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Seminar June 2nd, 2009, 17:00, CES Seminar Room Within the Research Group For Peace Studies
Many oppressed groups use art as a weapon of struggle against repressive regimes. What are the effects of this strategy? Art may help inform members of the public abroad about human rights violations; it may raise economic, diplomatic, and moral support for cells of resistance; and it can help rebuild civil society. At the same time, commercial forces may limit its power. Jacqueline Adams is a graduate of Cambridge University and the University of Essex. Her research examines dissident art, and the experiences and forms of resistance that shantytown women employ against repressive regimes, with particular attention to Pinochet's Chile. Her publications have explored the evolution of anti-dictatorship art, the paradoxical reactions of human rights activists to prodemocracy movement success, andreciprocity during ethnographic fieldwork. She worked as an assistant professor in Hong Kong, teaching research methods, theory, social movements, and gender, often with a focus on China and Asia. Most recently, as a scholar-in-residence at the University of California at Berkeley, she completed a book manuscript that explores the question of how dissident art forms emerge and are produced and distributed where freedom of speech is absent, and the contributions of such art to resistance. An article based on this work recently won an award from the Pacific Sociological Association. She is currently working on a book for Routledge, on the varied and gendered ways shantytown women experienced and resisted the Pinochet dictatorship, while serving as associate editor for The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. |