Link to join the seminar on Teams
Abstract: This seminar listens to activisms, migrations, and street-level politics, and asks how we can record a movement. It does by focusing on sound recording and archiving, and on methods of collaborative ethnography. We start by sketching ideas of migratory activisms and sonic politics: thinking about how activisms travel, circulate, migrate; and how struggles are rooted in the rhythms of the street, the city, and everyday life. We then turn to methods of collaborative research in Athens, where I am a member of a refugee-led activist collective, and together we run the Active Citizens Sound Archive. How can working with sound counter the dominance of visual forms of representation? In contexts of forced migration, how can sound open spaces for narratives to emerge that are usually drowned out by border panics and crisis reportage? We will engage with these questions, and think about how such practices might move the idea of an archive away from the physical and the national and towards the relational, the migratory, the activist, the communal.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Hilary 2021
Online on Teams (the link is above)
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-2, 4-6, 8)
Convened by Christopher Morton and David Zeitlyn
