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CANCELLED: REEEC Lecture: Andrew Gilbert, "Labors of Representation: A Bosnian Workers’ Movement and the Possibilities of Collaborative Graphic Ethnography"

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
REEEC
Location
101 International Studies Building (910 S. Fifth St., Champaign, IL 61820)
Date
Apr 8, 2020   4:00 pm  
Speaker
Andrew Gilbert (Senior Researcher at the Ethnography Lab at the University of Toronto, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Toronto’s Mississauga Campus)
Cost
Free and open to the public.
Contact
REEEC
E-Mail
reec@illinois.edu
Phone
217-333-1244
Views
44
Originating Calendar
Russian, E. European & Eurasian Center: Speakers

Professor Gilbert considers the affordances of the graphic or comics form of representation for projects of engaged or militant research, in which scholars aim to both investigate and contribute to social struggles. To do so, he will draw upon his ongoing collaborative efforts to produce an experimental graphic ethnography focused on the iconic struggle of the workers at the Dita detergent factory in the Bosnian city of Tuzla, which has become a kind of test-case for the possibilities and limits of a new labor politics in this post-socialist and post-war region. Workers have long recognized the politics of representation surrounding their struggle, and lamented that the existing formats available to them—mostly traditional mass news media—are limited in what they communicate.  Thus, like the workers and activists who worked with them, Professor Gilbert and his collaborators are interested not only in producing forms of knowledge that capture their struggle but which also might catalyze future action by opening up and giving flight to new horizons of political imagination.

Andrew Gilbert is Senior Researcher at the Ethnography Lab at the University of Toronto and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. He is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Bosnia and Herzegovina for nearly 20 years. His first research project focused on the politics of international intervention, as well as on the relationship between the historical imagination (how people conceive of history) and the political imagination (how people conceive what is politically possible). More recently, he has investigated the conditions that create openings and closures to political experimentation and social transformation, focusing on a series of worker-initiated protests and their aftermath in the late industrial Bosnian city of Tuzla. This has led to a growing research interest in collaboration and in the political and ethnographic potential of diverse media, such as the graphic form that is the focus of this project.

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