The Max Planck-Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change invites applications from PhD students in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge to apply for a grant to host a seminar or workshop during Lent Term 2022, on a theme related to the work of the Max-Cam Centre.

This scheme is designed to enable graduate students to present and discuss their research with peers. Applicants are encouraged (but not required)
to include in their plans participants from across academic disciplines (e.g. history, economics, sociology, philosophy, theology, etc.) and speakers (or discussants) from other universities.

Terms of the application:

• Groups of two or more PhD students may apply.

• The theme of the seminar or workshop should fall within the remit of the Max-Cam Centre (see our website for details).

• The seminar or workshop should be a one-day event; please propose a possible date. 

Applicants should send:

• a 500 word thematic description

• a one-page draft timetable

• a provisional list of participants

In addition, applicants should ask their supervisors to write a brief letter of support to the committee.

Please send applications to the Max-Cam administrator, Ms Connie Tang (pyt20@cam.ac.uk). Applications (including supervisors’ letter of support) must be received by noon, Friday 12th November 2021, for events to take place between January and April 2022.

Enquiries about the scheme may be addressed to the Max-Cam co-ordinator, Dr Johannes Lenhard (jfl37@cam.ac.uk).

1. Dr Kelly Fagan Robinson, Leverhulme Early Career and Isaac Newton Trust Fellowship 

Kelly Fagan Robinson is Medical Anthropology Subject Manager and Lecturer on the Health, Medicine and Society MPhil. She earned her PhD from UCL with her (ESRC/AHRC heritage and public policy) research, Looking to Listen, a project which investigated deaf people’s visual-tactile communication resources, and institutional reception of or resistance to deaf-centred practices. This academic year, Robinson will commence a three-year Leverhulme Early Career and Isaac Newton Trust Fellowship project, ‘Communication Faultlines on the Frontlines’. This research will question: what are the limits of communication? by examining transformations in the ways that British people define ‘support’. Concepts of support have shifted significantly in recent years, particularly as Brexit-based political polarity has foregrounded the size and cost of the Social State, and as the UK’s resources have strained under austerity measures, digitisation, the advent of algorithmically-determined eligibility, and COVID19. Robinson’s research aims to deconstruct the constitutive layers that build individual interpretations and articulations of the value of support, along with the implications associated with seeking public resources, more specifically the documented increases in psychic crisis, self-harm, and suicide due to loss of personal dignity. This places Robinson’s research at the crossroads of medical anthropology, semiotics, social policy and ethics, offering a distinct but complementary contribution to research currently being conducted within Max Cam.

2. Dr Juan del Nido, Philomathia ‘Ethics of Technology’ three year postdoc 

Based on an ethnographic analysis of how a Buenos Aires’ NGO promotes and brokers the incorporation of Blockchain among public and private stakeholders, my project will examine how technology mediates the imagination of a horizon beyond ethics. Haunted by confirmed or presumed corruption, indolence and what they see as the moral deterioration of the public sphere, certain middle class Argentines see in Blockchain’s technical properties, processes and code the means not to flesh out or embody the ethical but to outright foreclose it, and deviations thereof, as a subject of concern.

Building on recent developments in the anthropology of ethics, political theory and economic reasoning I will be looking at the following questions: What kind of order could lie beyond the ethical? How would it reproduce and sustain itself? How would economic, moral and political categories like efficiency, transparency, equality and freedom, and longstanding cultural patterns like the public vs. private divide, exist in such an order? How do technological affordances mobilize (post-)ethical imaginations?

3. Dr Timothy P.A. Cooper, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow

Project title: Recitation on the Threshold of Song: Media and Moral Atmosphere in Pakistan

Dr Timothy Cooper obtained his PhD in Anthropology at University College London. Mentored by Professor Joel Robbins, his Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge builds on recently completed doctoral research on the dynamics of technical mediation among traders in a large electronics market in the Pakistani city of Lahore. In these contexts,  giving a name to the atmospheric conditions of moral experience helps individuals and collectives make sense of the difficult relationship between technology, piety, and public affect. Otherwise comprised of publication projects, stakeholder engagement, and impact activities, further research conducted as part of the fellowship will build on the above to explore the role thresholds of permissibility play in the circulation of devotional recordings among the minority Shi’a Muslim community in Pakistani Punjab. The research examines the controversies surrounding a new genre of popular recitation known as qasida fouq or qasida bhatti, which has achieved fame and notoriety for the ways in which it continually tests the ethical threshold between religious recitation and secular song.

4. Dr Daniel White, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Daniel White examines the mutual production of emotion, politics and emerging media technologies, with geographic concentrations on Japan and the UK. Currently he is investigating practices of emotion modeling in the development of affect-sensitive software, social robots and artificial emotional intelligence. Through an ongoing project called Model Emotion, he works across disciplines with anthropologists, psychologists, computer scientists and robotics engineers to trace how theoretical models of emotion are built into machines with the capacity to evoke, read or even in a philosophical sense ‘have’ emotion in ways that foster care and wellbeing. Comparing how this process unfolds differently in places like Japan and the UK, he explores how designing robots with emotional intelligence is shifting research agendas within the psychological science of emotion, as well as transforming people’s capacities to relate affectively and ethically with emerging forms of artificial life.

The one-day seminar Self-Fashioning in Flux: The Entanglement of Interiorities with Political and Economic Changes, organised by Ori Mautner and Liangliang Zhang, took place on 10 March 2020 at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Here Ori and Liangliang reflect on the event.

“This one-day seminar examined self-formation projects in relation to contemporary socio-political transformations by engaging researchers working in diverse contexts: Alaska, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, El Salvador, United Kingdom, and various parts of the PRC. We brought together presenters and discussants from the disciplines of Education, Sociology and Social Anthropology, who represented Cambridge and UCL. Through three panels and a keynote presentation by Dr Joanna Cook (UCL), we collaboratively investigated the ways in which ethical subjectivities are implicated in 

• Migration and ongoing processes of managing unstable relationships between new and old homes, locality and translocality, hope and nostalgia in Alaska, Hong Kong and El Salvador
• Self-fashioning endeavours and their encompassment in projects aimed at religious revival and/or national-individual realisation in Israel and in the PRC
• The deployment of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (MCBT) as an authoritative pathway for mental health upkeep in the UK, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses’ tendentious choice of rejecting life-saving blood transfusion in Kyrgyzstan 
• The challenging transduction of mindfulness practice into an object of evidence-based policy making in the UK

Through this interdisciplinary collaborative exercise, we attempted to re-centre the self and its attendant ethopoetic processes in the investigation of larger economic and political conditions. We extricated the ways in which micropolitical projects of self-making are profoundly informed by grassroots actors’ conceptions of what constitutes a worthy and meaningful collective life. Thus, we demonstrated the ways in which ethics inhere in fundamental societal processes and afford unique pathways towards understanding the rapid transformations that confront multifarious life-worlds.

We experienced the atmosphere at the seminar to be friendlyyet intellectually stimulating. This, we believe, found expression in the respondents’ constructive and critical engagement with the richness of the ethnographic materials presented by the speakers, as well as in the joint reflection on these materials’ broader theoretical and comparative significance. We would like to thank the Max-Cam Centre for providing us the wonderful opportunity to develop our thinking on the seminar’s themes, and particularly to Connie Tang and Johannes Lenhard for their help in the organization. We wish to thank also King’s College for making available to us the College’s excellent facilities.”

List of Participants:

Speakers:

Mikkel Kenni Bruun – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Danny Cardoza – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Ori Mautner – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Claire Moll Namas – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Yifan Sun – Department of Education, University of Cambridge

Lee-Shan Tse – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Elizabeth Ann Walsh – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Liangliang Zhang – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Discussants:

Dr Joanna Cook – Department of Anthropology, University College London

Dr Asiya Islam – Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge

Dr Patrick McKearney – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Dr Kelly Robinson – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Dr Rachel Smith – Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge