EVENTS // THURSDAY

Policing Diversity

Hosted by: Yamuna Sangarasivam, Ph.D./Professor and Esperanza Roncero, Ph.D./Professor, from Nazareth College

We invite you to join us in journeying through a mindbody practice of witnessing an experience of policing diversity. We will observe how diversity and inclusion is weaponized as a slogan and a tool of managing and reproducing multiple forms of marginalization, incarceration, and oppression within predominantly white institutions (PWI). Willing solidarities and willful sovereignties, double-edged intentionalities and innocent transgressions, the violence of compliance and the naked need for salvation—longing for emancipation within prison walls, wrestling with the fatigue of war, how shall we sustain a call to struggle? How do we comport ourselves when the romance of celebrating diversity disappears into the realities of exclusion, exhaustion, and a quiet loss of integrity and respect? Let’s witness what happens when we confront the high impact practices of mindful silencing, intentional surveillance, strategic destabilization and displacement of people from the territorialities of citizenship and belonging.

 

 

Seeing Differently

Part 01

In this workshop, participants will explore ways to visually document fieldwork and other events using GoPros, spy cameras,  cell phones and lifestyle cameras.  The emphasis is on mounting and using a variety of different cameras in ways that displace the ethnographic gaze from the fieldworker’s eye, producing images and video that are surprising, counterintuitive, provocative, and fun.

We will meet at booth 316 in the exhibition hall and move to nearby tables.

We will have on hand a number of GoPros, small cameras and etc., but please bring along your phone, apple watch, or other small devices you may have.  Also please bring: a computer and a data card.

Part 02

In this follow-up to the Seeing Differently workshop, we will experiment with processing images we have collected.  Using scripts, collage and other approaches, the focus will be on play and intuition rather than objectivity and data. Slide decks, sets of photos, and video are all options.

Hosted by: Elizabeth Chin, Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology

 

Ethnospa

Hosted by: Elizabeth Chin, Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology and Nidhi Singh Rathore, ArtCenter College of Design

Are your methods dry and flaky?  Has your fieldwork lost its youthful glow?  Come pamper your practice at the Ethnospa.

We have a range of treatments and experiences that can help you refresh your research, and our consultants are ready to assist you in creating just the mix you need:

AeGyPT
AfroGoPro Therapy is designed to help you decolonize your ethnographic gaze through the innovative use of various seeing devices.

Method Massage
Treat yourself to a method massage, where you also will speculate technologies and temperaments for research that reveal the new investigative you.

Lab Suit Immersion
For those interested in a full body adventure, wearing a lab suit and taking it into the world is a sure-fire way to re-embody your field practices.

We also offer: Microagression release

 

Waiting for Buna

Hosted by: Micknai Arefaine, Applied Anthropology MA Student, Oregon State University

This experience will serve to push the boundaries of the cornerstone of ethnographic methods: participant observation. Who is participant and who is observer will be questioned and possibly redefined or completely blurred during this activity. The anthropologist, played by Micknai Arefaine, will invite the subjects to an Ethiopian coffee ceremony, which she will perform. The Ethiopian coffee ceremony is mundane and sacred, ritual and random, modern and ancient. It is gendered and feminist. The title, Waiting for Buna, refers to the experience of waiting to drink buna (coffee) during the ceremony itself. The Ethiopian Coffee ceremony provides an interesting space to explore the tension at the borderlands of the ethnographers identities while at the same time asking how these tensions are experienced by the subjects invited to participate in the ceremony. Waiting for Buna is a methodology rooted in Afrocentric consciousness.

 

EVENTS // FRIDAY

Relinquishing Utopia

Hosted by: Chibundo Egwuatu, Graduate Student, UIUC

Wakanda is a black utopian ideal – an ideal that has been mired in respectability politics, progress myths, and prosperity gospel in its media representations. Drawing from the social justice praxis by way of science fiction of adrienne maree brown, we will collective institute her call to relinquish utopia, interrogating our own dependency on building the impossible. We will moor our practices to the imminent possibilities presented to us through collectively fleshing out OUR Wakanda – conceptualizing a coming liberation rather than a passive utopia. *Drawing by Toyin Ojih Odutola, from Aperture magazine 223, “Vision & Justice.”

 

 

EVENTS // SATURDAY

Play Reading

SEAMLESS by Dorinne Kondo

SEAMLESS stages a theatrical view of history and identity, refracted through gender, work, family, and generation. Switching from comedic to poignant in a beat, the play centers on Diane Kubota, a successful Japanese American corporate attorney, whose life is seamlessly perfect – on the surface.  When Dr. Kathleen Goto, a Harvard psychologist, interviews Diane about her parents’ internment during WWII, the questions launch Diane on a quest that compels her to ask how well she knows herself, her family, her culture. A play about history and memory, the afterlife of trauma, and the (im)possibility of knowing the people you love most.