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Sociocultural Anthropology Collective

The Sociocultural Anthropology Collective brings together interlocutors across campus interested in the theories and methods of social and cultural anthropology.

Critical Anthropology Workshop–Upcoming Events

Keith Murphy, UC Irvine

Workshop Session: Transcription as Design

(jointly organized with the Linguistic Anthropology Workshop)

Friday, April 11, 10-11:40 (in person)

Linguistic Anthropology Lab (SSRB 340)

 

Andrea Ballestero, USC

Monday, April 21, 4-5:30pm (in person)

 

Graham Jones, MIT

AI Needs Anthropology, but Does Anthropology Need AI?

Monday, May 5, 10-11:30am (over Zoom)

 

Amahl Bishara, Tufts University

(jointly organized with the Democracy Lab; in person)

  • Talk

Wednesday, May 14, 12-2

  • Workshop with graduate students on collaborative oral history projects

Thursday, May 15, time TBA

 

Manisha Pande

(jointly organized with the South Asia Initiative)

Writing workshop

Date TBA (first week of June)

Recent Events

Making Sense of the Populist-Authoritarian Coalition and its ‘Capable Leader’ in the USA and Beyond [flyer link]

March 1, 2025

This one-day conference addresses the need to better understand the current populist-authoritarian coalition and its ‘capable leader’ in the USA as this relates to broader historical tendencies worldwide. It is inspired by scholarship developed at the interdisciplinary crossroads of History and the Social Sciences, particularly Anthropology, which has shown how seemingly discrete and stable entities – tenses, places, identities, cultures, economies, politics – are better appreciated as abstracted relational moments, as much of minds as of matter, and all mutually dependent within encompassing planetary processes identified variously as colonialism, capitalism, and the Anthropocene.

The nine conference participants take this part-whole relation to heart, disclosing how some immediate aspects of our current situation hide not only their development out of much broader historical processes, but also how they conceal their contribution to perpetuating these conditions. Conference themes include knowledge, ideology, institutions, and social reproduction; state violence, racial capitalism, and vigilantism; comparative fascisms and populisms, and technology, gender, and Silicon Valley. Through its approach, the conference seeks to explain, critique, and contribute to transforming the current situation, including its effects on public universities. Conference proceedings will be published in the journal Critical Historical Studies.

 

  • Federico Finchelstein, The New School
  • Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA
  • Stephanie Luce, CUNY
  • Lawrence Rosenthal, UC Berkeley
  • Dylan Riley, UC Berkeley
  • Nitzan Shoshan, El Colegio de México
  • Lana Swartz, University of Virginia
  • Heather Ann Thompson, University of Michigan
  • Alberto Toscano, Simon Fraser University

Associated Faculty and Students

  • Jon Bialecki
  • Suzanne Brenner
  • Michael Connolly
  • James Diokno
  • Nancy Donald
  • Jana Fortier
  • Gian Gregorio
  • Yuan Gu
  • Dylan Hallingstad O’Brien
  • Joseph Hankins
  • Aftab Jassal
  • Dredge Kang
  • Sofía Lana
  • David Lindstrom
  • Moon Pankam
  • Damini Pant
  • David Pedersen
  • Nancy Postero
  • Dominga Puga
  • Alex Stewart
  • Quynh Truong
  • Saiba Varma
  • Rabindra Willford
  • Rihan Yeh

On-campus centers, programs and initiatives with which members are involved