Cathrine Bublatzky

Anagha Anil is currently a PhD scholar in Cultural Studies at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Karnataka, India. Her research focuses on the corpothetics of communist iconography in contemporary Kerala. Her research interests include visual studies, popular culture, film studies etc.

Agnieszka Balcerzak is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Cultural Analysis and European Ethnology at LMU Munich in Germany. She holds a Master’s degree in German Philology from UAM Poznań in Poland, a Master’s degree in Eastern European Studies and a PhD in European Ethnology from LMU Munich. Her main research areas focus on transformation processes in Eastern Europe, social movements and protest culture, women’s and gender studies, material and memory culture. She is a member of several scientific associations, including the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and the German Association for European Ethnology (DGV). Balcerzak’s latest publication is her PhD thesis on the polarised protest culture in post-communist Poland Zwischen Kreuz und Regenbogen. Eine Ethnografie der polnischen Protestkultur nach 1989 (Transcript 2020), awarded the PhD Prize of the Faculty for the Study of Culture at LMU Munich. Her current research project is a comparative ethnological exploration of (anti)feminist abortion discourses and aesthetics including research stays in Croatia, Germany, Poland and the USA.

Sindre Bangstad is a Norwegian social anthropologist, a Research Professor at KIFO in Oslo, Norway and an Associate Researcher at Arkivet in Kristiansand, Norway. Bangstad holds a PhD from Radboud University in the Netherlands (2007), and has undertaken ethnographic research on Muslims in Cape Town, South Africa, and Oslo, Norway. He has published eight books and edited volumes, including the 2014 Anders Breivik And The Rise of Islamophobia (Zed Books/Bloomsbury). In 2019, he was awarded the Anthropology In The Media Award (AIME) from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in recognition of his contributions towards the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and insight through the public media. Bangstad is an incoming Stanley Kelley Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Teaching of Anthropology at Princeton University for 2022-23.

Cathrine Bublatzky is Assistant Professor in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Center for Transcultural Studies at the Ruprecht Karls University Heidelberg and her research focuses on documentary and artistic photographers from Iran living in the European diaspora. She investigates how aesthetics and populisms construct a tense cultural-medial environment for the actors and what influence this has on the photographic works, their reception and thus on socio-political negotiation processes. 

Letícia Cesarino is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Florianópolis, Brazil, and holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled O Mundo do Avesso: Política e Verdade na Nova Fronteira Cibernética (The World Inside Out: Politics and Truth at the New Cybernetic Frontier), to be published by Editora UBU in Brazil. Her current Project, with the Digital Humanities Lab at the Federal University of Bahia (LABHD/UFBA), is a transdisciplinary, computational and qualitative exploration of far right networks on Brazilian Telegram.

Luciana Chamorro Elizondo is a political anthropologist who specializes in Central America and writes on revolution and its afterlives, populist politics, authoritarianism, affect and aesthetics. She is currently preparing a book manuscript titled Afterlives of Revolution: authoritarian populism and political passions in post-revolutionary Nicaragua which examines the aesthetic and affective economies that undergird the transformation of Sandinismo from a revolutionary to a populist authoritarian project. Luciana completed her PhD in Anthropology at Columbia University in 2020 and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. Prior to Michigan, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Mellon funded Sawyer Seminar on “Neoliberalism at the Neo- Populist Crossroads” at the University of Arizona. Her research has been supported by the Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship, The Josephine D. Karman Foundation, as well as the Social Science Research Council. See more at: https://lucianachamorro.org/ 

Robert Dörre is a media scholar with a focus on social media and digital culture. He studied media culture studies, film studies, and sociology in Mainz and Cologne and subsequently completed his PhD as part of the DFG-funded research training group “Documentary Practices. Excess and Privation” at the Ruhr University Bochum. The dissertation, which deals with audiovisual self-documentation in social media, has been awarded the Young Talent Award of the Büchner-Verlag. He is a research associate at the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr University in Bochum and a member of the BMBF-funded junior research group “Jihadism on the Internet” at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. He is currently researching the distribution, networking and archiving of illegal media content in social media.

Dr. Ruthie Ginsburg is a research fellow at the Minerva Center for Humanities, Tel-Aviv University. She teaches in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, and Ha’midrash-Art College, Beit-Berl. Ginsburg’s interdisciplinary research combines several areas of investigation, focusing in particular on the visual practices of human rights organizations working in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the practice of photographing by activits. The research on Palestinians’ participation in the  Israeli Camera Project of B’Tselem was funded by Fritz-Thyssen Foundation. The current research on Photography and Demonstration is funded by the Israel Science Foundation. Parts of the former research were published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Current Sociology and Theory, Culture, and Society journals. 

Stefan Groth is senior research fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research and Privatdozent at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, Zurich University. Currently, he is mainly working on political narratives and on the production of Europe in everyday contexts within and outside of Europe. 

Dr. Sa’eed F. Husaini is a post-doctoral researcher at the ARUA Center for Excellence for Urbanization and Habitable Cities, University of Lagos, Nigeria. His interests lie in the political economy of democratization and the roles and impacts of political ideas. He completed a doctorate in International Development at the University of Oxford.

Britta Ohm is a media anthropologist, an independent/precarious researcher in the German academic system and affiliated with the University of Bern, Switzerland. She worked in films and television in Germany and took up extensive fieldwork in the 1990s on the globalisation and commercialisation of the television landscapes in India and successively also in Turkey. Her PhD- thesis (The Televised Community: Culture, Politics and the Market of Visual Representation in India) dealt with the unfolding interplay between transnational TV corporations and Hindu nationalist politics in India. While pursuing comparative approaches to the entanglements of media and politics in India and Turkey, she has more recently focused on contingencies of communication and media use/non-use among Muslims and lower castes/Dalits in India. She is also finalising a book manuscript (WT: The Undisputed Land: The Gujarat Pogrom and the Mediatization of Democracy and Fascism in India). Her work has appeared in European Journal of Cultural Studies, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Media International Australia, Television & New Media, Media, Culture & Society, among others.

Simone Pfeifer is a social and cultural anthropologist with a focus on visual, digital and media anthropology. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Research Training Group “anschließen ausschließen: Cultural Dynamics Beyond Globalized Networks” at the University of Cologne. At the same time she is an associate senior research fellow in the research project “Jihadism on the Internet: Images and Videos, their Appropriation and Dissemination” at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. She recently published the monograph “Social Media im transnationalen Alltag” (2020, transcript Verlag, in German) based on her multi-sited fieldwork on social media practices and transnational everyday lives of Senegalese in Berlin and Dakar, the co-edited open access volume “Jihadi Audiovisuality and its Entanglements” (2021, Edinburgh University Press), and the co-curated digital web application reCLAIM (2021). In her postdoctoral research project she focuses on Muslim everyday life and digital media practices in Germany. Her work explores social, visual, and digital practices, using digital and experimental ethnography and digital curatorial strategies for the co-creation of knowledge.  

Robert Samet is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Union College in New York. His research focuses on media, law, security, and paradoxes of popular democracy in the Americas. Robert’s fieldwork alongside crime reporters in Caracas was the subject of an award-winning book, Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (Chicago 2019) and has featured in a number of scholarly journals including American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, and The Journal of Latin American Studies. Currently, he is pursuing a pair of projects that build on this research. The first uses the Venezuelan case to construct a theoretical approach to populism that combines the inductive methods of ethnography with conceptual tools from communications and cultural studies. The second looks at how fear of police impacts urban space in a way that exacerbates the problem of violent crime in cities like Caracas.   

Mona Schieren is Professor of Transcultural Art Histories at the University of the Arts, Bremen. She was guest professor at ZHdK Zürich, Università IUAV Venice, Universität Hamburg. Topics of her research include transcultural studies in modern and contemporary art, fiber art, theory and history of body practices and technologies, collectivity and forms of activism. Her book Transcultural Translation in the Oeuvre of Agnes Martin. The Construction of Asianistic Aesthetics in American Art after 1945, Munich 2016 (German) was recently awarded with the International Publication Prize of the Terra Foundation to be translated in English. She is the editor of RE: BUNKER. Erinnerungskulturen – Analogien – Technoide Mentalitäten, with Katrin v. Maltzahn, (ARGO 2019) and recently published „Einrichten in der Apokalypse. Prepper-Wohnfantasien in Outdoor-Magazinen“, in: Irene Nierhaus, Kathrin Heinz, Rosanna Umbach (Hg.): WohnSeiten: Ins Bild gesetzt und durchgeblättert. Zeigestrategien des Wohnens in Zeitschriften (Transcript 2021). 

Adrian Stoicescu teaches cultural anthropology and digital ethnography with the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Bucharest. He researches aspects of the networked self identity and mediated cultures of conflict. His latest contributions are on the emotion as conflict regulator and humour as an instrument to counteract or, conversely, to support issues on the political debate arena.  

Ioannis Stylianidis is pursuing a PhD at the Heidelberg Center for Jewish Studies Heidelberg and the University of Heidelberg. His doctoral theme deals with the representation of Jews in the Greek press by focusing on the study of antisemitism from a global perspective. For his doctoral studies, he received an LGF scholarship from the Graduate Academy of Heidelberg University. Ioannis holds two Master degrees in the fields of Theology and Culture (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and Jewish Civilization (Heidelberg Center for Jewish Studies). He has also studied Middle East Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and Modern Hebrew at the University of Haifa. Ioannis was a Humanity in Action Fellow in Warsaw, where he received education in Human Rights. He was involved in two group projects; Stolpersteine: Commemorating the Holocaust Victims of Veria, Greece and Local Narratives of Diversity in Action – Against Urban Antisemitism and Social Exclusion in Warsaw, Poland. 

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and her award-winning Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). She is currently completing an edited volume with Joseph Masco entitled Conspiracy/Theory (forthcoming Duke University Press) and beginning work on a volume on reimagining cosmopolitanism (with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth for Oxford University Press). She is also writing a monograph on violence.