[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, November 28th - Cristina Grasseni - (Please RSVP)

[STS]

*STS Circle at Harvard*
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*
*
*Cristina Grasseni
*
*Radcliffe Institute
*
*
*
on

*Skilled Visions: Critical Ecologies of Belonging
*
Monday, November 28th
12:15-2:00 p.m.
124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106
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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts
<sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<sts at hks.harvard.edu>by 5pm
Wednesday, November 23rd.
*
*
*Abstract:*  This presentation will discuss the idea of applying the
skilled visions approach to collective strategies of self-representation,
by combining visual archive research with ethnographic sources in a project
about looking. The goal is to develop a critical analysis of belonging,
focusing on the visual apprenticeship of stereotypes as a naturalization of
social classification. The thesis is that there is a complex and tacit
competence at play in the mutual exercise of recognition, and that such
“skilled vision” feeds on comparison by context and on cultural training
rather than on a replicable repertoire of classificatory schemes. The
business of “sorting faces” depends on where we draw the implicit
boundaries of the groups we are identifying. Our own capacity for
recognizing and ascribing membership of a certain group is a *skill* that
is largely contextual, socially inculcated and publicly performed. The
paper aims at connecting the previous work on Skilled Visions with this
work-in-progress agenda, providing references from the relevant
anthropological literature and discussing some recent ethnographic material.

*Biography*: Cristina Grasseni is Assistant Professor of Social and Visual
Anthropology at Bergamo University, Italy.Her books *Skilled Visions:
Between Apprenticeship and Standards* (ed., Berghahn, Oxford, 2007)
and *Developing
Skill, Developing Vision: Practices of Locality at the Foot of the
Alps* (Berghahn,
Oxford, 2009) focus on visual apprenticeship as a form of relational and
situated learning. Her fieldwork with dairy breeders examined how
techno-scientific innovation and the reinvention of local foods as
“heritage” interact with local communities of practice. Grasseni received a
BA in philosophy, an MPhil in history and philosophy of science, and a PhD
in social anthropology with visual media from the universities of Pavia,
Cambridge, and Manchester, respectively. Cosponsored by the Harvard Film
Study Center, this year Grasseni is developing a novel project at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, as David and Roberta Logie Fellow.


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http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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