October 21, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Upstream, Downstream, Offshore: Constancy amidst the flux of supply chains Dr. Julie Y. Chu University of Chicago

ABSTRACT: Before “the chain” became the dominant figure for understanding the dynamics of supply and demand in the 1980s, fluvial landscapes have long undergirded logistical projects for building out and maintaining the infrastructural channels of commerce and travel, especially around estuarial or delta zones where rivers meet the sea. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic engagements with the original “development deltas” of Post-Mao China linking coastal SEZs (Special Economic Zones) along the Pearl, Min and Yangtze rivers to global exchange, this talk offers an estuarial take on what scholars of modernity and supply chain capitalism have described as a “liquid” world full of uncertainty and volatility. But in lieu of a theory of universal flux, the talk focuses on the temporal politics of constancy that make fluvial landscapes thinkable in terms of supply chains and in turn, actionable as valued lifeways to be developed and sustained along the logistical junctures of upstream, downstream and the offshore.

BIOGRAPHY: Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago and author of Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010). Her current writing project is entitled The Hinge of Time: Infrastructure and Chronopolitics at China’s Global Edge. Based on three years of fieldwork largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers traversing the Taiwan Strait, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific (via ports and border zones spanning the PRC and the U.S.), this work examines how certain figures of “infrastructure” animate the global politics of time in three distinct keys – as matters of constancy, rhythm and non/event.

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Chu’s talk.

October 28, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Outsourced Dreamwork. TikTok, Scrolling, and the Here-Else Dr. Samuele Collu McGill University

ABSTRACT: Binge-scrolling on digital media–the autonomic action of scrolling through potentially infinite feeds for extended periods of time–is a widespread practice at the core of the ever-expanding digitalization of the user unconscious. This talk presents an ongoing multimodal research project, based at McGill University, that uses affective computing and ethnographic methods to analyze the affective experience of users when they scroll on their own TikTok accounts. The experimental setting of the research, which focuses on college students between the ages of 19 and 24, is designed to facilitate collective sessions of feed-analysis. These sessions bring research participants and researchers together to develop a form of free-associative image-work that engages with the participants’ recorded TikTok feeds. Feed-analysis considers the user’s feed in its capacity to offer outsourced dream-work, one which challenges the boundaries between the algorithmic and human unconscious. In the talk, I move away from technophobic critiques of digital media and propose a phenomenological psycho-politics of the binge-scroll, an approach which takes scrolling as an affective technology of presence that facilitates the user’s rapid oscillations across a wide variety of attentional, affective, and un/conscious states.

BIOGRAPHY: Samuele Collu is an Assistant Professor of Medical and Psychological Anthropology at McGill University. His research addresses the entanglement between psychic life, therapeutic practices, and digital devices. His first book manuscript, entitled Into the Loop: Affect, Therapy, Screens, will be published by Duke University Press. The book is based on an ethnography of Systemic Couples Therapy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Drawing from the observation of over two hundred hours of live therapy sessions from behind a one-way mirror and/or closed-circuit television, the book explores what compels romantic couples to repeat, drift away from, or interrupt relational loops. Written in an experimental short-form genre, the book engages with psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and affect theory to describe the psycho-political forces that animate romantic attachments. Samuele Collu is currently working on Dreams I Scroll Through, a manuscript that draws from a multimodal ethnographic research to explore the affective experience of binge-scrolling on social media. His third book project, tentatively titled Bye Bye Now, is a melancholically vitalist work that addresses experiences of loss, abandonment, and gendered violence across family archives. 

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Collu’s talk.

November 11, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Christina Schwenkel University of California, Riverside

November 18, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Aurora Donzelli University of Bologna

December 2, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Jason Pribilsky Whitman College

February 24, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Krystal A. Smalls University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

March 3, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Anna T. Browne Ribeiro University of Louisville

March 31, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin Wellesley College

April 7, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Jennifer C. Hsieh University of Michigan

April 14, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Usha Reena Rungoo Harvard University