MIT Department of Anthropology

Past Events

MIT Anthropology

Past Events

Sep 27, 2024

The Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project Launch Documentary Screening Southeast: A City within a City with Live Music by Steve Walsh, Coco Gomez, + Matt Goetz

Friday, 9/27/2024 5:30 - 7pm  Bartos Theater,  E15-070 in Wiesner Building 

SOUTHEAST: a city within a city A hands-on exploration of what it felt like to live in a neighborhood that once produced more steel than any other place in the world. The documentary brings together builders, soldiers, scholars, gangsters, musicians, and politicians from the Southeast Side’s past and present to explain what happened to neighborhoods full of life and different cultures after the jobs disappeared. 

Join us for an immersive experience that blends documentary film, live narration, and musical performances. Original music performed live by writer/director Steven Walsh and his grandfather Roger "Coco" Gomez (accompanied on guitar by Matt Goetz)! Friday Sept. 27th at 5:30 in MITs Bartos Theater, Building E15 basement off Ames St.

 


 

Sep 26, 2024

Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project Launch: w/SECASP Director, Chris Walley + screening of Wetlands to Waste documentary

Chris Walley

MIT Anthropology

9/26/2024  4:00 - 5:30pm Panel + Doc Screening  | 5:30pm - 6:30 pm Reception 4:00 - 5:30pm @ The Nexus, 14S-130 in Hayden Library  | 5:30pm - 6:30 pm Walker Lawn outside Building 14 (or 14E-304 if rain)

Thursday Sept. 26th 
4 - 5:30pm @ The Nexus, 14S-130 in Hayden Library  

Please join SECASP Director Prof. Chris Walley and other co-collaborators as they discuss the project and screen segments of the site’s newly launched and final multimedia documentary. Wetlands to Waste explores the environmental history of the multiracial Calumet region and the rise of environmental activism led by Latina, white and black residents against industrial pollution and landfills. Funded in part with grants from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Donnelly Foundation. 

5:30 - 6:30pm, Walker Lawn outside Building 14 (or 14E-304 if rain)
 Reception on Walker Lawn outside Building 14 (or 14E-304 if rain).


 

Sep 11, 2024

Anthro Tea! 

9/11/24 4-5pm  E53-335L 

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation! No need to RSVP; just show up and bring your friends!

May 8, 2024

MIT Anthro Tea

Wednesday, May 8, 2024 4:00 - 5:00 PM Anthro HQ E53-335

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation! No need to RSVP, just show up and bring your friends!

May 6, 2024

“Seeds of Guamuchil”: Feminist activism-research and a women’s prison writing project in Mexico with Rosalva Aída Hernandez

Rosalva Aída Hernandez

Radcliffe Institute (Harvard)

Monday, May 6, 2024 4:00 - 5:30 PM Margaret Cheney Room, 3-308

Mexican anthropologist Aída Hernández, currently a Fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute, will join us to discuss her feminist activism-research in Mexico through the work of a creative writing project for imprisoned women she has helped lead. The event will feature a screening of a short film about the project: Semillas de Guamúchil (“Five women who discover creative writing in prison share their poetry now in their life at large”). We hope you can join us!

Apr 30, 2024

Elan Abrell's talk "The Ethical and Methodological Challenges of Animal-Centered Ethnography" 

Elan Abrell

Assistant Professor Environmental Studies, Animal Studies, and Science and Technology Studies at Wesleyan University

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM E53-354

As a relatively new and evolving field within anthropology, multispecies ethnography challenges traditional human-centric perspectives by engaging with the complex web of relationships between humans and non-human entities, including plants, fungi, and animals.

Apr 29, 2024

Spring 2024 A • H • STS Colloquium - Christopher Heaney "Trepanning Incas: Ancient Peruvian Surgery and American Anthropology's Monroe Doctrine"

Assistant Professor Christopher Heaney

Penn State

Monday, April 29, 2024 4:00 - 5:30 PM E51-095

This lecture reconstructs the process by which "Inca trepanation" became an accepted scientificfact, and the looting and trade in "Inca" and Andean ancestors and crania it relied upon to provide further museum "specimens" to prove or disprove Indigenous skill at this high-risk maneuver. Central to this process was the work of Andean collectors and Peruvian surgeons like the anthropologist Julio C. Tello, whose authority was sought but effaced by Americanist anthropologists in the United States.

Apr 9, 2024

Jason De León Book Talk "Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling"

Jason De León 

Director Cotsen Institute of Archaeology |  Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American Studies UCLA

Tuesday, April 9, 2024 4:00 - 5:30 PM 56-114

In this talk Jason De León will discuss his new book "Soldiers and Kings", a long-term ethnographic study focused on understanding the daily lives of Honduran smugglers who profit from transporting migrants across the length of Mexico. Using the stories of several smugglers, he examines the relationship between transnational gangs and the clandestine migration industry, as well as the difficulties of doing ethnography in this violent and ethically challenging context.

Apr 8, 2024

Pan-American Computing:  Regional Integration and U.S. Corporate Power at the Origins of South American Computer Markets

Colette Perold

Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder

Monday, April 8, 2024 4:00 - 5:30 PM The Nexus in Hayden Library, 14S-130

Part of A • H • STS speaker series:

This talk from Colette Perold analyzes the role of U.S. empire in the creation of South American markets for tabulating equipment and early mainframe computers. Grounded in two major programs—the 1940 Census of the Americas and the 1960s Latin American Free Trade Association—this talk explores the role of data integration and trade integration as two components of a regional strategy for U.S. corporate dominance over hemispheric tabulating and computing industries.

Apr 5, 2024

HOLLOW TREE - Documentary Film Screening and Q&A with director, producer, + 3 protagonists

Friday, April 5, 2024 2:30 - 4:30 PM The Nexus in Hayden Library, 14S-130

HOLLOW TREE follows three teenagers coming of age in their sinking homeland of Louisiana. Their different perspectives shape their story.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Director Kira Akerman, Producer Monique Walton, and the 3 protagonists. The Q&A will be moderated by Dr. Kate Brown, Professor of History of Science at MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society.  Seating is limited. Please register.

The event is sponsored by The Living Climate Futures Group at MIT.

Apr 4, 2024

Héctor Beltrán Book Talk "Code Work: Hacking across the US/México Techno-Borderlands" at UCBerkeley Center for Ethnographic Research

Héctor Beltrán

MIT Anthropology

Thursday, April 4, 2024 7 - 8:30 PM EST (4 - 5:30 PM PST)  470 Stephens Hall UC Berkeley / virtual 

The Center for Ethnographic Research at UC Berkeley welcomes MIT Anthropology Class of 1957 Career Development Assistant Professor Héctor Beltrán for a discussion of his book, "Code Work: Hacking across the US/México Techno-Borderlands"

Apr 3, 2024

Anthro Tea

Wednesday, April 3, 2024 4:00 - 5:00 PM Anthro HQ E53-335

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation! No need to RSVP; just show up and bring your friends!

Mar 15, 2024

"Prototyping anthro-engineering for sustainability education and solution-building at MIT and beyond" MCSC Friday Lunch

Friday, March 15, 2024 12:00 - 1:00 PM MCSC Office 105 Broadway (Building NE36) on the 7th floor

Hear from undergraduate students and instructors involved in the MCSC-supported seed award project, “Anthro-Engineering Decarbonization at the Million Person Scale,” about their efforts to bridge anthropology and engineering to explore the design of a culturally appropriate, affordable, and sustainable intervention to create a pathway to decarbonization in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the coldest and most polluted capital city in the world.

Presenters: Iselle Barrios (’25), Dr. Lauren Bonilla (MIT Anthropology), Grace Gardner (’24), Madeline Hon (’24), Kiran Mak (’25), and Ella Trumper (’24)

Mar 14, 2024

Braiding Knowledges to Transform Science: Climate Change, Cultural Places, and Food Sovereignty research at the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science

Dr. Sonya Atalay

Visiting Professor in MIT Anthropology • Provost Professor of Anthropology at UMass-Amherst • Director, NSF Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science

Thursday, March 14th 4:00 - 5:30 PM, Reception to follow in Bldg 56 Lobby 5:30 - 6:00 PM 56-114

Abstract:
How do we bring previously disparate ways of knowing, Indigenous Knowledge and “Western” or mainstream science, into right relationship with one another for mutual thriving of land and culture? At a time of accelerating environmental change and complex, overlapping challenges, we need a plurality of perspectives to innovate solutions. This talk focuses on work being carried out by a team of international, interdisciplinary, predominantly Indigenous scientists from the US, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand as part of the newly funded Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science. I’ll share how our team, which includes archaeologists; climate, environmental, and water scientists; scholars with expertise in Indigenous knowledge systems and education, foodways, and museums and heritage, are collaborating to explore ethical practices and protocols of braiding knowledges, the seeds for building new research worlds. The talk highlights efforts to bring braiding methodologies into mainstream scientific practice through a transdisciplinary approach that reflects Indigenous understandings of place in which the urgent and interconnected areas of climate change, cultural places, and food sovereignty and security are the focus.

Bio:
Dr. Sonya Atalay (Anishinaabe-Ojibwe) is an Indigenous archaeologist, utilizing community-based participatory methods to conduct research in full partnership with Indigenous communities. Dr. Atalay’s scholarship crosses disciplinary boundaries, incorporating aspects of cultural anthropology, archaeology, critical heritage studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She’s currently involved in producing a series of research-based comics about repatriation of Native American ancestral remains, return of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) law, and is Director of the NSF-funded, multinational Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS)

Mar 13, 2024

MIT Anthro Tea! 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024 4:00 - 5:00 PM Anthro HQ E53-335

Come relax with us and enjoy some fun conversation! No need to RSVP; just show up and bring your friends!

Mar 11, 2024

Rose Salane: The Art of the Archive

Rose Salane

Artist

Monday, March 11, 2024 4:00 - 5:30 PM Building 10, Room 150 (MIT Museum Studio)

In this casual conversation, New York-based artist Rose Salane will describe her archival approach to documenting the forces of attraction that draw objects together. Salane has exhibited her “dynamic sets of object accumulation” at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and MASS MoCA, among many other museums and galleries. This short Art21 film introduces her practice.

Light refreshments will be served.

Questions? Contact Prof. Graham Jones (gmj@mit.edu

Feb 28, 2024

 Department Talk Series: Dr. Amy Moran-Thomas "Oil in Stereo: Ancestry Through Infrastructure"

Amy Moran-Thomas 

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 12:20 - 1:10 PM Boston University CAS 426 at 725 Commonwealth Ave.

Oil in Stereo: Ancestry Through Infrastructure, an ethnography of oil histories in western Pennsylvania, brings the texture of a family album to the interior dilemmas and sensory technologies of ecological destruction. Populating the abstractions of settler colonialism and hydrocarbon toxicity with the jarring intimacy of a kinship story, this genre experiment reflects on planetary health, questions of “slow violence” and intergenerational responsibility from the grounding of combustible family histories.
Feb 14, 2024

MIT Anthro Tea

Wednesday, February 14, 2024 4:00 - 5:00 PM Anthro HQ E53-335

Come relax with your friends and enjoy some conversation! No need to RSVP; just show up and bring your friends!

Feb 2, 2024

Talk by Stefan Helmreich "Ocean Waves Dangerous, Domesticated, and Diagnostic" for Anthropology of the Seas EASA Network - Webinar series 

Stefan Helmreich

MIT Anthropology

Friday, February 2, 2024 3-5PM CET / 9-11AM EST Zoom

Ocean waves of relentless approach have long been objects of apprehension and fear. From mariner folklore to literature to Hollywood films, oncoming waves — both outsized and unremitting — have been forces and symbols of, variously, nature unbound and social planning unprepared. How do coastal engineers and marine scientists understand such entities? This talk will center attention on how ocean waves become objects of measure, monitoring, and modeling and in the process, entities whose frightening dimensions might yield to prediction and control. The talk will offer case studies from wave research centers in the Netherlands, Oregon, and Bangladesh. Amplified waves emerge as avatars of the Thallasocene, forces and forms diagnostic of the age of a rising ocean.