CENTER  FOR  EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY

Hyper-Fictions/Hyper-Realism | 2021-2022 Theme

SETTLER COLONIALISM, SLAVERY, AND THE PROBLEM OF DECOLONIZING MUSEUMS​

​ OCTOBER 20-23 , 2021

A Hybrid International Conference Co-Presented by the Center for Experimental Ethnography and the Penn Museum
Over the past several decades scholars and practitioners have critically reconsidered the role of ethnographic museums in the development and representation of knowledge about people and processes throughout the world.  Persistent questions have emerged again and again:  What are the relationships between colonialism and collection?  What issues of accountability surround contemporary knowledge production and representation?  How do we think through the challenges of repatriation?  And what might repair look like?  These are not new questions, and they have been asked not only within museum settings, but also across the discipline of anthropology as a whole for the past thirty years.  
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​ The conference will open on Wednesday, 20 October and will run through Saturday. 

upcoming events

October Third Thursday:
​(Un)usual Business | Oct. 14th at Noon
Join us for our October Third Thursday with Dr. Maisha S. Akbar and Brian Shapiro (MA), who will discuss "Business as (Un)Usual" a multi-modal film they wrote, produced, and starred in that satirizes the question “Why can’t white men listen to Black women?” In this discussion of the film which premiered at the 2020 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Akbar and Shapiro will address reactions to the film’s content as well as its methodology.
STUDENT CALLOUT | 
Performing Parables: Ragas and Sagas of the Sundarban | Deadline Oct 20th
Calling all undergraduate and graduate students at Penn to join in our special musical theatre performance course in Spring 2022 with composer Ali Sethi, author Amitav Ghosh, and director Brooke O'Harra. Instructors will lead students in a rigorous process of research, development and rehearsal, culminating in a public performance of a musical version of Ghosh's newest book "Jungle Nama". Interested undergraduate students, please contact Brooke O'Harra by October 20th. Interested graduate students, please contact Deborah Thomas. Course runs January thru March 4.

RECENT EVENTS

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 Ethnographic Praxis, Relationality,
​Multi-Modality 
​| Sept 23
Panelists explored artistic modalities and co-laboring as ways of knowing that offered a multi-modal attunement without pinning down or leaning on a redemptive ‘truth’, offering reflections and performances that attend to institutional and epistemic violence reproduced in the academy, state or extra/judicial systems. 

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Third Thursday:
​Meet The Fall Fellows 
​| ​Sept 16
The CEE Community met with Cristiana Giordano, Ricardo Bracho, and Greg Pierotti to learn about their exciting Fall 2021 Fellows Courses, including "Getting Caught" (taught by Giordano and Pierotti) and "Surrealism in the Americas" (taught by Bracho). During a lively discussion, we heard about ongoing projects at the juncture of performance, stage work, theatre, and anthropology. 
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Very Low Frequency Remote Sensing/Listening Station 
| Sept 15
by Eugene Lew with the S(tree)twork Project
In the first activation, Eugene Lew and participants tuned into low frequency sounds of the earth’s magnetosphere where the dramatic activity of the fiery sun’s register on earth’s atmosphere. This station is equipped with extraordinary tools including: 3 heptagonal magnetic antennae, each featuring 333 turns of enameled copper wire, deployed at 3 discrete points

FALL FELLOWS COURSES

GETTING CAUGHT 

ANTH-588/401 FNAR-388/588 THAR-388/401 
with CEE Fellows Greg Pierotti and Cristiana Giordano
This seminar is an exploration of and a cross pollination between research and narrative practices in theater and anthropology. By creating a dialogue between these disciplines in a laboratory format, we hope to pose questions and explore techniques in ways that will enrich our engagement with anthropological questions and performative production... 

SURREALISM IN THE AMERICAS 

ANTH 596/401 I GSWS-398/401 I LALS-596/401 I FNAR-596/401
with CEE Fellow Ricardo Bracho
Surrealism in the Americas is a workshop focused around the reading, writing and production of surrealist manifestos, plays, performances, poems and fiction. Taking the stance that surrealist literary production is at its base a left aesthetic engagement with form and politics, the course will survey North American, South American and Caribbean engagements with what is largely misunderstood as a European aesthetic and movement....

The Contest over "Indigeneity"

APRIL 23-April 30th

Curated and organized by Jenny Chio (jchio@usc.edu)
Spring 2021 Visiting Fellow, Center for Experimental Ethnography...KEEP READING

REGGIE WILSON &
​"GROUNDS THAT SHOUT!!"

May 1, 2021 I 3:00 PM EST​

Curated and organized by Reggie Wilson, Spring 2021 Visiting Fellow, Center for Experimental Ethnography....KEEP READING

INTRODUCING THE VISUAL IDENTITIES iN ARTS AND DESIGN RESEARCH GROUP (VIAD)

The CEE  and The Visual Identities in Arts and Design Research Group at the University of Johannesburg are forging exciting transatlantic connections. Established in 2007, the VIAD research group is dedicated to deepening research around the overarching thematic of identity construction through forms of visual practice, visual culture and visual representation, and specifically in relation to African and Afrodiasporic histories and experiences. Learn more

GET INVOLVED

Welcome! Our newsletter and listserv is the best way to stay connected to CEE events, callouts, and partnerships.
​You are also invited to contact us directly at experimental-ethno@upenn.edu.