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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

Recent Events

Spring 2025

Keith Murphy, UC Irvine

Workshop Session: Transcription as Design

(jointly organized with the Linguistic Anthropology Workshop)

 

Andrea Ballestero, USC

Conversation on some of her recent publications

 

Graham Jones, MIT

Rodrigo Ochigame, Leiden University

AI Needs Anthropology, but Does Anthropology Need AI?

 

Amahl Bishara, Tufts University

Against Fragmentation: Palestinian Practices of Connection Against Erasure

plus a workshop on collaborative oral history projects

(jointly organized with the Democracy Lab)

 

Manisha Pande

Writing workshop

(jointly organized with the South Asia Initiative)

Winter 2025

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

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
  • Fatimah Kanth
  • 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