Susan Lepselter, PhD., Indiana University Bloomington
March 22, 2018
5 p.m.
Belk Library and Information Commons, Room 114
From the “outer space” of planetary science to the human body occupying its own “outer spaces” in pathologized and transgressive ways, Dr. Susan Lepselter’s presentation will explore the imaginaries of young women who use Tumblr to perform different abilities with embodied orientation, sensory experience and spatial organization.
Lepselter’s research explores the poetics of both popular media and everyday life in contemporary American culture, focusing particularly on captivity narratives, themes of gender and class, and discourses of memory and trauma in American social life.
In 2017, Lepselter was awarded the Gregory Bateson Book Prize, a highly regarded prize that recognizes extraordinary and innovative writing that does work across disciplinary boundaries, while remaining grounded in rigorous ethnography.
The Society for Cultural Anthropology describes Lepselter’s work as follows:
“In writing that hews closely to the form of her subjects’ language and thought, Lepselter evokes the affectively charged sediment of stories and memories whose persuasiveness rests not on logical coherence but on a set of potent resonances across seemingly disparate domain of experience and action. Enfolding readers in a dense tissue of narrative fragments, she conjures a structure of feeling in which people experience a sense of confinement and a longing for release. Class, gender, race and regional history indelibly reflect this structure of feeling. Yet in treating stories as mutating communal property that is continuously claimed and repurposed through creative acts of telling, Lepselter refuses to pin narratives reductively to singular subject positions or fixed social locations that would definitely author or explain them.” Strassler, Karen.
“Susan Lepselter Awarded the 2017 Gregory Bateson Prize,” Cultural Anthropology (2017), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1195-susan-lepselter-awarded-the-2017-bateson-prize (accessed March 5, 2018).
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About the Department of Anthropology
The Department of Anthropology offers a comparative and holistic approach to the study of the human experience. The anthropological perspective provides a broad understanding of the origins as well as the meaning of physical and cultural diversity in the world — past, present and future. Learn more at https://anthro.appstate.edu.
Susan Lepselter, PhD., Indiana University Bloomington
Susan Lepselter, PhD., Indiana University Bloomington