Multimodal Anthropology:
Conversations with Prof Dr Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan
13.03.2023 11:00 – 12:30
We invite you for an interactive event with anthropologist Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan, who will be visiting the institute as part of the For Digital Dignity research program. In a free flowing Q&A, we will navigate aspects of multimodal anthropology, visual anthropology, media anthropology, ethnographic filmmaking, postcolonial and decolonial theory, among others.
Date: 13 March 2023, Monday
Time: 11.00-12.30
Venue: Room C 003 (ground floor), Oettingenstrasse 67
Based at the New York University, Dattatreyan has utilized collaborative, multimodal, and speculative approaches to research how media consumption, production, and circulation shape understandings of migration, gender, race, and urban space.
Dattatreyan is also the co-editor of the Multimodal Section of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. His first book, The Globally Familiar: Digital hip hop, masculinity and urban space in Delhi (Duke University Press, 2020), narrates how Delhi’s young working class and migrant men adopt hip hop’s globally circulating aesthetics— accessed through inexpensive smartphones and cheap internet connectivity that radically changed India’s media landscape in the early aughts— to productively re-fashion themselves and their city. Recently, Gabriel has become interested in the ways that corporate owned social media platforms have become a site for a rearticulation and disruption of enduring forms of coloniality. His second book, co-written with Sahana Udupa and titled Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media (NYU Press, forthcoming), explores these developments and their material consequences.
Prior to joining NYU, Dattatreyan was a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London where he co-directed the Centre for Visual Anthropology. He received a joint PhD in Anthropology and Education from the University of Pennsylvania.
Organizer: Prof Dr Sahana Udupa