Fiona Murphy (Dublin City University) "LATE WORK: Imagination, Form and the Creative Life of Anthropology"
| Dates: | 5 October 2026 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Fiona Murphy |
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What might it mean to think of anthropology through lateness, as a way of staying with forms of thought that remain difficult, unresolved, excessive, or somehow out of time with the conventions through which knowledge becomes recognisable? Taking Edward Said’s writing on late style as its point of departure, this lecture brings lateness into conversation with the creative life of anthropology and with ethnographic practices that have long worked through image, sound, fiction, poetry, drawing, performance and collaborative making. For Said, late style names a relation to time shaped by contradiction, intransigence and a refusal of synthesis, where form acquires force through difficulty and coherence remains partial, provisional and unsettled. Moving between fragments of my own creative anthropological work and a selective genealogy of experimental anthropology, the lecture follows encounters between form, temporality and ethnographic attention, while looking sideways to artistic research, practice research and research-creation in neighbouring fields. Said’s lateness offers a language for work that remains open, resistant and unfinished, and for an anthropology willing to inhabit the interval between what can be grasped directly and what comes into view obliquely, imaginatively, through forms whose meanings continue to arrive after the argument has ended.
Dr Fiona Murphy is an anthropologist in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University.
Speaker
Fiona Murphy
Organisation: Dublin City University
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Boardroom, 2nd floor
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
