15 March 2021
In an invited presentation for the University College London Anthropology Seminar Series, Sahana Udupa will speak about the home/field conundrum and data relations. The talk will propose that digital data relations have decoded some of anthropology’s key methodological tropes such as the distinction between “home” and “the field”, and associated ideas of distance and nearness, now and after, us and them. With the “always-on” character of digital social networks now entrenching the fields of anthropology and other disciplines, the metaphorical distinction between home as a site of calm academic reflection as opposed to “field” as a site where “alterity is discovered” appears not only untenable but also unfamiliar (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). By inquiring into the partial dissolving of these distinctions, the talk explores what it means to do research when the “comfort” of the home—a sign of the privileged location of the colonizer—is productively disrupted by the turbulences of digital communication, especially when the “field” follows and haunts the researcher in digitally networked ways.  This talk builds on a chapter in “Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality, Dispossession and Rupture”, manuscript-in-making co-authored with Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan.