The bi-weekly GIDEST seminar is devoted to discussion of a pre-circulated paper that addresses issues at the intersection of design, ethnography, and social thought. The paper can be downloaded from the GIDEST site for seminar participants to read in advance.

Hugh Raffles—director of GIDEST—is Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. His work is a sustained ethnographic exploration of relations between humans, animals, and things. His current project, Still Life, is an anthropology of stone that draws on fieldwork in China, Japan, Iceland, and Scotland to raise questions about the practice of substance, place, and temporality through close accounts of objects that range in scale from landscapes to monuments to pebbles. Hugh’s essays have appeared in a wide variety of venues, including Granta, Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, the New York Times, Cabinet, and Orion. He is the author, most recently, of Insectopedia (Pantheon, 2010), a New York Times Notable Book, and was a recipient of a 2010 Whiting Writers’ Award.

The event is sponsored by GIDEST, a Mellon-Foundation-supported initiative of the NSSR.

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