John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures University of California, Davis

Links

• CSIS
• Department of Anthropology
• STS
• DHI
• LGBTRC

About the Speakers

John Law is Professor of Sociology at the Open University and Co-Director of ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). His research focuses on four central themes: non-coherent methods; people, technologies and animals; biosecurity, agriculture and disaster; and alternative knowledge spaces. His most recent book is After Method: Mess in Social Science Research(Routledge, 2004).

Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Teaching Professor of Anthropology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His current field research focuses on the interrelations among state, capital, and social movements in a Colombia rainforest region. He is the author of Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1995), and more recently, or Territories of Difference: Place-Movements-Life-Redes (Duke University Press, 2008).

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on developing a critical theory of late liberalism grounded in theories of the translations, transfiguration and the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms. She is the author of The Cunning of Recognition. Her most recent book is Economies of Abandonment. Social belonging and Endurance in late Liberalism(Duke University Press, 2011).

Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, where she teaches Latin American literature and cultural theory. She holds degrees in comparative literature and linguistics from the University of Toronto, the University of Illinois, and Stanford University. She has published extensively on the subjects of Latin American women's writing; travel literature and imperialism; language and militarization; and modernity and neoliberalism. She is the author of the groundbreaking book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992).

Dame Marilyn Strathern was the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University from 1994 to 2008. She has written about new reproductive technologies and intellectual property law and her most recent work focuses on the complexities of transparency, accountability, and audit, especially within the academy. She is the author many books among which the most influential are The Gender of the Gift (University of Calfornia Press, 1988) Partial Connections (Altamira Press2004 [1991]); Kinship, law and the unexpected: Relatives are often a surprise (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Donna Haraway is Professor of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include feminist theory, cultural and historical studies of science and technology, relation of life and human sciences, and human-animal relations. Her most recent book is When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Alberto Corsín Jiménez is a Senior Scientist in Social Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council, and Head of the Social Sciences Board at the Spanish National Agency for the Evaluation of Science. He has an interest in the organization of ethnography and anthropological knowledge as descriptive and theoretical forms. He has just finished a book 'A trompe l'oeil anthropology for a common world', where description is placed at perpendicular angles vis-a-vis emerging forms of global public knowledge. His current work examines the rise of an urban commons movement and the development of open-source urban hardware projects by architects, artists and engineers.

Luis Tapia is a philosopher and political scientist at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia where he coordinates the Multidisciplinary Doctoral Program in Development Studies. His research focuses on the state, autonomy, democracy, and the notion of the “multisocietal.” He has published extensively on these topics, and his recent publications include: La política salvaje (2008); El estado de derecho como tiranía (2011); La coyuntura de la autonomía relativa del estado (2009); and El estado: Campo de lucha, with Álvaro García Linera, Rául Prada, and Oscar Vega Camacho (2010).

Karen Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics. She held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. She is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the Co-Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC.

Helen Verran is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University of Melbourne. Her current research focuses on environmentalism and its working knowledges. She has a PhD in metabolic biochemistry. Previously, she worked as a science lecturer in the Institute for Education at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. Among her publications are Science and an African Logic (2001); Singing the Land, Signing the Land; and “On Assemblage: Indigenous Knowledge and Digital Media (2003-2006) and HMS Investigator (1800-1805)” in Assembling Culture by Tony Bennett and Chris Healy (eds.) (2011).

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on traditional medicine, popular culture, and everyday life in contemporary China. Other areas of interest include medical anthropology; the anthropology of knowledge and of embodiment; critical theory and cultural studies; and theories of reading, writing, and translation. Her publications include: Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter in Chinese Medicine (1994); Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing with Zhang Qicheng (2012); Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (2002).

Anna Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current research: an “ethnography of matsutake,” a mushroom highly prized by the Japanese, in which she explores the relationship between mushroom cultivation and damaged landscapes. Her publications include: Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005); In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1994); Words in Motion (C. Gluck and A. Tsing, eds.) (2009).

Isabelle Stengers is Professor of Philosophy at the Free University of Brussels. She is author of numerous books and articles on the history of science, the politics of scientific knowledge production, and the ecology of practices. Her most recent books available in English are Cosmopolitics I (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Cosmopolitics II (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the National Museum of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research interests include South American ethnology, kinship, ritual, and cognitive anthropology. His publications include From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society (University of Chicago Press, 1992). His most recent book is Métaphysiques cannibales (Paris: PUF, 2009).

Debbora Battaglia is a Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor, and Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. She has published extensively on epistemologies of belonging and alienness, most recently in reference to world-making and intersections of science and cosmology in discursive spheres of outer space. Her books include On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory, and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society and the edited volumes E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, and Rhetorics of Self-Making. A John Simon Guggenheim and NEH Fellow, she holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University.

Marianne E. Lien is Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, and visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on food and consumption, markets and economic practices, materialism, domestication and human-animal relations. Her most recent research is on aquaculture, in collaboration with John Law. She is the author of Marketing and Modernity (Berg 1997), and (co-)editor of many books including The Politics of Food (Berg 2004) and Holding Worlds Together (Berghahn 2007).