BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Sabre//Sabre VObject 4.5.7//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/Zurich X-LIC-LOCATION:Europe/Zurich TZURL:http://tzurl.org/zoneinfo/Europe/Zurich BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0200 TZNAME:CEST DTSTART:19810329T020000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=-1SU END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0200 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:CET DTSTART:19961027T030000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=10;BYDAY=-1SU END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:news140@zasb.unibas.ch DTSTAMP;TZID=Europe/Zurich:20180313T154823 DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Zurich:20180418T161500 SUMMARY:Valerie Hänsch: "The politics of counter- imaging in Northern Suda n: Crisis witnessing and the local resonance of global mass media" DESCRIPTION:Presentation by Dr. Valerie Hänsch\, Institute of Social and C ultural Anthropology\, LMU Munich \\r \\nBased on long-term ethnographic research the paper proposes to analyze genres of representations\, which I call here “crises witnessing”. I explore how communities aim to visually document\, witness and communica te a silenced history of forced displacement in a remote area along the N ile in Northern Sudan. With the construction of the Merowe Dam\, the Rive r Nile was impounded\, and thousands of people have been flooded out of t heir homes without warning and even before resettlement had taken place. In the absence of smartphones and the lack of cameras at the beginning of the flooding\, many inhabitants asked me to record the destruction\, the flight\, and the appeals to the international community. Based on the in ternalized perception that images are able to establish evidence\, the fo rcefully evicted inhabitants placed great hope in the power of images to prove human rights violations and to provide visual counter-evidence agai nst hegemonic discourses and promises of large infrastructures. In this paper\, I argue that the anthropologists’ video camera acts as an “ac tant” evoking specific genres of representations in moments of crisis t hat differ from everyday interactions with a video camera. These\, often performative\, genres of crises witnessing which aim at the production of visual evidence\, I contend\, resonate with globally distributed media r ealities and hence reproduce certain practices of communication that are stereotyped in the mass media. The local interactions with the camera as a stage\, that appropriate global regimes of representations and stage “witnesses” and produce “victims”\,  require reflections on the changing usages and ascribed qualities and meanings of images. X-ALT-DESC:

Presentation by Dr. Valerie Hänsch\, Institute of Social an d Cultural Anthropology\, LMU Munich

\nBased on long-term ethnographic research the paper proposes to ana lyze genres of representations\, which I call here “crises witnessing ”. I explore how communities aim to visually document\, witness and com municate a silenced history of forced displacement in a remote area along the Nile in Northern Sudan. With the construction of the Merowe Dam\, th e River Nile was impounded\, and thousands of people have been flooded ou t of their homes without warning and even before resettlement had taken p lace. In the absence of smartphones and the lack of cameras at the beginn ing of the flooding\, many inhabitants asked me to record the destruction \, the flight\, and the appeals to the international community. Based on the internalized perception that images are able to establish evidence\, the forcefully evicted inhabitants placed great hope in the power of imag es to prove human rights violations and to provide visual counter-evidenc e against hegemonic discourses and promises of large infrastructures. In this paper\, I argue that the anthropologists’ video camera acts as an “actant” evoking specific genres of representations in moments of cri sis that differ from everyday interactions with a video camera. These\, often performative\, genres of crises witnessing which aim at the product ion of visual evidence\, I contend\, resonate with globally distributed m edia realities and hence reproduce certain practices of communication tha t are stereotyped in the mass media. The local interactions with the came ra as a stage\, that appropriate global regimes of representations and st age “witnesses” and produce “victims”\,  \;require reflection s on the changing usages and ascribed qualities and meanings of images. DTEND;TZID=Europe/Zurich:20180418T174500 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR