Visual Anthropology Society at Temple

05/05/2020

SVA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship Program COVID19 Revision:

Due to the COVID19 situation the Society for Visual Anthropology has revised its call for the 2020 SVA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship for predissertation level graduate students. As it is impossible to travel, we realize students must remain safely at home, but doing so does not preclude advancing their projects. Effectively immediately, we are accepting applications to support summer research that advances identifying and solidifying a dissertation research topic in Visual Anthropology. Stipends of $4000 will be awarded.

Options for at-home research include, but are not limited to:

-Archival research
-Netnography (interviews over the internet)
-Production & Post-production activity (testing equipment/techniques; working with shot or found images/footage/media)

Research plans must describe the type of visual work to be conducted over the summer and can include multiple methods and phases of work. Simple budgets must account for weekly hours worked and expenses incurred for on-line access, memberships, or bandwidth; no more than half of the funds can be spent on online education expenses. All projects must have some form of presentable project which will be virtually distributed to the SVA membership this fall and will live on the SVA website.

PLEASE follow the normal eligibility and application details found on this page, but note new proposal deadline.

Students who have already applied will be contacted by the committee about revising their applications. Others are welcome to submit their proposals by May 6, 2020.

This is an excellent opportunity for graduate students to make progress despite the inability to travel and work with people in close proximity. We are open to all ideas and options.

Due to the COVID19 situation the Society for Visual Anthropology has revised its call for the 2020 SVA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship for predissertation level graduate students. As it is impossible to travel, we realize students must remain safely at home, but doing so does not preclude adva...

04/29/2020

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL VIETAM: CONTEMPORARY ISSUES AND NEW DIRECTIONS

a totally (and unexpectedly, but as it turns out, appropriately) online workshop

May 1, 2020 [Rescheduled from April 3rd - with all due respects to Cô Na]

Hosted by Dang Nguyen and Erik Harms

"Welcome!
Welcome to the digital home of Understanding digital Vietnam: contemporary issues and new directions. Our workshop was originally scheduled to take place on 3 April at Yale University; this plan, however, was disrupted by public health measures in Connecticut and throughout the US to slow down the spread of COVID-19. Instead, we asked our presenters to create short videos summarising their papers and conducted a discussion remotely. In other words, we have gone doubly digital!

Our vision for the workshop was and is to facilitate a scholarly forum for researchers of digital Vietnam to share their work and discuss the shifting nature of mediated sociality and modernity in Vietnam. Beyond this forum, we also want to create an agenda-setting moment for all researchers involved towards a special collection of scholarly articles on digital Vietnam in the future.

In the following pages, you can find short videos of the workshop presenters summarising their papers, as well as a recording of the virtual workshop. Papers were circulated to all participants prior to discussion. We will update published versions of the papers presented on this site when they become available, as well as any resulting collaboration or future collections of research coming out of this workshop.

If you would like to read the papers and join the workshop discussions, contact the co-hosts.

Welcome to the digital home of Understanding digital Vietnam: contemporary issues and new directions. Our workshop was originally scheduled to take place on 3 April at Yale University; this plan, however, was disrupted by public health measures in Connecticut and throughout the US to slow down the s...

03/27/2020

SVA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship Program

"The SVA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowships are designed to provide graduate students working in the field of visual and multimodal anthropology with funding to pursue exploratory research for planning their doctoral dissertation research and/or methods training to prepare for their doctoral dissertation research. Research projects supported by the funding should have the potential of advancing the field of visual anthropology. Normally, fellows receive their awards after their first or second year of graduate training as they begin to develop their dissertation research projects. We expect to award up to six fellowships in 2020 with each fellow up to an amount of $6,000 depending upon need. Of the total amount granted, up to $2,500 may be used for video/film equipment."The SVA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowships are designed to provide graduate students working in the field of visual and multimodal anthropology with funding to pursue exploratory research for planning their doctoral dissertation research and/or methods training to prepare for their doctoral dissertation research. Research projects supported by the funding should have the potential of advancing the field of visual anthropology. Normally, fellows receive their awards after their first or second year of graduate training as they begin to develop their dissertation research projects. We expect to award up to six fellowships in 2020 with each fellow up to an amount of $6,000 depending upon need. Of the total amount granted, up to $2,500 may be used for video/film equipment.

The SVA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowships are designed to provide graduate students working in the field of visual and multimodal anthropology with funding to pursue exploratory research for planning their doctoral dissertation research and/or methods training to prepare for their doctoral diss...

02/25/2020

“Gambling on Visibility:" A conversation about the challenges of representing precarious life

Thursday, February 27, 2020 from 6:30-8pm
Slought Foundation
4017 Walnut Avenue, Philadelphia

Organized in conjunction with the installation The Zama Zama Project, this event will feature a conversation with Ilisa Barbash and Rosalind Morris about the ethics and politics of representing vulnerable communities. What do those who have been marginalized in and by the global economy want when they seek visibility and recognition? What are the risks of documenting underground economies? What are the aesthetic forms available for this task? And what does it mean to collaborate--to speak with rather than merely about people—across difference?

The Zama Zama Project, on display through March 20, 2020, features high-resolution, immersive video and narrative documentary shorts about the lives of men and women who make their living scavenging for gold. This collaborative project led by Rosalind Morris grows out of long-term research in the Witwatersrand gold-mining region that stretches over more than two decades. In this fragile and toxic environment, men mine for gold in decaying tunnels kilometers beneath the surface of the earth, and women grind stone by hand to extract the precious metal. The Zama Zama Project is intended to document their predicament, while providing an opportunity for audiences to encounter life in these remnants of the gold-mining world and to hear from and engage those who live in it.

01/20/2020

Virtual Film Festival Call for Films (Deadline Feb 5th)

Digital and visual storytelling are critical multimodal ways that are central to conveying knowledge and action in a moment where the world is in a fragile place environmentally, socially, economically, and culturally. Documentary and ethnographic film offers its audiences a tangible sense of place and space, contextualizing large-scale cultural and environmental phenomena through personal narratives, family biographies, and portraits of local communities. The Virtual Film Festival brings together anthropological understanding and discussions through the lens of the camera. The virtual film festival program imagines the theme of Distribute in both literal and poetic ways. In a literal sense, we see that the action to virtually distribute a film festival embraces the opportunity to ensure timely films reach new audiences. The active distribution of films in an Open Access way is central to the democratization of knowledge and a de-centralization of power. In a poetic sense, a virtual film festival also creates the opportunity to distribute the labor and collaborate with all of you around the world in order to bring together friends, family, peers, allies, and others in classrooms, community halls, living rooms, dorms, or any space that can be transformed into an ad hoc theater where you can curate your own screening session and dialogues.

The Virtual Film Festival is co-curated by Fiona P. McDonald (UBC) and Harjant Gill (Towson University). Please direct any questions via email with the subject heading “ Virtual Film Fest” to [email protected] and [email protected].

is co-sponsored by the Society for Cultural Anthropology and Society for Visual Anthropology and we invite anthropological films produced on the theme of (made between 2017-2020) to be included in the virtual Film Festival accompanying the 2020 biennial.

To submit your film, please visit: https://distribute.utoronto.ca/films/

By submitting your film to the Film Festival (and if selected) you agree to make your film available online and only accessible by conference participants using a secure password for the duration of the conference. All submissions must be received by 11:59 PM EST on February 5, 2020 via the online submission form.

https://youtu.be/rQJwaKj-2IQ

Preview for the upcoming Society for Cultural Anthropology/Society for Visual Anthropology online conference D I S T R I B U T E May 7-9, 2020.

01/15/2020

[Book] "Muddied Waters. The Fictionalisation Of Ethnographic Film" by Toni de Bromhead (2019)

Visual anthropologists and ethnographic film-makers continue to disagree on what is and what is not ethnographic film. Meanwhile the situation becomes ever more unclear, possibly to the detriment of ethnographic film. Toni de Bromhead now tackles this problem from the point of view that an ethnographic film must, by definition, offer reliable ethnography. She does this by closely examining a number of documentary films about southern Italy, made from 1948 to 2018, some made by great Italian filmmakers, such as De Seta, and others by respected non-Italians, for instance David MacDougall

Muddied Waters. The Fictionalisation of Ethnographic Film 2020/01/15 96 Toni de Bromhead Muddied Waters. The Fictionalisation of Ethnographic Film 2019, Intervention Press Website Visual anthropologists and ethnographic film-makers continue to disagree on what is and what is not ethnographic film. M...

12/20/2019

"Multimodality and the Future of Anthropological Research and Scholarship" by Harjant Gill

"In this way, this shift to multimodality within anthropology is also reflective of shifts in thinking about how anthropological scholarship is circulated. Historically, our discipline has placed a greater emphasis on written accounts as perhaps the more reliable and “legitimate” form of scholarly output. While there have been important interventions in the nature of ethnographic storytelling and how we deal with questions of representation (see “Writing Culture” debate),[2] the entrenched hierarchies within existing structures of knowledge production and circulation that values written scholarship above (and often at the cost of excluding) films and media-based scholarship, continues to be upheld in academic institutions, scholarly journals, and at annual meetings and conferences. Often the resistance to change, to trying novice approaches and to showcasing multimodal research is rooted more in the familiarity with traditional way of doing things, rather than skepticism of some of the newer approaches. However, as the “business” of academia changes and adapts to the increasing technocratization of education (online journals, interactive textbooks, instant streaming, etc.), we will inevitably see a shift from primarily text-based scholarship to multimodal scholarship. In fact, the publication of this essay in American Anthropologist (our flagship journal) and the coinciding name change of the new section from “Visual Anthropology” to “Multimodal Anthropologies” was made possible only after the journal seized to exit as a “printed” volume (in 2013), and went entirely digital/online—which led to opening up of a space for experimentation and alternative modes of scholarly engagement, and ultimately, the “Multimodal Anthropologies”[3] section. This section currently exists as a hybrid section of the journal that features video, photos, drawings, music, performance, etc. Parts of the scholarship featured in this section is included in the “printer-friendly” version of the journal that resides behind the publisher’s paywall, while other “multimodal parts” are featured on a linked online database that is publicly accessible, and will continue grow as online-content production and streaming becomes more accessible and user-friendly."

Full:

by Harjant Gill

05/02/2019

https://anthropology365.com/2019/05/02/the-story-of-a-mass-shooting-survivor-and-anthropologist/?fbclid=IwAR21ePzzRr8ei8s01iS54NjnXof-HRMXCvf-ErR1Mlr5ywcUdR3ck4ajkNI

  On April 30, my Liberal Studies class, framed as Anthropology and Philosophy of Science (Syllabus), was the site of a horrific event. Two of my students were killed while four more were inju…

04/02/2019

Livestream in the Context of Ethnographic Fieldwork: A New Media Literacy | Dave Paulson (Temple University) | Critical Asian Studies, March 2019
🎬📲👀🤳▶️

The recent mosque shootings in New Zealand broadcast live on the Internet have sparked widespread debate concerning online video streaming. While livestream technology has been widely available on major social networks for years, only recently have academics and the general public taken a more criti

03/26/2019

Television and National Belonging in Post-Reform Vietnam
Dr. Giang Nguyen-Thu
March 26th | Temple University

03/25/2019

TOMORROW! Television and National Belonging in Post-Reform Vietnam

Tuesday, 26 March @ 1pm | Gladfelter 212, Temple University.

In this talk, Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu will discuss her new book Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market (Routledge 2018). Since the country’s economic reform in 1986, Vietnamese television has experienced a tremendous shift from a purely propagandist tool of the Party-State into an all-pervasive medium of popular culture. The dynamics of Vietnamese television, however, is completely neglected in the field of international television studies, shadowed by the Western assumption of Vietnam being an oppressed land without media freedom. In her book, Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu seeks to challenge such reductionist assumption to reveal the effects of popular television in recreating the sense of national belonging in Vietnam. This book explores how various genres of popular television, including television dramas, talk shows and reality shows, alter the way Vietnamese people make sense of and organize their post-Reform lives, and how these new genres enable a new condition of cultural oppression as well as political engagement in the name of the nation. In sharp contrast to the previous image of Vietnam as a war-torn land, post-Reform Vietnamese television conjures into being a new sense of national connectedness based on an implicit refusal of the socialist past, hopes on peace and marketization, and anxieties of the globalized future.

Dr. Giang Nguyen-Thu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She also serves as an on-leave lecturer at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. She had her doctoral degree at the University of Queensland (2016) in the field of media and cultural studies. She is now interested in the emotional politics of social media in Vietnam. Her current research investigates how Vietnamese mothers use Facebook to navigate in an emerging economy of precarity caused by the widespread panic related to environment and food toxicity. Similar to her works on Vietnamese television, this research is informed by Giang’s interest in cultural globalization as situated mediation processes between global logics and local concerns, whose effects much exceed Western imagination of the Vietnamese media environment.