Ethnographic writing workshop, May 2016
Together with Dr. Eileen Moyer and Silke Hoppe, I organized an Ethnographic Writing Workshop which took place at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in May 2016 (well, most of the workshop actually took place in the wonderful Villa Mattern). Three outstanding ethnographers, Julie Livingston, Robert Desjarlais and Eileen Moyer, taught a group of 33 PhD students and UvA staff about the spectacle and the mundane in ethnography, the process of transforming field notes into exquisite prose, and about finding your voice as a writer. The week culminated in an event we called ‘ethnography slam,’ which turned out to be an intense morning of touching performances by the workshop participants. You can catch a glimpse of this occasion, described by Desjarlais as “transformative,” if you read the Allegra blog series, which I guest edited in October 2016:
Roundtable: The politics of publishing, June 2013
With Roberta Raffaetà, we organized a roundable on the politics of publishing at the joint conference of the EASA Medical Anthropology Network and the AAA Society of Medical Anthropologists in Tarragona, Spain. Nine speakers from around the world, representing various academic publishing outlets, discussed the importance of the impact factor and its influence on the quality of publications; the work of writing, peer-reviewing and editing; the reach of academic publications beyond academia; and on open access. The event was suppored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and we later also published a commentary, with a focus on the impact factor, in Anthropology & Medicine.
Creative writing
In 2005, I founded a cultural association 'Pero' with the goal of encouraging creative writing in the Slovenian language by using the virtual world as an important part of the process. From then to 2014, I organized online and offline events, including writing workshops, online literary evenings and online short story competitions. These events featured many Slovenian writers, including Andrej Blatnik, and poetry slam performers Robb Q. Telfer and Dan Sullivan of the Chicago Speak'Easy Poetry Ensemble. 'Web pen', the website which was the main platform of all this happening, received the EUROPRIX European Multimedia Quality Seal in 2008. The project was supported by the Slovenian Ministry of Culture and the City of Ljubljana.
Conference panels (selection)
2020 Digital technologies as co-creators of ‘field events’. Panel 60: Illuminating Futures of the Life Course through Visual
and Digital Media [Age and Generations Network]. EASA, Lisbon, Portugal, 22 July.
2019 Care Across Borders: Intergenerational Care through Digital Technologies in Transnational Family Life (Invited session of the Interest Group on Aging and the Life Course). Panel co-organizer (with Lynnette Arnold, UMass) and presenter, AAA Annual Meeting, Vancouver, Canada, November 22, 2019.
2016 What is the future of the field-site? Multi-sited and digital fieldwork. Panel co-organizer (with Fangfang Li, UvA), Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (ASA). Durham, July 4-7.
2013 Emergent Technologies, Future Publics. Panel co-organizer (with Jennifer Jo Thompson, University of Georgia; Christine Labuski, Virginia Tech; Allan Hanson, Kansas University), Annual Meeting of American Anthropological Association (AAA), Chicago, November 24.
2012 The (In)equalities of global health: E-health and Telemedicine through the Lens of Critical Medical Anthropology. Panel co-organizer (with Victor Braitberg, Univ. of Arizona). Annual Meeting of American Anthropological Association (AAA), San Francisco, November 18, 2012.
2011 Moving Beyond the Clinic: Tracing the Tidemarks of Technology in Medicine. Chair and panel co-organizer (with Bianca Brijnath, Monash Univ.) at AAA Annual meeting, Montreal, Canada, November 16.
Wenner-Gren Foundation symposium, March 2014
In 2014, I had the privilege to act as a conference monitor at the week-long symposium of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, titled The Death of the Secret: The Public and Private in Anthropology. The symposium took place at the magnificent Tivoli Palácio de Seteais in Sintra, Portugal, and was organized by Lenore Manderson, Mark Davis and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh. In 2015, a special issue The Life and Death of The Secret was published in Current Anthropology.
Doctoral thesis defense, February 2020
On 14 February 2020, I publicly defended my thesis, entitled Care Through Digital Connections: Enacting Elder Care Through Everyday Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Indian Transnational Families. The event took place in the Aula of the University of Amsterdam. I'm thankful to my superisors, especially Jeannette Pols and Kasturi Sen, for guidance and support on this journey!
Book launch: Viral Loads, UCL Press, 23 September 2021
I'm a co-author of a chapter in the book Viral Loads: Anthropologies of urgency in the time of COVID-19, edited by Lenore Manderson, Nancy J. Burke, and Ayo Wahlberg. The book was published by UCL Press in September 2021. The event was marked by a webinar, in which the co-editors and many of the authors talked about their work and about how COVID-19 has come to guide our lives so entirely.
See the webinar recording in five episodes, perfect for
teaching!
The book is available to download for free.
