Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series: Critical Play: Experiments in Student Activism and Research Online

Kristin Bright, Department of Anthropology, will give a talk as part of the 2020-21 Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series. She will be joined by student panelists Emma Bernstein, Amun Chaudhary, Claire Martens, and Katie van der Merwe of Middlebury College and Jessica Bytautus, Yasmine Hassen, Yiran Li, and Anneliese Mills of the University of Toronto.

The Body Online (TBO) is a digital ethnography lab dedicated to student and community engaged ethnographic research, design, and technology interface. In this panel, TBO students and faculty reflect on multimodal ethnography as a form of participatory research and critical play. Drawing from their work on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, panelists explore a range of expressions and relations of the body, from Asian American food bloggers to Afro-Latino BLM activists to YouTube vloggers and #WitchesofInstagram. What do these spaces produce or disrupt in terms of ideas normalizing and disruptive about the health, wellness, and identity of contemporary bodies, and what are some ways we can look to critical play as a form of release, community, and creativity in 2020-21.

Register in advance:

https://middlebury.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrcuGhrz4pHtbTbxtaq4SbRdtbTpXJYCCq