*STS Circle at Harvard* [image: image.png] * * *Cristina Grasseni * *Radcliffe Institute * * * on
*Skilled Visions: Critical Ecologies of Belonging * Monday, November 28th 12:15-2:00 p.m. 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106 [image: image.png] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to sts <[email protected]>@hks.harvard.edu<[email protected]>by 5pm Wednesday, November 23rd. * * *Abstract:* This presentation will discuss the idea of applying the skilled visions approach to collective strategies of self-representation, by combining visual archive research with ethnographic sources in a project about looking. The goal is to develop a critical analysis of belonging, focusing on the visual apprenticeship of stereotypes as a naturalization of social classification. The thesis is that there is a complex and tacit competence at play in the mutual exercise of recognition, and that such “skilled vision” feeds on comparison by context and on cultural training rather than on a replicable repertoire of classificatory schemes. The business of “sorting faces” depends on where we draw the implicit boundaries of the groups we are identifying. Our own capacity for recognizing and ascribing membership of a certain group is a *skill* that is largely contextual, socially inculcated and publicly performed. The paper aims at connecting the previous work on Skilled Visions with this work-in-progress agenda, providing references from the relevant anthropological literature and discussing some recent ethnographic material. *Biography*: Cristina Grasseni is Assistant Professor of Social and Visual Anthropology at Bergamo University, Italy.Her books *Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards* (ed., Berghahn, Oxford, 2007) and *Developing Skill, Developing Vision: Practices of Locality at the Foot of the Alps* (Berghahn, Oxford, 2009) focus on visual apprenticeship as a form of relational and situated learning. Her fieldwork with dairy breeders examined how techno-scientific innovation and the reinvention of local foods as “heritage” interact with local communities of practice. Grasseni received a BA in philosophy, an MPhil in history and philosophy of science, and a PhD in social anthropology with visual media from the universities of Pavia, Cambridge, and Manchester, respectively. Cosponsored by the Harvard Film Study Center, this year Grasseni is developing a novel project at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, as David and Roberta Logie Fellow. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/ Follow us on Facebook: STS@Harvard <http://www.facebook.com/HarvardSTS>
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