The Material Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association (ASA) announces the following session at the Association’s Annual Meeting, “The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain In the Post-American Century,” 6-9 November 2014, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, CA USA Material Culture Caucus Session: Twenty Years, TwentyContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, UCL The latest issue of Hau has a symposium on Pierre Lemmonier’s latest book, Mundane Objects, with commentary by Bruno Latour, Chris Ballard, Tim Ingold, Paul Graves-Brown, Susanne Küchler and a response by Pierre Lemmonier. The series of comments essentially sum up a “state of the art” commentContinue Reading
15-17 September 2014 Emmanuel College Cambridge United Kingdom While some scholars have understood the activity of overseas Christian missionaries primarily in terms of a ‘Colonization of Consciousness’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 1992), a range of recent scholarship has also emphasised the profoundly material dimensions of much missionary activity. While religious conversionContinue Reading
Agbogbloshie: the world’s largest e-waste dump – in pictures | Environment | theguardian.com. Discarders of electronic goods expect them to be recycled properly. But almost all such devices contain toxic chemicals which, even if they are recyclable, make it expensive to do so. As a result, illegal dumpingContinue Reading
Call For Papers Thinking with Things, 1500-1940: An interdisciplinary material culture workshop for graduate students 25th April 2014 Deadline for abstract submission: 3rd March 2014 Keynote speaker: Dr Spike Bucklow, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge Closing Remarks: Dr Katy Barrett, Royal Museums, Greenwich Thinking with Things is a one-day workshop to beContinue Reading
Ohio State University, Department of History of Art Columbus, OH, April 11 – 12, 2014 Proposals due: January 17, 2014 (extended deadline) This conference seeks papers that address and examine the shifting trajectories and connected histories of individual objects and ideologies across time and space. Over the last decade, there has been increased interest inContinue Reading
The Anthropology department at UCL (University College London) is pleased to announce the Mary Douglas Awards, to students applying for Master’s programmes for entry in September 2013. These fee waivers, worth between £2000 -£ 4000 pounds will be awarded based on the merit of individual applications. There are three excitingContinue Reading
Rebecca Martinezs Photos of Lifelike Baby Dolls at NYTimes.com. Continue Reading
Haidy Geismar, UCL [Ed note: This is Material World Blog’s 1000’th post!] I’ve been thinking about novels that have something profound to contribute to Material Culture Studies having just read Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears which is a remarkable instantiation of the affective entanglement of techniques, materials, and emotion.Continue Reading
American Material Culture: Nineteenth-Century New York NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers At the Bard Graduate Center, New York City, July 1-26, 2013 Objects matter. Material culture scholars use artifactual evidence such as consumer goods, architecture, clothing, landscape, decorative arts, and many other types of material. The Bard Graduate Center will host a four-week NEH Summer InstituteContinue Reading
Pitt Rivers Museum & Keble College University of Oxford, United Kingdom 19th – 21st July 2013 Ethnographic museums have a long and distinguished history but they have also been the subject of criticism and complaint. During the second half of the twentieth century they therefore underwent something of an identityContinue Reading