Elizabeth Povinelli, Anthropology, Columbia University
GRADUATE SEMINAR: 10:00 am Roundtable at George Wells Knight House, 104 E. 15th Ave Friday, October 12, 2012
*taken from http://huminst.osu.edu/events/geontologies-indigenous-transmedia-and-anthropocene
In the wake of a massive neoliberal reorganization of the Australian Governance of Indigenous life, Elizabeth Povinelli embarked on a quest with Indigenous friends to create a transmedia project. In 2007, in the fragile coastal ecosystem of northwest Australia, this transmedia promised to support an understanding of the place based responsiveness and responsibility of land and people and to provide a foundation for her friends’ economic and social stability. The basic technological principles of the project were simple. Media files would be geotagged such that they could be played proximate to a site or de-linked from their location and moved across other formats and into platforms. Different pricing schemes would allow revenue production atthe same time that the web based nature of the historical and cultural information would be attractive to their children. The social vision was also clear. The transmedia project would allow them to embed their geontological principles and practices in cutting edge communicative technologies allowing them access to information economies. And the virtual nature of the medium would have minimal impact on the physical features of the environment. In this talk, Povinelli will explore competing geontologies at the end of late liberalism and the beginning of an anthropocene consciousness. Through an analysis of this ongoing endeavour, she asks: how does the promise of a making space within contemporary communicative technologies for alternative geontologies meet, and confront, the social spacing of collapsing late liberal forms of power and emerging conceptual foundations of climate change?
Elizabeth Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. A former editor of the journal Public Culture, she is the author of Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2011); The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Geneology, and Carnality (Duke University Press, 2006); The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Duke University Press, 2002), and Labor's Lot: The Power, History and Culture of Aboriginal Action (The University of Chicago Press, 1994). She has also recently produced the short film, Karrabing, Low Tide Turning, selected for the 2012 Berlinale International Film Festival, Shorts Competition.
sponsored by the Precarity and Social Contract Working Group, DISCO, and the departments of Comparative Studies; Geography; and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
for more info, please visit http://huminst.osu.edu/events/geontologies-indigenous-transmedia-and-anthropocene
