News/Research

Juliana Friend at the 2018 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology

19 Mar, 2018

Juliana Friend at the 2018 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology

BCNM graduate student Juliana Friend's proposal to reflect on the conversation archive was accepted by "Displacements," a virtual conference taking place from April 19 to April 21 by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. Friend's proposal involved focusing on the possibilities and limitations of the conversation achive, as well as the stakes of digital iterability and thoughts on what constitutes "conversation" in the first place.

This is the first time that the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology took place virtually, "displacing" the conventional modes of gathering by allowing participants to tune in from wherever they may be.

Juliana's presentation was part of "A Multimodal Turn" and was entitled "What is a Conversation in the First Place? Toward a Dialogic Ethnographic Archive." She spoke about her work with Many-to-Many, a BCNM supported project, that we've covered in the past.

According to the conference's website:

Displacements are in the air: episodes of profound political upheaval, intensified crises of migration and expulsion, the disturbing specter of climatic and environmental instability, countless virtual shadows cast over the here and now by ubiquitous media technologies. What does it mean to live and strive in the face of such movements? What social and historical coordinates are at stake with these challenges? And what kind of understanding can anthropology contribute to the displacements of this time—given, especially, that our most essential techniques like ethnography are themselves predicated on the heuristic value of displacement, on what can be gleaned from the experience of unfamiliar circumstances?

Exclusionary politics of spatial displacement always depend on rhetorical and imaginative displacements of various kinds: a person for a category, or a population for a problem. In the face of such moves, the critical task of ethnography is often to muster contrary displacements of thought, attention, imagination, and sensation. What forms of social and political possibility might be kindled by anthropological efforts to broach unexpected places, situations, and stories?

Read more about the biennial meeting on its official website.