Faculty Colloquium - "From Project to Experiment: Galvanizing Laboratories of Cultural Analysis for the Post-Classroom Era"
Wednesday, November 7, 2018 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5Bard College Berlin Cafeteria, Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow
A talk by Penelope Papailias (University of Thessaly)
This talk is going to touch on some of the new forms of collaboration, creation, community building, learning and research emerging out of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly in Volos, Greece. The University of Thessaly is a public university and the “Anthro Lab”, which Professor Papailias directs, currently has no direct funding (occasionally the staff is able to order some ‘machines’) and is awaiting results of highly-competitive and much-delayed Greek national grant competitions. At the same time, the transformation of the ecology of knowledge in the digital age potentially renders humanities / social science laboratories into critical sites for reimagining teaching, researching and publishing practices, as well as challenging routines and social hierarchies within the university (between professors and students, among students of different categories, among other categories of workers in the university community), but also between the university and the local community. Papailias will discuss various modest ‘experiments’ that have emerged out of the laboratory, such as 'death cafes’, English language classes for Syrian refugees, the international “Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities”, distinguishing them from the contemporary dominant discourse and technology of the ‘project’.
Penelope Papailias is an associate professor of social anthropology at the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly, where she also directs the Laboratory of Social Anthropology. Her monograph Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece (2005) explores the politics of cultural memory and popular practices of historical documentation and archiving. She is the author of numerous articles on the cultural politics and media technologies of witnessing, focusing on topics such as affective publics, social grief, visuality and violence, public death and necropolitics in the context of critical media events, network culture and the database as cultural form. She has also co-authored an online, open-access textbook in Greek, entitled Digital Ethnography (2015). Penelope is co-founder of the Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities and on the editorial board of the online, open-access Greek feminist journal φεμινιστιqά / feministiqά.
(Image: Αffective readings of Frankenstein at the 2018 Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities in Hania, Greece, by Bard Annandale students Ty Holtzman, Simon DeBevoise and Cal Fish. Credit: Ty Holtzman)
Date & time: Wednesday, November 7, 2018, from 12:30pm
Venue: Bard College Berlin Cafeteria
Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow
Email: [email protected]