THE WORKING GROUP ON ANTHROPOLOGY AND POPULATION
BROWN UNIVERSITYSPRING 2012 SEMINAR SERIES
(See previous semester's schedule here.)
Friday, February 3 - 212 Giddings at 12:00 noon
Crystal Biruk, Pembroke Center Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University
“Navigating the Marketplace of Expertise: Mobility and Boundary Work in AIDS Research in Malawi”
Crystal Biruk is a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center, having received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Her book manuscript in progress, The Marketplace of Expertise: Producing AIDS Knowledge in Malawi, explores the politics of knowledge production in international AIDS research. Her research and teaching interests encompass postcolonial technoscience, global health, cultures of expertise, transnational queer identities, and the affective and ethical politics of intervention. Among her publications is a forthcoming article in Medical Anthropology (“Seeing like a Research Project: Producing ‘High Quality Data’ in AIDS Research in Malawi”). She is currently working on an article in preparation entitled: “Time, Tolerance, and Moral Economies in the Wake of Malawi’s Gay Marriage Affair.”
Friday, April 13 - PSTC, Mencoff Hall, Seminar Room 12:00 noon
E. Summerson Car, Associate Professor of Social Work, University of Chicago
"Signs of Sobriety: Rescripting American Addiction Therapeutics"E. Summerson Car is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist (Michigan, 2004), and an Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and Center for Gender Studies. Interested in contemporary clinical practices and social welfare institutions, her work is tied together by the analysis of the politics of language, personhood, and identity. She is the author of Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety (Princeton, 2011). Her current project examines the cultivation, institutionalization and circulation of American forms of professional expertise.
Friday, Apri 27 - 212 Giddings at 12:00 noon
Sara H. Smith, Assistant Professor of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“'Cooked Minds' Empty Hearts, and Emo Boys: Taming the Unruly Future of Territory in Leh, Ladakh”Sara H. Smith is a feminist political and cultural geographer who is interested in the relationship between territory, bodies, and the everyday. In her research, she seeks to understand how political and geopolitical conflict is constituted or disrupted through intimate acts of love, friendship, and birth. Smith received her PhD in geography from the University of Arizona in 2009, with minors in anthropology and history. She was awarded the 2012 Social Science Research Council Book Fellowship Award for her manuscript-in-progress, provisionally entitled Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Babies, and the Making of Territory in Ladakh.