Andrew Graan (University of Helsinki)
| Dates: | 12 February 2024 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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Andrew Graan: A Groundwork for an Anthropology of Projects?
We live in a world saturated by projects: research projects, reform projects, entrepreneurial projects, projects of technological innovation, projects of scientific discovery, construction projects, projects of artistic creation, and so on.??Not surprisingly, then, anthropologists increasing take some project (for example, one of humanitarian relief, economic development, or environmental conservation) as a location for field research. In doing so, however, anthropologists tend to use research on projects as a means to examine and theorize some larger social formation, such as neoliberalism, technoscience, or democracy. Ironically, then, even within research situated within a project, the project form, that is, the very model of a project as a kind of purposive and transformative action, often remains obscure.??
In this talk, I make a case for the analytical and theoretical productivity of treating projects as an object of study.??Given the contemporary ubiquity of projects, I ask: how does the project form shape the social environments that anthropologists study as well as the theoretical tools that anthropologists use???The answer that I construct draws on research that I have conducted with project workers in North Macedonia but it focuses on my ongoing historical research on seventeenth century England and its culture of “projecting.”??If “projects” are a highly naturalized category in the here-and-now, in England of the 1600s, projects and project makers (or “projectors”) were likely to scandalize. It is thus through a critical genealogy that I interrogate presuppositions and affordances of the modern project form, ones that illuminate social analysis and social theory in the present.?
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