4:05 p.m.
Dear all,
Welcome to next week’s IMS seminar, where we will be visited by Nina Grønlykke Mollerup
(associate professor of ethnology at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies at Saxo
Department, University of Copenhagen), who will give a presentation titled 'Well,
Assad is still there…' - Violence, temporality and images for elsewhen.
Abstract:
This presentation explores the temporality of images of violence through the prism of the
unprecedented visual documentation of the past decade's historic uprisings in Egypt
and Syria and the ensuing violence. This period could pertinently be termed, not only a
time of uprisings, but also a 'Time of the Image' (cf. Bryant and Knight 2019:30;
Hobbes 1962:100). The Time of the Image, capitalised, designates a period in history in
which images have been significant, but where images have also been 'a way of
organising time itself' (Bryant and Knight 2019:30). Engagements with images are
inherently a temporalizing practice, always entangled in other times. When an image is
taken, it already reaches into the past, carrying along a presence of a certain time and
place and through this preservation, it reaches into the future. As Roland Barthes (1981,
91-93) has argued, photographs violently force on us time's passage (cf. Bryant 2014,
692). But by bringing a moment forward and at times entailing re-membering the past, it
can also provide orientations towards the future. The presentation draws on ethnographic
fieldwork carried out over the past 13 years with Egyptian and Syrian activists,
photographers, journalists and archivists, and NGO-workers, who have been at the forefront
of visually documenting violence in the two countries and preserving this documentation.
For a while, these images were urgent. Shared immediately with fellow protesters as well
as on newspaper front-pages and in evening news across the globe, these images were
crucially invested in the politics of the present. While hope and urgent engagements in
the present turned to trauma and despair, these images are now part of compelling
archiving efforts, put together as a collective testament for other times. This
presentation focuses on how these images are revisited, reconstructed and employed for new
purposes, allowing for engagements with future-making.
Bio:
Nina Grønlykke Mollerup is associate professor of ethnology at the Centre for Advanced
Migration Studies at Saxo Department, University of Copenhagen. She was trained as an
anthropologist and holds a PhD in communication. She has worked extensively on practices
of visually documenting (mainly) state-sanctioned violence in relation to the uprisings
and ensuing violence in Egypt and Syria. She has published in journals like Social
Analysis and Journalism Practice and is chair of the EASA Media Anthropology Network
e-seminar series.
Read more about Nina Grønlykke Mollerup here:
https://saxo.ku.dk/ansatte/?pure=da/persons/249606
Nina Grønlykke Mollerup will be presenting online at this seminar, but for everyone else,
you can choose whether you want to attend from Dacke in Växjö or via zoom:
https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/940933326
The seminar is on the 6 Oct. from 10.15-12.00 CEST.
Best wishes,
Signe – on behalf of IMS
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IMS website:
https://lnu.se/en/research/searchresearch/linnaeus-university-centre-for-in…
Signe Kjaer Jensen / PhD
Senior Lecturer, Department of Film and Literature
Linnæus University
Department of Film and Literature
351 95 Växjö
Sweden
https://lnu.se/personal/signe.kjaerjensen/
signe.kjaerjensen at lnu.se<mailto:signe.kjaerjensen at lnu.se>