This research cluster draws together individual members of the group working on the three separate, but deeply inter-related themes of performance, politics and violence, enabling cross-cutting discussions that enrich the content of all our work. Ongoing field-based research by the group across Asia, Africa and Europe explores these themes in multiple forms and at various scales: from symbolic, mystical and structural violence to genocide and other forms of physical violence, and from far-reaching State and international political control to the micro-politics of everyday life, as well as the inter-connections between them.
Our Aims:
- To develop – through an engagement with one another’s research – new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of performance, politics and violence
- To trace and make manifest across our research the connections between everyday performativity and ritual or institutional performance in the analysis of politics and violence
- To explore collectively the implications of violence in its various forms and scales – from overt state violence to more subtle, structural forms of violence, complicity and resistance – for the lives of those with whom we conduct research
- To engage in comparative analysis of concepts and experiences of performance, politics and violence in different ethnographic context
- To utilise our differing perspectives on performance, violence and politics to throw new light on other broad departmental research foci, such as development, public health and the anthropology of childhood and youth
Get in touch: Dr Nicolas Argenti