5th March: WEBINAR with LETIZIA BONANNO "Vignettes from Athens: on care, ethnography and drawing"
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
We are delighted to invite you to the tenth webinar of the series "Images, Ageing and Care," with Letizia Bonanno entitled Vignettes from Athens: on care, ethnography and drawing.
It will take place on March 5th (Wednesday) at 17:00 – 18:30 CET/ 16:00- 17:30 GMT/ 8:00 – 9:30 PST/ 11:00-12:30 EST, on Zoom. Link will be provided here closer to the event date.
ABOUT THE TALK
In this presentation, the speaker will share ethnographic vignettes from their research on reconfigurations of care in austerity-stricken Athens. She will discuss how drawing—rather than solely writing—fieldnotes sharpened their perception and enabled new forms of reflexivity, fostering a critical exploration of their subjectivity and positionality as an ethnographer.
Building on Lisa Stevenson’s (2014) argument that an “anthropology through the image” shifts attention to “imagistic rather than discursive modes of knowing,” the speaker will explore how visual approaches can process experiences that might otherwise remain unexamined in ethnography. Similarly, drawing on Michael Taussig’s (2011) claim that sketches offer a unique immediacy in ethnographic understanding, they will examine how drawing intervenes in the reckoning of reality in ways that writing and photography do not.
The talk will consider the forms of understanding that drawing—both as an act and a practice—can afford and the access it provides to alternative perspectives. The speaker will describe drawing as a medium for (self)invention, a way of visualizing possibilities, a method of deception, and a creative act that manipulates reality. Ultimately, they will illustrate how drawing can serve as a powerful visual strategy to unravel complexities and challenge preconceived notions of reality.
Arguing that drawing is more than a mere methodological tool, the speaker will highlight its potential to trigger memories, evoke subjective responses, uncover hidden details, and envision alternatives. As both a perceptive device and an ethnographic practice, drawing recenters anthropological inquiry beyond text. To explore its potential, the seminar will include practical exercises aimed at fostering reflexivity and positionality—crucial elements in any ethnographic endeavor..
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Letizia earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2019. Since then, she has held teaching and research positions at various British universities. For her doctoral and postdoctoral research projects, she conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Athens (Greece), focusing on the reconfigurations of modes and practices of care within grassroots, self-organised healthcare facilities.
She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, where she is developing her new research project "Steel Life" on industrial labour and post-industrial futures in Taranto (Italy) and Galați (Romania). For this project, she has been awarded the SEED Grant by the University of Vienna and the Post-PhD Research Grant by the Wenner Gren Foundation. Additionally, Letizia has actively participated in scholarly discussions on graphic anthropology, writings on its methodological and epistemological affordances. She is member of the editorial collective at Otherwise Magazine, where she serves as a visual co-editor, and she also co-edits the Anthropology of Work Review.
ABOUT THE WEBINAR SERIES ON IMAGES, AGEING AND CARE
This webinar series – free and open to all- gathers anthropologists and image-makers interested in exploring the ontological and epistemological connections between images, aging and care, treating the relationship and these phenomena as requiring and inviting interrogation. It is sponsored by the Images of Care Collective , the Association for Anthropology, Gerontology and the Life Course (AAGE) , EASA’s Age and Generations Network (AgeNet) and the Network for Visual Anthropology of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (VANEASA) . You can see our past webinars here .
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Looking forward to seeing you all there!
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