Co-seminar in Anthropology (Half-Term): Insurgent Archivings: On the Sentient, the Storied and the Yet To Come

Does the weight of history offset the plasticity of people and power? How do the historical and the unhistorical come together in refiguring social life and futurity? The seminar takes on these vital debates to 1) trouble commonsensical understandings of the archive as expressing a solid past that overdetermines the present and to 2) open pathways for an anthropology of the accidental, the sentient, and the yet to come. Attuned to diverse ethnographic sensoria and dissenting storytelling, we probe the political stakes of decolonizing archives and seek to nurture the traces of alternative visions that people mark out day-to-day.