Presented By: Department of Anthropology
The Winter 2023 Roy A. Rappaport Lectures: "From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale"
"How Scale Broke the World" by Michael Lempert
The Department of Anthropology proudly presents
The Roy A. Rappaport Lectures
with Michael Lempert
"From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale"
Lecture Series Abstract:
What trouble can come from straining to know a thing closely, "microscopically"? These lectures explore the political, epistemological, and ontological problems caused by observational scale. Since the mid-twentieth century, US social scientists studying face-to-face interaction have been by turns fascinated and frustrated by the "small" scale of their object and the scrutiny it seemed to demand. They repurposed recording technologies to know social interaction--and often also to control it, where control meant bottom-up liberal social engineering, from shoring up democracy to streamlining hiring. Scale became politicized anew in the 70s as scholars of interaction faced questions that vexed social movement activists. How did the "interpersonal" relate to the "institutional," "micropolitics" to "mass" politics? Similar scalar contestation has roiled many fields and has shaped how disciplines understand their internal differences.
Lectures will be held at 3:00 p.m. in the Rackham Assembly Hall, 4th Floor, on
January 20, 2023 | How Scale Broke the World
February 10, 2023 | Talk Therapy and the Shrinking Science of Conversation
March 17, 2023 | Liberal Technologies of Social Interaction
April 14, 2023 | Micropolitics or Tempest in the Transcript?
Lectures will also be available via webinar:
https://umich.zoom.us/j/91475190155
Michael Lempert is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is an interdisciplinary linguistic anthropologist who writes widely on social interaction. He is the author of Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery (University of California Press, 2012; winner of 2013 Clifford Geertz Prize), coauthor (with Michael Silverstein) of Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency (Indiana University Press, 2012), and co-editor (with E. Summerson Carr) of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions in Social Life (University of California Press, 2016). He was formerly Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, visiting professor at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, residential fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford and fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. He is currently leading a team-based ethnography of "liberal listening," funded by The Wenner-Gren Foundation.
The Roy A. Rappaport Lectures
with Michael Lempert
"From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale"
Lecture Series Abstract:
What trouble can come from straining to know a thing closely, "microscopically"? These lectures explore the political, epistemological, and ontological problems caused by observational scale. Since the mid-twentieth century, US social scientists studying face-to-face interaction have been by turns fascinated and frustrated by the "small" scale of their object and the scrutiny it seemed to demand. They repurposed recording technologies to know social interaction--and often also to control it, where control meant bottom-up liberal social engineering, from shoring up democracy to streamlining hiring. Scale became politicized anew in the 70s as scholars of interaction faced questions that vexed social movement activists. How did the "interpersonal" relate to the "institutional," "micropolitics" to "mass" politics? Similar scalar contestation has roiled many fields and has shaped how disciplines understand their internal differences.
Lectures will be held at 3:00 p.m. in the Rackham Assembly Hall, 4th Floor, on
January 20, 2023 | How Scale Broke the World
February 10, 2023 | Talk Therapy and the Shrinking Science of Conversation
March 17, 2023 | Liberal Technologies of Social Interaction
April 14, 2023 | Micropolitics or Tempest in the Transcript?
Lectures will also be available via webinar:
https://umich.zoom.us/j/91475190155
Michael Lempert is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is an interdisciplinary linguistic anthropologist who writes widely on social interaction. He is the author of Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery (University of California Press, 2012; winner of 2013 Clifford Geertz Prize), coauthor (with Michael Silverstein) of Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency (Indiana University Press, 2012), and co-editor (with E. Summerson Carr) of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions in Social Life (University of California Press, 2016). He was formerly Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, visiting professor at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, residential fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford and fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. He is currently leading a team-based ethnography of "liberal listening," funded by The Wenner-Gren Foundation.
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