Workshops and conferences

Workshop "Re-assessing trauma and violence: Re-framing the bodily, the spoken and the self", June 2013

The workshop, held at Solstrand between 28 and 30 June 2013, invited researchers from around the globe discuss the ethnographic and comparative study of trauma. An overall aim of the workshopwas to contribute to current debates about the effects of violence and marginalisation on psychosocial health. Participants at the workshop included Rania Astrinaki, Maria Tapias, Nicholas Argenti, Antonius Robben, Inger Lise Teig, Thor Erik Sortland, Carol Kidron, Silje Vaage and Elias Alemu Bedasso, as well as the organisers (Vigdis Broch-Due, Margit Ystanes and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen).

Workshop "The Entangled Tensions of Intimacy, Trust and the Social", May 2012

Organised around the notion of intimacy and how this is widely associated with reciprocity and trust, the international workshop held in Bergen between 18 and 20 May 2012 explored theoretically and ethnographically these questions. The workshop gathered anthropologists and other scholars from around the world. More information about the workshop and its participants and theme may be found following this link.

Workshop and PhD course organized during the 2008 Bergen Summer Research School

Course 8: Global Reconfigurations of Poverty and the Public: Anthropological perspectives and ethnographic challenges

Course Leader:

• Vigdis Broch-Due, Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, UiB

Invited course leaders:

• Jean Comaroff, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

• Alice O'Connor , Associate Professor, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Short Course description:

“The Poor”, - a group figuring so prominently in contemporary media and the discourses of aid, human rights and global insecurity, in fact consist largely of the classical subjects of anthropology. While anthropologists continue to produce ethnography about the specificities of different peoples in impoverished settings, few address the problems that arise when all that cultural diversity is subsumed under the headings “Poverty” or “the Poor”. Anthropologists who do address questions of poverty are often sidelined in increasingly globalised policy debates that set quantitative “goals” and seek measurable formulae for attaining them.Why are anthropologists vocal on the plight of distinct peoples but silent or marginalized on the subject of the “the poor”? How do we as anthropologists research, theorize, let alone compose ethnographies, that focus on such a diffuse, standardised, globalised entity as “poverty” and “the Poor”? Should we? And what are the consequences of remaining on the sidelines? These urgent questions outline the analytical challenges of this PhD course. The approach will be historical as well as theoretical, drawing on the history of ideas, motives, and technologies for defining poverty and relating that history to contemporary anthropological dilemmas. The course will, for instance, critically examine the conundrums and ideas arising from the 19th century global reconfiguration of “poverty” and the “public” during the era of colonialism. It will look at encounters with immigrants and with colonized and domestic racial “others.” It will trace the rise of Cold War era development and modernization projects, and it will chart the consequences of the contemporary neo-liberal demotion of poverty from social phenomenon to personal defect. Understanding these transformations, and the new connections and configurations they have created around the world, is a challenge that has largely been ignored by anthropology to its cost. It is the challenge that this course takes up.