2016 Conference Program

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anthropology graduate student conference

8th annual anthropology in transit

Friday, April 1, 2016

SBSG 1517

10:00a       Registration, coffee, and breakfast snacks

10:30a       Welcome Address with Dr. George Marcus

11:00a        Paper panel: “Nuanced Bodies”

Ree Botts (UCLA), “African-American, Light Skinned, and Woman: The Nuances of Gendered Racial Categories across Borders and Their Impact on Racial Identity”

Evan Conaway (UCI), “Virtual Flesh: The Technical Modification of Queer Self-Presentation in World of Warcraft”

Rebecca Hasselbeck (UCI), “Noticing Nuances: Work and Skill in the Care of Racehorses”

Yimin Lai (UCI), “Person, Human, Ren: The ‘Nuances’ of Translating Personhood in Ethnographies of China”

Dr. Tom Boellstorff, discussant

12:15p        Lunch, provided

1:30p          Video panel: “Warfare and the Aesthetics of Nuance,” with Dr. David Theo Goldberg

3:30p          Paper panel: “Nuanced Natures”

Kyrstin Mallon Andrews (UCI), “Cogiendo aire: Decompression Accidents and Ocean Health on the Dominican Frontier”

Courtney Cecale (UCLA), “Anticipating Climate Change in the Peruvian Andes”

Ivana Guarrasi (UCSD), “Tableaux Vivants: A Training Model of Clinical Simulation in Flesh and Wax”

Danica Loucks (UCI), “’Statistical trickery’ in Climate Change Debates: Nuance as Political Bias”

Dr. Angela Jenks, discussant

4:30p          Keynote address: “On the Nature of Catastrophic Forms: Nuance as Complex System”

Dr. Adriana Petryna

Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Gabriele Schwab, discussant

6:30-9:30p  Dinner party at 6370 Verano Place (map provided)

 

Saturday, April 2, 2016

SBSG 1517

9:00a          Coffee & breakfast

9:30a          Paper panel: “Politics of Nuance”

Malay Firoz (Brown University), “Against ‘Nuance:’ Theory, Immersion and Critical Anthropology”

Oviya Govindan (UCI), “Rethinking Single Stories of State and Resistance”

Gregory Kohler (UCI), “Subtle Traces: Regulation and Consumption in the Italian Dairy Industry”

Patricia Kunrath Silva (UCI), “Nuances of Philanthropy in Brazil and the United States”

Dr. Damien Sojoyner, discussant

 

11:00a        Paper panel: “Poetics of Nuance”

Abhishek Bhattacharya (University of Chicago), “China’s Chairman, or Our Nuance: Indigeneity and the Naxalite Movement in India, from the Late 1960s through the ‘80s”

Jason Palmer (UCI), “Troubling the Sacred with Help from the Saints: Peruvian Mormon Perceptions of Utah”

Leah Zani (UCI), “Reading in-between the Lines”

Dr. Lilith Mahmud, discussant

 

Anthro in Transit leverages the extraordinary concentration of cutting-edge anthropological scholarship in Southern California to provide a forum for emerging scholarship from anthropologically-concerned students nationwide.

The aim of Anthropology in Transit is 1) to give graduate students an opportunity to present work-in-progress to a supportive audience; 2) to share and refine our research with the larger scholarly community; and 3) to develop professional networks with our current and future colleagues.

In 2016, conference activities will begin the morning of Friday, April 1, and end the afternoon of Saturday, April 2. Events will be held on the UC Irvine campus and surrounding areas within walking distance. Sleeping accommodations and on-campus parking will be made available for no charge with UC Irvine graduate students.

The theme for our eighth annual conference is (nuance).  The conference aims to interrogate “nuance” as a category that is epistemologically privileged in anthropological knowledge creation. Panels will address it both as a performative communicative strategy and as a category of experience we encounter in our fields amongst our interlocutors.

This year’s conference will feature keynote speaker Dr. Adriana Petryna, Edmund J. and Louise W. Khan Term Professor in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Feel free to contact us at anthropologyintransit@gmail.com with any questions.