Postgraduate research students
Carolina Corral Paredes, PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
Research themes: Mexico, prison, post-imprisonment, criminality, visual anthropology and collaboration, sensorial memory.
Title of dissertation: Indefinite sentence? The presence of imprisonment in the lives of former inmates in Mexico.I aim to identify the ways in which prison remains present as an imaginary and material experience in the lives of former prisoners in Mexico and how it affects their being in the world and social relations post-release. I am interested in looking at imprisonment as a social experience, and at the negotiation of re-acceptance of the former prisoner by his/her close and wider communities: family, friends and employees. I am also concerned with imprisonment as a sensorial experience and the way it is remembered through the body and senses.
I plan to begin fieldwork in the autumn 2010. Film, as means of both research and representation, will be an intrinsic component of the project. It is conceived as a collaborative venture that will invite participants to think of creative ways to tell their stories and put them into film.
Andrea Catarina Gaspar, PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
Research themes: design, technology, interaction-design, visuality, materiality, aesthetics, conceptuality, representation, performance, virtuality
I am interested in the anthropology of the visual. Based on my fieldwork in a design company, in Milan, I specifically research how designers make sense of the visual. Design nowadays is not what it used to be; current design practices are not only influenced by digital media technologies, but deeply transformed by them. Within this framework, my ethnography describes some of the tensions that designers are dealing with, namely, the difficult adjustment between the materiality of an arts tradition, out of which design usually comes, and a rather more immaterial tradition of conceptual art, which is increasingly preferred
Jan Lorenz, PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
Title of dissertation: 'Relentless dybbuk': the loss, the memory and the revival of Jewish life in post-socialist Poland.
Research themes:Polish Jews, transnationalism and diaspora, community, belonging, memory, education, politics of identity, media and ITC
My research project investigates a small community of young Polish Jews in face of the institutional and social phenomenon coined as the Jewish revival in post-socialist Poland. My research focuses on notions of contemporary diasporic identity and construction of community strapped between locality and transnationality. I am particularly interested in relationship between local notions and practices of belonging and a wider social context - politics of identity and memory, educational programs, media discourse, global communication and migration.
I am also concerned about the ways in which cultural notions of identity, authenticity, and memory are embedded in materiality and visuality of public spaces, media images, and cultural iconosphere of everyday topographies. In addition, my research examines how people employ visual media to articulate and perform their belonging. Visual methods are deeply integrated in my research and fieldwork and provide ground for exploration of problematic tropes of an epistemological and methodological character as well as an opportunity to create a parallel representation in film.
Nick Middleton, MPhil Ethnographic Documentary
Poles Apart - Young Polish Immigrant experience in Coventry and Warwickshire
This is a film based research project under the MPhil in ethnogrphic documentary programme.
Research Themes: Established immigrant community and relationship to new immigrant community. Education, formal and informal, role of the Catholic Church, work, wages, exploitation.
The project uses film as the research method and initially explores the relationship between the older, established Polish immigrant community and their relationship to the immigrants from the new European Community. It begins by exploring the new younger immigrant experience through the help and support of key older Poles (Jan & Magda) who have lived in Coventry and Warwickshire since the end of the second world war.
Through the support mechanisms, and possible tensions, I want to focus on young peoples experiences as they begin to enter into a new set of institutions both at the formal level and the informal social level. Through making close links with several young families I want to explore how family life is organised? How they make sense of a new education system? How they learn and adapt to the range of new social new social settings? How identity is maintained? What is missed? What is home?
Aliaa Remtilla, PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
Research Themes: Tajikistan, Ismaili Islam, post-socialism, change, kinship and relationalities
Title of Dissertation: Relying on Relationships: Adapting to Change in Tajik Ishkashim
Title of Film: The Other Side
My fieldwork was conducted in a small village in Tajik Ishkashim that sits on the river separating Tajikistan from Afghanistan. In a place that has undergone a dramatic socio-political and economic shift since the Soviet Union fell some 20 years ago, my PhD argues that Tajik Ishkashimis have prevented a feeling of post-Soviet ‘chaos’ from seeping into their daily lives by searching for stability in their interpersonal relations and religious beliefs.
My film, The Other Side explores how kinship production in border regions can mobilize either social or biological justifications of relatedness. The film tracks the journey of a 70-year old Tajik doctor living in a border village to the Afghan side of the river. Through his travels, he re-connects with kin whose names he had heard of but whom he had never met, raising the question: what does it mean to be related when 60 years of separation have created insurmountable difference?
This main character of the film was a man who adopted me when I arrived to do my fieldwork. As I accompany him through Afghanistan, I simultaneously explore how cultural boundaries can be broken down such that a young Canadian-Indian woman can be incorporated into village networks on a social level. The Other Side is about political borders, social boundaries and difference. But it is also about the connections people make across these separating mechanisms be it through a focus on shared blood, shared religion or simply a shared human existence.
Mike Upton, PhD in Social Anthropology
Research Themes: HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Intellectual Property, South Africa, WTO.
Title of Film: Patent Fever - The New Epidemic
My research considers patent claims in the pharmaceutical industry and the effects these have on the affordability of medicines to treat HIV/AIDS in South Africa in the context of the massive expansion of intellectual property claims in recent years.
In 2009 I produced an educational film Patent Fever about campaigns in South Africa to lower prices on anti-retroviral drugs and the rise of neglected diseases such as tuberculosis.
Using this and other material, I’m exploring the Video Essay genre to create a new edit that situates both author and subject in a way that departs from conventional observational documentary.
Rachel Webster, PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
Research Themes : The Bakkarwals of Jammu and Kashmir, Nomadic Lifestyle & Change, Childhood & Learning, The impact of Sufi Values on Everyday Life.
Life is a journey in which we encounter many different experiences, journeying from one place to another, both physically and mentally. Our perception and reactions largely determine the way in which the world is experienced. Using my own experience of living and working amongst an extended family of Bakkarwals – semi nomadic goat herders who continue to bi-annually migrate between the high mountain pastures of the Kashmir Valley and the lower lying hilly regions of Jammu – my work explores the way in which deep, universal human values, landscape and movement inform this close-knit community’s experiences and outlook in a region torn apart by religious difference. In focusing on the experiences of children and the role of education as a catalyst for change, it also sheds light on the processes and structures that influence how a community perpetuates and reinvents itself over the generations and in light of social, environmental and economic circumstances. Through the use of film and a subjective literary style, I hope also to communicate the sensory, experiential dimension of Bakkarwal life as it is lived
Recently-passed projects
Anne Marie Carty, MPhil Ethnographic Documentary
Tir Cyffredin - Shared Land: A film based research project due to be completed in June 2010.
Research Themes: Rural Wales; Rural ethnography; Home; Identity; In-migration; Welsh language; Threatened culture.
This project uses film as the research method to explore ideas and experiences of identity and culture amongst the diverse communities living in the Bro Ddyfi area of Mid Wales: the Welsh-speaking Welsh, the Welsh who chose to speak English and the (mainly English) incomers. Through a 'portfolio' of films of varying lengths and character, I seek to highlight the very different ideas that these various groups have, not only about one another but also about cultural authenticity, tradition and the appropriate relationship to the geographical space that they share. Despite the apparent differences, I contend that all these groups share a strong – and similarly articulated - sense of community, and a powerful (if differently experienced) attachment to the landscape.
Andre Cicaló, PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
Research themes: Race relations in Brazil and Latin America, slavery, urban anthropology, memory, space, affirmative actions.
Title of Dissertation: A Place in the City: racially based affirmative actions and questions of Black empowerment in Rio de Janeiro.
Working Title of Film: Memories from Oblivion
Current Project: My visual research and the film that I am presently cutting focuses on the forgetting and the living of memories of slavery in Gamboa, the port neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. Although Rio was the busiest slave port in the world until the second half of the 19th century, the city landscape preserves very little of this story. This is due not merely to constant urban renovation but also to the mystifying ideologies of ‘racial democracy’ in Brazil. Despite being more or less obscured by these processes, the slavery past can be still discovered in the life experience of Black people and in the urban inequalities in Rio de Janeiro. Nowadays, the degraded area of Gamboa is going through a process of gentrification and its attractive colonial buildings are part of a project of heritage listing by the City Council, aimed particularly at promoting tourism. The question at the heart of my visual research is whether the history of slavery in this area will find some space in this process of renovation or whether it will be buried and silenced even more effectively. This question is particularly relevant at the historic moment that is the focus of my broader doctoral research, namely, the implementation, for the first time in Brazil, of racially based affirmative actions in favour of Black citizens.
Alyssa Grossman, PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
Research themes: Memory, post-socialism, Eastern Europe, surrealism, everyday life.
Title of dissertation: Chorographies of memory: everyday sites and practices of remembrance work in post-socialist, EU accession-era Bucharest.
My research involves studying constructions of memory in Bucharest, analyzing its politics and poetics in order to more deeply understand Romania's current period of post-socialist transition. How are people's relationships to their own memories currently changing, and what new practices are emerging as Romania's global position shifts? While I consider remembrance work occurring within “official” realms, such as museums, public monuments, and state politics, I am particularly interested in “unofficial,” everyday contexts, such as the interiors of people's homes, and in ordinary, public spaces around the city. As a student of visual anthropology, I am concerned with the visibility and materiality of remembrance practices, and with integrating visual methods (primarily filming) into my fieldwork; and I have supplemented this visual focus with interdisciplinary (and sometimes experimental) methodologies, such as those used by the surrealists and the mass-observationists.
Penny Moore, PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
Research Themes: Sensory knowing; Music making and creativity; Visual ethnography; Visual anthropology; Cities and place.
My research looks at the intersection of musicians' sociality, music making and place. Initially I had thought to investigate the situated nature of creativity by focusing on musicians living and working in Vienna, what I call 'situated creativity'. Questions of how to undertake such research in practice, led me to consider an exploration of music making as a primary focus. This came about through an ongoing engagement with the possibilities of using visual media to do anthropological work.
I approach music making as a socially situated, skilful and sensually engaged process. In approaching music from this perspective, I hope to explore sensory knowing and aesthetic presence, addressing those aspects of musical experience that are beyond the power of words. Central to exploring different ways of knowing has been my engagement with techniques and technologies of visual anthropology, which I use to approach the experience of musicians' sensual engagement in their worlds.
Valentina Bonifacio, PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
Research Themes: Paraguay; visualism; indigenous people; mimetic practices.
My research is located into the space of encounter between White and Indigenous people in Paraguay. I am particularly interested in the relationship between indigenous communities and the state and in mimetic practices as a strategy of resistance. I am now editing a video about the 20th anniversary of the expropriation of land for Maskoy people in Paraguay; the video tackles some of the themes I've previously mentioned.
Joceny Pinheiro, PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media
My research focuses on contemporary processes of indigenous (and black) identification in the context of the Brazilian Northeast. After living with a number of community leaders and taking part in several indigenous gatherings in the state of Ceará, I came to realise that it is through the performance of indigenousness that a group of people become (also in the sense of being acknowledged) ‘indigenous’. I have used video and photography to explore the embodied dimension of those performances, and thus give a glimpse into how indigenousness is publicly presented through the activities of discoursing, narrating, singing, praying, and dancing.
In Gathering Strength, the film that accompanies my thesis, I have also looked at the ways certain leaders experience indigenousness and define their identities. Gathering Strength has been screened in the UK, Brazil, Portugal, Canada and France.
Johannes Sjöberg, PhD in Drama:
Title: Ethnofiction: genre hybridity in theory and practice-based research
Supervisors: Dr Alan Marcus, the University of Aberdeen , Professor James Thompson, Drama at the University of Manchester, Professor Paul Henley, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the
University of Manchester
Research Themes: Ethnofiction, ethnographic filmmaking, applied theatre, transgender, Brazil
The research project considers if the largely unexplored genre of ethnofictions, as described by visual anthropologist Jean Rouch, offers means of integrating a hybrid study within drama and ethnography. Ethnofiction is an experimental ethnographic film genre, where the practitioner asks the subjects of his fieldwork to act out aspects of their life-experience in front of the camera in improvisations as exemplified in Rouch's classic films Jaguar (1957-67), Moi, un noir (1958) and La pyramide humaine (1959). A key question is whether a nuanced understanding of foreign cultures can be created and mediated by combining ethnographic research methods with the processes of dramatic work? Given the relative paucity of literature on ethnofiction, I seek to examine whether the use of improvisation, combined with participant observation, can be an effective research method.
Following a detailed background study of Rouch's methodology of ethnofiction, I have tested these approaches by making two films: an ethnographic documentary and an ethnofiction, about transgendered Brazilian living in São Paulo. The ethnographic documentary short Drama Queens follows the transgendered actresses Savana 'Bibi' Meirelles and Fabia Mirassos and their work at the theatre Os Satyros in central São Paulo. The theatre is run by Rodolfo García Vázquez and Ivam Cabral. Os Satyros is famous for involving the theatre's environment in the plays. The transgendered community plays an important part of the life at Roosevelt Square where the theatre is located. The documentary shows Bibi's and Fabia's life on and off stage. The one hour ethnofiction Transfiction focuses on identity and discrimination in the daily lives of transgendered Brazilians. Fabia Mirassos projects her life through the role of Meg, a transgendered hairdresser confronting intolerance and re-living memories of abuse. Savana 'Bibi' Meirelles plays Zilda who makes her living as one of the many transgendered sex workers in São Paulo, as she struggles to find her way out of prostitution.