Anthropology Department Colloquium Series

During the academic year, the department organizes a variety of colloquium events, for which it typically brings in outside speakers. All events are open to anyone who wants to attend and include beverages and snacks. These events are an excellent opportunity to be inspired by what others are doing, learn about the state of the anthropology, and interact with influential researchers from across the world. The following colloquia events will count toward your Anthropology Certificate requirements, unless otherwise stated. To receive email announcements with up to date details regarding the colloquium series and department events, please sign up here.

View Past Colloquium Series

 

Fall 2019 Schedule:

November 19, 2019
2:30-6:30 pm
SBSG 1517
South Asia Collective + Sikh Studies Film Screening
Dr. Ethirai Gabriel Dattatreyan (Visual Anthropologist)
Senior Lecturer Department of Anthropology
University of London, London

 
November 26, 2019
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 1517

Anthropology/IMTFI
Fabio Mattioli - University of Melbourne, School of Social and Political Sciences
Ludovico Rella - PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, Durham University

December 5th, 2019
3:30-5:00pm
SBSG 1517

Dr. Katrian Pype
Ethnographic research on digital culture in Kinshasha, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Professor Department of African Studies and Anthropology
University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdom

 

Winter 2020 Schedule:

January 9, 2020
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 1517
"Anthropology, Theater and performance"
Dr. Ugo Edu
 
January 16, 2020
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 1517

"Worldmaking"
Dorinne K. Kondo is a Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at the University of Southern California. Kondo is author of Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace and About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. She is director of Asian American Studies at USC.
January 29, 2030
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 1321

Shaozeng Zhang

January 30, 2030
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 1321

Non-Suffering Work: China's medical Interventions in Post-conflict South Sudan

Yidong Gong, Ph.D, University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow

February 3, 2020
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 1321

Caitlin Zaloom is an Associate Professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. She is a founding editor of Public Books and the author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London.

February 13, 2020
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 1321

Troubling Patient Choice An Auto-ethnographic Account of Made Care Work

Dr. Erica Hua Fletcher - Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine.

February 18, 2020
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 1321

Performance/Anthropology: Ethnographic Terminalia/Internment Camps/Disneyland

Stephanie Takaragawa is an Associate Dean and Associate Professor, Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Department of Sociology, Chapman Univeristy Expertise: Cultural Anthropology; Asian American; Japanese Internment; and Visual Culture

February 20, 2020
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 1517

Tracing an Anthropology of HIV Data in the Era of Treatment as Prevention

Dr. Stephen Molldrem, President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of California Irvine's Department of Anthropology

February 26, 2020
12:00-2:00 pm
SSPA 2112
The Center for Ethnography presents: A Film on the Poetics of Intimacy with Francisco Cruces, Professor of Anthropology at UNED, Spain, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley

February 28, 2020
11:00 am

HIB 135

Publishing as Possibility and Engagement

Ken Wissoker, Editorial Director, Duke University Press, Intellectual Publics, The Graduate Center at CUNY

UCHRI Please RSVP to inahk@uci.edu

March 5, 2020
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 

Mineral Incorporations, Lead, Labor, and Life in Peruvian Neo-Extractive Politics

Stefanie Graeter, Chancellor's ADVANCE postdoctoral Fellow in the University of California Irvine's Department of Anthropology

March 11, 2020
12:30 pm 
SSPB 1222

To be Rescheduled*****Chasing Blackness: Citizenship, Racial Economy, and the Reproduction of Blackness in Mexico

Assist. Professor Anthony Russell Jerry, Department of Anthropology at UC Riverside

 

Spring 2020 Schedule:

April 1, 2020
3:30-5:00pm
Via Zoom

Grad: Publishing Workshop by Professor Tom Boellstorff

 

April 2, 2020
3:30-5:00 pm

Cancelled. This event will be moved to a later date.

Frank Cancian photo show with Obeydah Darwish

April 6, 2020
3:30-5:00pm
Via Zoom

Grad: Virtual "Brown Bag" with Prof. Justin Richland **All are Welcome!**

 Divided Jurisdictions
Monday, April 6, noon (Zoom details to be provided later)
Justin Richland, Department of Anthropology, UC Irvine

In this fractious sociopolitical moment in the U.S., questions of what we know, how we know it, and who is "in the know" have been thrown into radical doubt. I say radical doubt because in the rapid slide from "science skepticism" to "misinformation campaigns," what only a few years ago was characterized as a crisis of information now threatens crises of representative democracy and the rule of law. Along the way, established principles of good governance, once assumed to be immutable, were revealed to be "mere" norms whose force and authority depended on the coordination and cooperation of actors who, whatever their differences, at least ostensibly understood their political fortunes to be tied up in the (re)production of certain foundational norms of U.S. constituionalism. What exactly is the relationship between knowledge, normativity and authority in the U.S. today? And what might an ethnographic investigation of their interactional accomplishment, and the particular brand of humanistic empiricism it affords, suggest about how we got into these crises, and what it might take to get out?

April 7, 2020
3:30-5:00pm
Via Zoom

Engaging Research Re-Design (Valerie Olson and Kris Peterson)

(Zoom link to be announced closer to the date)

This workshop offers you tools to stay connected to, or to productively disconnect from, your research project. Our department wants you to feel empowered, supported, and provisioned as you adjust to changing research ecosystems. We provide: ways to continuously re-conceptualize your research topic or object of study, engage with interlocutors and data sources in appropriate and compassionate ways, make research ethics decisions, and take care of yourself as a researcher in a rapidly dis/re-organizing field. Let's also try to have fun and stay attuned to each other as research partners.

April 8, 2020
3:30-5:00pm
Via Zoom
 
April 10, 2020
3:30-5:00 pm
SBSG 

Cancelled **To be rescheduled at a later date***Sylvia Yanagisako and Lisa Rofel, lunch venue

April 13, 2020
12:00 pm
Via Zoom

Teaching Together: Supporting Faculty and TA Collaboration in Large Classes
Angela Jenks and Katie Cox, Department of Anthropology, UC Irvine

Large lecture classes often rely on graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) to lead discussion sections, grade assignments, and provide targeted feedback to undergraduates. However, common challenges in the working relationship between instructors and TAs frustrate faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students alike. This presentation shares recommendations developed in the Teaching Together Learning Community, a year-long learning community in the UCI School of Social Sciences designed to improve large undergraduate classes by strengthening collaboration between faculty and graduate TAs. Specific tools for improving faculty-TA communication, supporting graduate student pedagogical professional development, and engaging in a collaborative course design process will be shared.

April 16, 2020 (on Hold)
3:30-5:00pm
SBSG 

Benjamin Dix (Illuminations)

 April 40, 2020 (Monday)
Noon-1:00pm
via Zoom

Virtual Brown Bag Discussion with Keith Murphy

I'm currently working on a project about graphic language. You can read the semi-official description on my website, but what I want to do for this brown bag meeting is talk a little bit about how the project has shifted and matured over the last couple of years. I'll show and discuss some of the particular tools I'm using as I do fieldwork and write, and some of the ponderable objects that have drawn me in directions I hadn't conceived when I first proposed the project. So think about it as part "research presentation," part "how I work," and part "lessons from the field."

April 22, 2020 (Wednesday)
Noon - 12:50pm
via Zoom

Ethnography in a Time of Pandemic: A Virtual Brown Bag Workshop
Eleana Kim and Tom Boellstorff, moderators

 

The global nature of the coronavirus pandemic has the potential to affect every community on the planet. Just as COVID-19 is transforming societies around the world, our fieldsites and how we do ethnography will likely change in fundamental ways. If you are preparing to do fieldwork, your research design and goals may have to adapt to changing circumstances and uncertain timelines. If you are in the field (and possibly had to leave your fieldsite), your project changed around you in real time. If you are writing your dissertation, you may be concerned about how the cultural contexts of your fieldwork will be affected by the pandemic. In this workshop, we will discuss how COVID-19 has affected your research plans and goals, and collaboratively brainstorm strategies for tracking changes in your fieldsites and identifying other spaces, scales, and relations for ethnographic investigation.

April 23, 2020
3:30-5:00pm
SBSG

**Event Cancelled** We hope to reschedule at a later date**Theater-maker

Debra Spitulnik Valdi is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory College of Arts and Sciences

May 4, 2020
Noon-1:00pm
via Zoon

Cash, credit, or TP?

Bill Maurer

Monday, May 4, noon–1pm

In this virtual brown bag, I will talk about repurposing existing research strategies to study emerging economies during a pandemic, as well as the sorts of questions from reporters, policymakers, and activists I have been fielding.

Suggested reading: "The Use of Money to Maintain Connection and Toilet Paper," Anthropology News, April 9, 2020 (https://anthropologynews.report/the-use-of-money-to-maintain-connection-and-toilet-paper/)

May 7, 2020 Moved to later date
3:30-5:00pm
SBSG

 Sikh Studies Lecture

Please note this event is being moved to a later date, possibly Fall 2020. We will update everyone when we have further information. Thank you for your understanding.

May 18, 2020 
12:00 noon
Zoom Mtg

Jeff Mantz, the head of the Cultural Anthropology program at the NSF, will do a Zoom event for our grad students about responding to the COVID crisis with regard to research.

May 21, 2020  Korean Studies Event (E. Kim)
May 28, 2020 Sa'ed Atshan