More-than-human Anthropologies: Part 2

Thank you for patience - we had to postpone as there was a sickness in the team during the awful flu season! We hope you can make it to the new date!

More-than-human Anthropologies: Part 2 continues ANSA’s seminar series with a focus on sensory and multimodal methods in anthropological research. Featuring short provocations from Yunjia Zhang and Giti Datt, the seminar moves between snowy tourist landscapes in rural China and the life cycle of attar perfume oil in north India to explore how images, infrastructures, scent, and materials shape more-than-human relations, and where these methods raise new questions rather than clear answers. The session centres open, question-led discussion and invites participants to think together through uncertainty, experimentation, and work in progress.

Our wonderful speakers

1. Yunjia Zhang. La Trobe University. Yunjia’s research explores how visual methods open new ways of engaging the more-than-human world through image-to-image, image-to-text, and image-to-landscape relations. These approaches foreground objects and environments as active participants while raising political and interpretive challenges around representation and meaning. For this very panel, Yunjia shares her engagement with the snow, in response to more-than-human temporalities and agencies.

2. Giti Datt. Australian National University. Giti’s research focuses on the life cycle of attar in north India - a particular kind of perfume oil distilled from natural aromatics, using historic techniques. She is experimenting with multimodal methods and more-than-human perspectives to develop a broader, deeper understanding of attar, as well as our experience of it.