Inaugural lectures: Karen Waltorp and Atreyee Sen

To celebrate the appointments of Karen Waltorp and Atreyee Sen as professors at the Department of Anthropology, the department extends an invitation to a double inaugural lecture, followed by a reception.

The inaugural lecture takes place at the Gothersgade Auditorium 1 from 13.00-15.30 and is followed by a reception from 15:45-17.00. 

The lectures and reception are open to all.

Programme

13:00  -13:15	Welcome by Dean Vibeke Koushede, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Copenhagen
13:15 - 14:15	Inaugural lecture: Steps to Alternative Digital Futures by Professor of Anthropology Karen Waltorp
14:30-15:30	Inaugural lecture: Circuits of anger, cycles of fury by Professor of Anthropology Atreyee Sen
15:45-17:00	Reception at the Ethnographic Exploratorium (Room 4.1.12) Øster Farimagsgade 5.

Karen Waltorp: Steps to Alternative Digital Futures - On Smartphones, Tech Imaginaries and Image Ecologies

Abstract

The world is changing at rapid speed. Our lives across work and leisure are increasingly digitally mediated, and our everyday environments are automated in ways that are opaque to us. Anthropology is the knowledge of humans as cultural and social beings in their ‘natural environment’. In this talk, I query what anthropology help us understand about this: What might empirical studies with people in very different positions and places help us understand about steps to alternative digital futures? I argue it affords imagining alternatives to the dominant narratives and tech-determinist imaginaries promoted by Silicon Valley. I present two decades of ethnographic work spanning the digital interface and its undergirding energy-hungry infrastructure, tracing how place, personhood and sociality is reconfigured, and planetary boundaries challenged. From digital sociality in the Nordics and smartphones as both relational device and ‘real virtuality’ for minoritized women; over tech imaginaries as they form and clash in South Africa’s ‘Silicon Cape’ among tech giants, township tech entrepreneurs, and residents suffering recurring blackouts while trying to stay connected to opportunities; and finally attending to the flow of images in an ecology that runs across myth, dream and daily life, social media screens and game engines with Afghan/Danish Film Collective ARTlife - and beyond.

Bio

Karen Waltorp is professor of anthropology, University of Copenhagen, filmmaker and Head of the Ethnographic Exploratory and MultimodalLab. She is Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Australia and at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University, and Research Fellow at HUMA: Humanities in Africa, UCT. Her expertise is in multimodal and futures anthropology, digital media and emerging technologies, energy and infrastructures. Her books count Why Muslim Women and Smartphones (2020), Energy Futures (2022), An Anthropology of Futures and Technologies (2023), Digital Sociality (2024) and Tech Imaginaries (2026). Waltorp is Chair of the European Research Council’s Advanced Grant Panel for Social Sciences and Humanities and Principal Investigator of CLAIMS to Energy Citizenship (DFC, 2024-2028).

Atreyee Sen: Circuits of anger, cycles of fury - Doing anthropology in the age of rage

Abstract

In anthropology, the human condition (Arendt 1958) usually encompasses the universal, indispensable aspects of ‘being human’ across a diversity of moral geographies. My talk will bring forth a discussion on how rage has become fundamental to our contemporary human condition as the world gets more interconnected through shared senses of injustice, along with fear, hatred, paranoia, and other ‘negative affect’.  Every hour of our days, news and social media bring us information about protests, resistances, violence, revolutions, and rebellions, as the world faces failures of democracy, resuscitation of dictatorships, rising gender backlash, surveillance capitalism, extractivism, protracted wars, mass killing and displacement, and authoritarianism. These are merely some of the factors that has tipped the earth into what social scientists call ‘the bad, ugly Anthropocene’ (cf Dalby 2015), signalling that human activity has eroded the social, economic and biological frontiers of planetary life. I want to explore how collective anger as a response to this planetary crisis has become the defining fabric of contemporary lives, creating pervasive affective landscapes of human rage across the global North and South. How can one ‘do’ anthropology in ‘the age of rage’ (Bone 2024)? Do we direct our gaze to the speed at which angry communities are developed, deluded, and dispersed within digital ecologies? And what about the anger of anthrologists who conduct research on rapidly changing terrains of human fragility? Between the ‘stuckedness’ (Hage 2009) of human life and the ‘stickiness’ (Ahmed 2004) of disparities, my talk will raise some issues around the global circulation of rage and affective injustice which is embodied, stoked and energised in the contemporary era.

Bio

Atreyee Sen is professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Over the course of her academic career in India, the UK and Denmark, Sen has brought critical insights to studies of gender, childhoods, poverty, urban politics and South Asian cities. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, ‘Anger, Legitimised (ANGLE): Amplified anger and its rhetorics of legitimation in the 21st century.’