ΣΕΜΙΝΑΡΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΤΕΤΑΡΤΗΣ
ΤΜΗΜΑ ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗΣ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΛΟΓΙΑΣ
ΠΑΝΤΕΙΟ ΠΑΝΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΙΟ
ΑΙΘΟΥΣΑ Α1 (ΝΕΟ ΚΤΗΡΙΟ), 15:00-17:00.
ΠΡΟΣΚΛΗΣΗ
Σας προσκαλούμε στο σεμινάριο της Τετάρτης 29 Νοεμβρίου για να ακούσετε τις παρουσιάσεις δύο ομιλητριών, της Elena Zoe Dennie, University College London και της Xenia Valeth,University of Seville.
Ακολουθούν σύντομα βιογραφικά των ομιλητριών με περίληψη της κάθε παρουσίασης.
Elena Zoe Dennie, University College London
“Touching Sound Movement: Performance Art Making in Athens, Greece.”
ΠΕΡΙΛΗΨΗ
This presentation is a work in progress, as Elena is in the midst of conducting 24 months (2022- 2024) of participatory ethnographic research in Athens in collaboration with various local, national, and international performance institutions (theaters, galleries, collectives), artists, performers, musicians, and other professionals in the performance field. She examines the dance of movement, emotions, and body and the possibilities of and ways in which movement transmutes into shared and diverse experiences and the emergence of social and material environments through technical processes of performance. She will foreground ethnographic vignettes from her ongoing, current fieldwork.
ΒΙΟΓΡΑΦΙΚΟ
Elena Zoe Dennie is a PhD student in the Material Culture section of the University College London Anthropology Department (United Kingdom) and an affiliate researcher at Panteion University Department of Social Anthropology in Greece. Her current project focuses on the role of the body and movement in current-day performance practices and the enveloping social milieu and movement of collective experience in Athens (Greece). Her project is supervised by Dr. Ludovic Coupaye and Dr. Rafael Schacter at UCL and by Professor Diana Riboli at Panteion University.
Elena is a member of the UCL Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity, an international research hub dedicated to the documentation, analysis, and comparison of the ways in which diverse communities preserve, develop, and conceptualise specific technical relations with their local, social, cultural, and natural environments. [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/research/centre-anthropology-technics-and-technodiversity-catt].
She studied on the UCL Material Culture MA degree programme with Dr. Ludovic Coupaye and as an Anthropology Distinguished Major at the University of Virginia (United States) with Dr. George Mentore and the late Professor Roy Wagner. Her research has investigated dance, ritual, and movement in everyday life with the Makushi people of Guyana, South America. She also investigated more recently concepts of health and body and the presence of material objects in technical processes of complementary and alternative healing in Athens (Greece). Her research interests include the body, touch, emotions, movement, performance, ritual, power, materiality, and the anthropology of Greece.
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Xenia Valeth, University of Seville
“Persistence and reinventions of grassroots activism in Exarchia (Athens).”
ΠΕΡΙΛΗΨΗ
The present seminar, based on ongoing ethnographic research in and around Exarchia carried out conjunctly by a young anthropologist and experienced activist, aims to reflect on the strategies of persistence urban grassroots collectives apply to be able to keep going throughout the years. In the existing literature, the continuity of activism has been analysed both regarding entire movements and individual activists; however little attention has been given to the way specific organisations maintain themselves in spite of internal challenges and changing external conditions.
When it comes to intraorganizational cohesion, community building and transmitting a culture of commitment to both newcomers and experienced members has shown to be more significant to our research participants than the strategies of burnout prevention that have gained prominence in activist sustainability literature (Cox 2011; Gorski 2015; Roth 2016) during the last decade. Furthermore, according to our observations so far, continuity is encouraged by a collective’s capacity to transform the perception of the present as a time of low-scale mobilisation into a political opportunity for opening up to wider audiences of potential supporters and, far from entering into a phase of “stagnant resistance” (Herold and DeBarros 2020) constantly reinvent themselves.
ΒΙΟΓΡΑΦΙΚΟ
Xenia Valeth has been working on and with social movements since the very start of her career. As a BA student she started experimenting with engaged ethnography in the context of the Spanish Indignados neighbourhood assemblies and got her bachelor’s degree in social and Cultural Anthropology from LMU Munich in 2017.
In 2019 she got her MA in Ethnography and Anthropology at Universitat de Barcelona, where she had been researching persistence and micropolitics in a self-organized school project.
She has collaborated in the research project “Symmetrical and collaborative ethnographies” (2018-2021) and started her doctoral studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Universidad de Sevilla in 2019. Since 2020 she is a predoctoral research fellow at her department. Currently she is conducting field research in Athens and holds an affiliation with the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.