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.
FALL 2020 SCHEDULE:
| Oct. 23, 2020 (Friday) Noon via Zoom |
WHERE: On Zoom (registration link available here: https://uci.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIkcOChqT0jGdwRbD-X5kYhsdhg5hCAWKIJ ) The Maribor Uprisings: A Live Participatory Film Winner, Best Feature Film, Society for Visual Anthropology, 2017 Summary Twice, the people went into the streets. Twice, the police drove them away. What began as protests became uprisings. In the once-prosperous industrial city of Maribor, Slovenia, anger over political corruption became unruly revolt. This participatory documentary places audiences in the midst of the third and largest uprising as crowds surround and ransack City Hall under a hailstorm of tear gas canisters. The Maribor Uprisings takes up urgent questions raised by these events, and by uprisings elsewhere, from the Arab Spring, through Paris, to Black Lives Matter. What sparks such popular outrage? How are participants swept up in—and then changed by—confrontations with police? Could something like this happen in your city? The directors invite audiences to engage these questions through an unusual and participatory form. Drawing on the dramatic frontline footage of a video activist collective embedded within the uprisings, this film places viewers amidst the jostling crowds. It requires them to make their own choices about which cameras they will follow and therefore how they will participate. Like those who joined the actual uprisings, audiences in the theater must decide whether to listen to organizers and remain with those committed to nonviolent protest on Freedom Square or to follow rowdy crowds toward City Hall and almost certain conflict.
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| Oct. 23, 2020 (Friday) 5:00-6:00pm PDT via Zoom Register Here |
EBeyond Environmental Injustice (B-EiJ) Workshop Civic Data & Case Study for Santa
Ana HOSTED BY: Kim Fortun, Tim Schütz, Kaitlyn Rabach, Prerna Srigyan and Maggie Woodruff CONTACT: Tim Schütz, tschuetz@uci.edu UPDATES: Follow the B-EiJ Instagram, sign up for the e-mail list and visit the digital research workspace You will receive a Zoom link on the day before the workshop. The Environmental Injustice Teaching Team will host a 1-hour virtual workshop. Participants will learn to use a research framework that examines many different factors that contribute to environmental problems (social, political, economic, biochemical, technological) in Santa Ana, California. The workshop is open to everyone, including researchers, teachers, students and community members. The goal is to create an opportunity to work together, leveraging different skills and easily accessible environmental data resources. Part of the workshop will focus on ways local organizations like Orange County Environmental Justice can use data provided by the US Environmental Protection Agency and other sources to show how and where environmental injustice is happening in Santa Ana. No prior experience with research or environmental data is expected. The workshop is designed for mutual learning. More information:
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Nov. 13, 2020 (Friday) 9:00am PST Join us on Zoom |
Anthropology Colloquium Mo-Faya: Socio-ecological survivals in Nairobi's outlaw settlement Contemporary urban planning practices in Nairobi are often framed as movements towards "world-class city" status localized within a situated "Africa rising" moment. My current work wants to move beyond the hegemony of these official narratives to think about Nairobi from its "outlaw" settlements. To do this it dwells in the social experiences of urban spatial management in Mathare, a poor urban settlement in the east of Nairobi, to draw attention to what I argue is the imperial assemblage that produces this city: one informed by political, ecological, social and economic ideas and practices that have their grounding in empire. In so doing, it connects themes often examined in silos – for example, slum fires, evictions, 'illegal' water tapping, cholera, extrajudicial killings, youth urban vernaculars, subject formation and floods – and draws attention to how an increasingly militarized urban planning brings about what I term ecologies of exclusion. Notwithstanding the historical neglect and force of urban governance in the poor spaces that I highlight, ultimately I would like to make evident how those framed as the city's outlaws (shanty dwellers etc.) engage with and emerge from the many violent articulations of an imperial urban planning through dynamic socio-ecological survivals. And from within these poor urban struggles, they are able to articulate more grounded narrations of the history and possible futures of Nairobi. |
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Nov. 16, 2020 1:00-3:00pm Via Zoom |
Sikh Feminisms Working Group Monday, November 16⋅1:00 – 3:00pm
Dear all, Please find attached and below information on a call for participants for UCI-hosted Sikh Feminisms Working Group. Please circulate. Thank you! Please email Anneeth Kaur Hundle at ahundle@uci.edu and Nima Yolmo at nyolmo@uci.edu if you are interested in participating and for access to readings. All faculty colleagues, graduate students, undergraduate students and university workers are invited to participate. Our first meeting will take place on November 16th from 1 to 3 PM PST to discuss Jakobsh's (2003) Relocating Gender in Sikh History: Transformation, Meaning and History. All meetings will take place over Zoom. Reading available online at UCI Libraries. See link here. Sikh Feminisms Working Group: Postcolonial, Intersectional, Transnational and Decolonial Approaches Convened by Professor Anneeth Kaur Hundle Department of Anthropology University of California, Irvine 2020-2022 UCI Sikh Studies and the Department of Anthropology in conjunction with the Religious Studies Program and Departments of Asian American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, will be hosting and convening a two-year working group on the topic of Sikh Feminisms. The research group will meet on a monthly basis to discuss pre-assigned readings. Our first conference will be held in Spring 2021 (Dates TBA) to workshop preliminary papers for individual or collaborative research papers. Monthly meetings will continue during AY 2021-2022 with a culminating conference in Spring 2022(Dates TBA) to workshop final contributions to an edited volume on the topic of Sikh Feminisms/Sikh Feminist Writing to be submitted to be submitted to a prospective publisher by Summer 2022. This working group will seek to identify elements of a Sikh feminist thought and the possibilities and limitations of a Sikh feminist tradition through assessments of Sikh religious scripture and texts, religious institutions and religious practices within the Khalsa Panth and among Sikh-identifying communities in multiple, situated contexts. The working group affirms the need to articulate and identify terrains for Sikh feminist intellectual thought and practice in relation to South Asian/Indian/Punjabi/diaspora feminisms; Third World and postcolonial traditions of feminism; woman of color intersectional feminisms; transnational and Global South feminisms; and decolonial feminist approaches. Here, "feminism" is invoked as a product of the encounter between Western feminist traditions and Sikh traditions, itself mediated by Western liberal secular modernity and contemporary nationalisms. The working group seeks to articulate Sikh feminisms in the plural, and will highlight the identities, positionalities and agencies of Punjabi Sikh women and men, LGBT/queer, gender-queer and non-binary youth in both the Punjab homeland and in diasporic locations. The group will also identify research sites, texts, archives and artifacts; methods and methodologies for this project. By centering feminism, the working group is interested in articulating a non to-epistemological, political and intellectual project that is concerned with systems of heteropatriarchy and normative gender and sexuality roles in relation to interlocking structures and systems of power. It affirms this commitment in the context of the far-right national political climate that has normalized neo-fascist, neoliberal, nativist, and heteropatriarchal objectives in relation to the avowedly liberal multiculturalist polices of the US state and capital, including the university. This context extends to landscapes of nationalist and fascistic violence in South Asia/India and other diasporic contexts of Sikh settlement. Old and new configurations of heteropatriarchal power have also produced new terrains of resistance. This has been exemplified by the historic women's march that coincided with the inauguration of Donald Trump as president in January 2017; the outing of powerful sexual predators in the corporate world and in Congress in the American public sphere; by the #MeToosocial media campaign; debates within South Asian academia and among multi-generational South Asian feminists regarding the politics of social media "shaming" and "call out culture" of sexual harassers in the academy; and a number of global south feminist campaigns in recent years coalescing around violence against women and sexual/street harassment. Building on existing ground-breaking work by Punjab/Sikh/Sikh Studies scholars who have developed original analyses at the intersections of Sikh Studies and gender studies, a primary aim of the working group is to continue developing Sikh feminisms as an interdisciplinary field formation that is connected to anthropology, religious studies, Asian American/South Asian/Punjab/Sikh Studies and gender, sexuality and feminist studies more broadly. While there have been intermittent events and initiatives in Sikh Studies which have compelled conversations on internal reform and the critique of heteropatriarchy, the working group continues to build on this conversation as more feminist, LGBT and gender-queer youth become interested in the field. A research field on Sikh feminisms helps to prevent the parochialization of Sikh Studies such that it is engaged with contemporary intellectual currents in the Global North/South academy, is engaged with the public sphere and community organizations and activists and is relevant to South Asian youth's lived experiences. This interest is exemplified by numerous new websites and blogs devoted to transgressive and transformative writing about social issues impacting Sikh communities and youth globally, including Sikh feminist cultural production. Key goals of the working group: 1.) Understand the scope and contributions of existing Sikh Studies gender/sexuality and feminist scholarship. 2.) Understand the complexity of Sikh-identifying communities in multiple geographic contexts. Identify the terrains of hetero-patriarchy that Sikh communities/the Sikh panth contends with, including the lived experiences of Sikhs as gendered beings in relation to class, caste and race and sexuality; gender roles and expectations; masculinities and femininities; and the experiences of LGBT/queer, trans-, non-binary Sikhs. Explore the contradictions between gender equality in Sikh scripture and gender inequalities in Sikh communities/the Sikh panth in multiple geographic, social, political and economic contexts. Identify sources of resistance to Sikh feminist projects. 3.) Examine Sikh textual resources for feminist thought and practice. Examine articulations of Sikh feminist thought and practice through Sikh religious authority, institutional community and panthic expression. 4.) Examine terrains of Sikh feminist thought and practice in lived context or through other forms of cultural production. Identify, name and define Sikh feminisms. Imagine possibilities for Sikh feminist thought, ethics, praxis. 5.) Identify the needs of South Asian/Sikh youth, including toolkits and resources for community collaboration and social transformation. 6.) Develop research agendas, both individual and collective. 7.) Plan two conferences to be hosted at UCI and discuss plans for developing an edited volume. Our first meeting will take place on November 16th from 1 to 3 PM PST to discuss Jakobsh's (2003) Relocating Gender in Sikh History: Transformation, Meaning and History. All meetings will take place over Zoom. |
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Nov. 17, 2020 (Tuesday) 3:00 – 4:30pm Register: it.ly/BlacknessIndianOcean |
Film Screening/Discussion on the African descendant Sidi diaspora in India by Professor
Beheroze Shroff (Asian American Studies) Discussion facilitated by Prof Anneeth Kaur Hundle (Anthropology), Prof Samar Al-Bulushi (Anthropology), and Nima Yolmo (PhD Candidate, Anthropology). Co-sponsored by the UCI Humanities Center Oceans Initiative (Directory Judy Wu); the South Asia Initiative at UCI, Blackness and the Asian Century, the Dhan Kaur Sahota Presidential Chair of Sikh Studies, Anthropology Department Colloquium Series and the Global Blackness/Global Africa initiative in the Department of Anthropology. |
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Dec. 4, 2020 (Friday) |
Dhan Kaur Sahota Presidential Chair of Sikh Studies Co-Sponsored by the School of Social Sciences, the Department of Anthropology Colloquium Series, Religious Studies Program, Department of Global and International Studies, Department of Asian American Studies, UCI Sikh Students Association and UCI Jakara Movement Chapter December 4th 2020 | 3-4:30 PM PST "Exploring Logics of (Non)Violence in Sikh Thought" Professor Arvind-Pal S. Mandair Sikh Studies shot to prominence in the 1980s due to a rising interest amongst scholars
in the phenomenon of violence associated with Sikhs and Sikhism, encompassing both
insurgent anti-state violence as well as state orchestrated violence against Sikhs
in India. By the late 1990s, a body of literature had developed which framed Sikhs
and Sikhism in relation to emerging architectures of secular security states and their
governance of minorities. One of the cornerstones of this architecture were conventional
typologies of violence (that is, a standard definition of what violence is, especially
in relation to the category 'religion'). Tracing these conventional typologies of
violence to the liberal imaginary (broadly conceived), this lecture interrogates this
normative understanding of violence which continues to be deployed in representations
of Sikhism. Zoom Webinar Registration HERE Arvind-Pal S. Mandair teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures. He holds doctoral degrees in Chemistry and Philosophy/Religion. His earlier publications include: Teachings of the Sikh Gurus (with Christopher Shackle) Routledge: 2005; Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality and the Politics of Translation (Columbia: 2009); Secularism & Religion-Making (with Markus Dressler) (Oxford: 2011); Sikhism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury: 2013); and the encyclopedia volume Sikhism (Vol. 8 of the Encyclopedia of India Religions, Springer: 2017). He is founding editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture & Theory. His forthcoming books include: Spiritual Warriors: Logics of (Non)Violence in the Sikh Tradition (2021 forthcoming) and Geophilosophical Encounters: Sikh Philosophy, Decolonial Praxis and Diasporic Logic (Routledge: 2021/22); and Sikh Philosophy (Bloomsbury: 2021/22). He co-edits two new book series, Routledge Critical Sikh Studies (with Pal Ahluwalia) and Routledge Studies in Translation and Religion (with Hephzibah Israel). Details of these projects can be found at arvindpalmandair.com Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Dhan Kaur Sahota Presidential Chair of Sikh Studies at UCI. To learn more about Sikh Studies at UCI, please visit: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/anneeth/ Questions? Email odunaevs@uci.edu or ahundle@uci.edu
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