Social Anthropology seminars

Cristina Rivera Garza examines how personal archives can challenge the erasure associated with gendered and state violence. Drawing on the family papers used in her account of her sister Liliana’s 1990 femicide, she considers how language, punctuation, repetition and playful forms preserve a person’s presence. The lecture connects these close readings with collective memory and the afterlives of femicide. Rivera Garza asks how documentary and writing practices can make victims materially present in public memory, engaging with Christina Sharpe’s concept of archives of breathlessness.

As part of its webinar series on region-specific diversity issues, the ALBA Network is organizing a panel discussion to explore the challenges and biases faced by neuroscientists while establishing their research groups and careers in the MENA region, from an academic and cultural perspective. This will be followed by highlights of success stories, unique region-specific opportunities for research collaborations and recommendations to improve representation of MENA neuroscientists in the global stage.

How can people coordinate their actions or make joint decisions? One possibility is that each person attempts to predict the actions of the other(s), and best-responds accordingly. But this can lead to bad outcomes, and sometimes even vicious circularity. An alternative view is that each person attempts to work out what the two or more players would agree to do, if they were to bargain explicitly. If the result of such a "virtual" bargain is "obvious," then the players can simply play their respective roles in that bargain. I suggest that virtual bargaining is essential to genuinely social interaction (rather than viewing other people as instruments), and may even be uniquely human. This approach aims to respect methodological individualism, a key principle in many areas of social science, while explaining how human groups can, in a very real sense, be "greater" than the sum of their individual members.

Amitav Ghosh considers why societies have struggled to imagine and respond to global warming. He argues that fiction has helped shape the priorities and consumption patterns of the modern world while often failing to confront the realities of climate change. The lecture connects stories of ordinary people and imperial histories with the cultural conditions of the climate crisis. Ghosh questions approaches that place responsibility only on individual conscience, arguing that the scale of the problem demands a collective response. His account asks how literature, public imagination and historical understanding can contribute to that response.