Research Projects
The Visuality of Memory
recent research projects on post-violence knowledge production in Portugal, Spain, and Latin AmericaRevolution & Return.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Worlds of Absence.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Collecting Ephemeral Art.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Revolution & Return.
While previous work has analyzed the mobilization of images after periods of dictatorial violence, my current research project, “Militant Imaginaries, Colonial Memories: The Visual and Material Traces of Revolution and Return in Contemporary Portugal” analyzes this phenomenon in a context where dictatorship and empire overlap. Supported by a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship, this project observes individual and collective engagements with images left by entangled historical events: the 1974 Carnation Revolution, the end of Portuguese empire and the return of colonial settlers to the metropole. Drawing on visual, ethnographic and historical methods, I am gathering empirical data regarding how film footage, photographs and documents from institutional and family archives are animated in order to produce new narratives about the past. Project outputs, including a multi-modal visual essay (Returning the Gaze, in production), a feature-length ethnographic film and a book manuscript, will conceptualize how knowledge about Portugal’s transition to democracy and, by extension, its relationship to the (de)colonizing project are produced and mediated. By juxtaposing at times contradictory, competing memories of revolution and return, I argue that an anthropological analysis of how the past is visually and materially narrated elucidates how images are mobilized to unsettle closed narratives regarding empire, decolonization and political transition. As Portugal nears the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution and as debates about race and belonging expand, this research opens future avenues of anthropological inquiry regarding memory, decolonizing approaches to museum collections and emergent visual heritage practices, applicable far beyond the Portuguese context.
Worlds of Absence.
My current book manuscript entitled Worlds of Absence: Spanish Documentary Practice and Forensic Science in Times of Crisis, analyzes the intersection of forensic science, modes of documentation, and image-making practices during the excavation of mass graves in Post-Franco Spain. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I track the historical, visual, and techno-scientific labor exerted to produce knowledge in a context marked by absence and disinformation. In doing so, I describe how Spaniards reimagine their relationship to the past by turning to forensic science and visual imaging technologies as tools for deciphering and making public the mechanics of dictatorial violence. I argue that in the context of legal amnesty, cultural amnesia, and economic austerity unique to contemporary Spain, forensic science operates in what I call the “subjunctive mood”: in the absence of courts equipped to manage the evidence exhumed and produced in these endeavors, forensic photographs and other evidentiary forms are made to be seen. In this process, collectivities validate alternative historical narratives and imagine new political futures through their engagements with visual evidence that circulates across multiple display contexts.
Collecting Ephemeral Art.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
