THE CENTER  FOR  EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY

medium/archive | 2019-2020 Theme

APPLY NOW FOR SUMMER FUNDING!

We invite graduate students from across the University of Pennsylvania to apply for our student summer research grants, due March 16 2020. These grants are meant to support doctoral, MFA, and professional degree students who are incorporating multi-modal methodological strategies into their ethnographic research.  These strategies can encompass film, performance, sound, creative writing, drawing and/or other media.

FEBRUARY EVENTS

ZAMA ZAMA PROJECT

Slought

Join Slought on February 20th 6:30 to 8:30 PM for Documentary for Critical Times, a conversation about the possibilities and limits of the moving image in times of crisis. Organized in conjunction with the installation The Zama Zama Project, this event will feature a conversation with artists Susan Meiselas and Rosalind Morris about what it means to produce documents and documentaries of crisis...Keep Reading

DIALOGUE

Patricia Roberts-Miller & Seth Kreimer

On February 20th, join Professor Patricia Roberts-Miller (University of Texas at Austin) and Professor Seth Kreimer (University of Pennsylvania Law School) in a dialogue about Demagoguery and Free Speech. Demagoguery has a been a frequent topic of American documentary films. Demagoguery is also seen as posing a threat to news media around the world today. But what precisely is "demagoguery"?   Read More...

THE MOVEMENT REVISITED

Christian McBride & Sonia Sanchez
Please join us for this very special discussion, moderated by Dyana Williams, and duo performance in celebration of Christian McBride’s The Movement Revisited: A Musical Portrait of Four Icons (Mack Avenue Records) at Penn Museum’s Widener Lecture Hall. The Movement Revisited grew into a sweeping four-part suite for big jazz band, small jazz group...Read More & RSVP Here...

CURRENT FELLOWS

WAYNE MODEST

Wayne Modest is the head of the Research Center of Material Culture. He is also professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies (by special appointment) in the faculty of humanities at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (VU). Modest’s work is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to material culture/museum collections.

EMILY CARRIS

Emily Carris is an artist and founding member of The Art Dept. Collective, a collaborative vintage store and workshop space dedicated to sharing stories and uplifting underserved artists.
Her work exploring the personal and cultural legacy of slavery and the Black female body has been exhibited nationally and internationally. 

RECENT EVENTS

SPRING FELLOW MEETUP

Emily Carris + Wayne Modest
For the first Third Thursday of 2020, students, faculty, and community friends gathered together to meet up with incoming CEE Faculty Fellows Emily Carris and Wayne Modest. Emily began her presentation  posing a question that first occurred to her in England, while contemplating an image of a slave ship in a tumultuous ocean.... "what does salt know?" Seven years after her work in England, Emily returned to Philadelphia to work on developing institutional space for art as scholarship, which culminated in her founding the Art Dept. Collective. 
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ZAMA ZAMA PROJECT

Multimodal Exhibition at Slought
The Zama Zama Project" is a multi-format installation by Rosalind Morris about the world of informal mining in the abandoned gold mines of South Africa, on display January 24 - March 20, 2020. The opening event, titled "The Cost of Gold," took place on Wednesday, January 29th from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought featured a conversation about informal mining and its representation with artist Rosalind Morris and Radhika Subramaniam, moderated by Eduardo Cadava. The exhibit and opening are both free and open to the public. 

SONIC WORLDS

Juan Castrillon (CEE Student) 
Between January 21st and the 24th, Juan Castrillon (PhD Candidate in Music and CEE Graduate Certificate Student) delivered three guest lectures at the University of Helsinki: Amazonian Indigenous Music and Communication with Non-Humans: The Sonic Worlds of the Hehenewa People, multimodal methods in ethnomusicology, and Sonic Worlds of Dervishes. In addition, the University will be hosting film screenings of Rehavi (Timekeepers) and ~Kiraiñia (Long Flutes) followed by Q&As with Juan. Check out the trailer to ~Kiraiñia here:

STAY TUNED FOR SSMF 2020!

 The 8th Annual SSMF will be held on March 27th-28th, 2020 at the University of Pennsylvania and is a hybrid of a film/media festival and an academic conference.  This year, we received submissions from scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers, and educators that creatively explore the theme of “Rupture and Repair.” T ....read 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.