Professor Susan Ossman, Visiting Professor of Movements and Places at NYU Abu Dhabi, will give a public lecture on “Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork: A Memoir of Anthropology and Art.”

Ossman will expand on her recent book Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork, a Memoir of Anthropology and Art (Routledge 2021), focusing on the unfolding shape of several projects she developed over the past decade to elucidate how questions of media, modality and experimentation can be variously and strategically entangled. “On the Line” began with a painting and progressively brought anthropologists,
artists and public libraries together in Riverside California from 2012 to 2016. The Moving Matter Traveling Workshop (MMTW) began in 2013 with a concept and a text and has developed into a laboratory and
community of serial migrant artist/scholars. Ossman’s current work on “Gather Wood Gather Words” emerged from ethnographic research in Morocco and explores gesture as a unifying force for research across scholarship and the arts. Ossman focuses on the evolving configuration of these different programs as they cross disciplines and offer moments for individual and collaborative engagements that produce diverse outcomes in multiple media for diverse publics, leading to a broader discussion of the potential of anthropological field design as a leading practice for current work in experimental humanities and arts.

Monday, April 8 at 4:10 pm in 2203 Social Sciences and Humanities Building

This lecture is part of the Anthropology Sociocultural Colloquium.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Art and Art History, Cinema and Digital Media, Performance Studies, Cultural Studies.