This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in-person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundts hus.
Abstract
In today’s world, projects serve as a pervasive format through which actors pursue goals and imagine new futures, from a family’s home renovation to intergovernmental efforts to produce vaccines amid global pandemic. Indeed, organizing work and problem solving through the project form—the very model of the project as a kind of purposive and transformative action—is now so commonsensical that its logic and utility are beyond question. In this presentation, I make a case for the analytical and theoretical productivity of treating the project form as an anthropological object of study. Given the contemporary ubiquity of projects, I ask: how does the project form shape both the social environments that anthropologists study and also the theoretical tools that anthropologists use? The answer that I construct draws on my ongoing historical research on seventeenth century England, a period that Daniel Defoe, writing in 1697, described as “A Projecting Age.” If “projects” are a highly naturalized category in the here-and-now, in the English world of the 1600s, projects and project makers (or “projectors”) were likely to scandalize. It is thus through a critical genealogy of project making that I interrogate presuppositions and affordances of the modern project form and their consequences for social analysis and social theory in the present.
Biography
Andrew Graan is an anthropologist specializing in culture and linguistics, with a focus on mass media, political language, performance, publics, publicity, project social life, nation branding, international intervention, and global governance within Macedonia, the Balkans, and the European Union. Source: University of Helsinki