eric S. Dobkin Boardroom on the SAR campus. Advanced registration is encouraged.
To register for this event, please click here.
Giovanni Batz, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Miami University
Giovanni Batz by Monika Banach
Along with the global demand for natural resources and the influence of neoliberalism, foreign companies that produce energy and sponsor extra-activist industries in Latin America continue to grow. State officials, the private sector, and other supporters of megaprojects argue that these initiatives foster development, employment, and living conditions, as well as creating clean and renewable sources of energy. Yet many indigenous communities, human rights organizations, and other opponents claim that these industries do not further development and instead contribute to communal divisions, environmental degradation, human rights violations, and militarization. In Cotzal, Guatemala, the arrival of several megaprojects has been referred to as the “new” or “fourth” invasion—the three previous invasions being Spanish colonization, the creation of plantations at the end of the nineteenth century, and the Guatemalan civil war (1960–1996). In this presentation, Giovanni Batz will provide a historical account of these “four invasions” with an emphasis on the conflict surrounding the construction of a hydroelectric dam in Cotzal.
This event is free and open to the public. The presentation will take place in the Eric S. Dobkin Boardroom on the SAR campus. Advanced registration is encouraged.
To register for this event, please click here.
John Arroyo, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
John Arroyo by KCET Departures
Where Mexican immigrants live in the United States plays a critical role in how they adapt to their host society—and how their host society reacts to their presence in a physical context. Over the past twenty years, the mobility patterns of surging Mexican populations across Georgia have had a major influence on suburban space. Based on two years of ethnographic research, John Arroyo examines how fear, invisibility, and agency manifest across the residential built environments of newly Mexican areas of greater Atlanta and explores how Mexican-origin people either adapted to or reshaped suburban housing at various scales. Additionally, he shows how the spatial ideals of Latino urbanism foment reactionary land use and zoning policies throughout small suburban municipalities on Atlanta’s periphery. In a twenty-first-century America defined by exponential Latino-community growth, this emergent case study illustrates how Mexican-origin populations navigate the challenges of urbanism when settling in places unprepared for seismic population shifts.
This event is free and open to the public. The presentation will take place in the Eric S. Dobkin Boardroom on the SAR campus. Advanced registration is encouraged.
To register for this event, please click here.
Beth Semel, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Beth Semel by Elena Sobrino
What does it mean for machines to listen? What kind of listeners do the people who build artificial intelligence–enabled machines train them to be? After all, Amazon’s Alexa is only “listening” in the same way that she is a “she.” Drawing from extended ethnographic fieldwork with psychiatric and engineering professionals in the United States, Beth Semel argues that the concept of machine listening is both a powerful and strategically vague analogy that articulates taken-for-granted assumptions about human listening and the speaking subject. While listening technologies are central to contemporary debates about ethics and automation, Semel’s examination of the behind-the-screen labor through which a set of such technologies is assembled reveals their entanglement with deeper histories and political economies of engineering, speech science, and care work in the United States.
This event is free and open to the public. The presentation will take place in the Eric S. Dobkin Boardroom on the SAR campus. Advanced registration is encouraged.