Anthropological Encounters: A Roundtable with Ashawari Chaudhuri, Tanzeen Doha, and Tamta Khalvashi

A conversation about encounters, collaborations, and commitments that shape, motivate, and inspire anthropologists.

Co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities; Science and Technology Studies; and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.  Thank you.

Ashawari Chaudhuri is a visiting assistant professor in STS. Professor Chaudhuri's bio: I am an anthropologist of the environment, science, and medicine. My current book manuscript is a historically grounded ethnography of agricultural biotechnology in India. Along with asking what a good seed is for farmers and biotechnologists, I trace how knowledge about objects like genetically modified seeds is formed at intersections of practice, people, and time. My next project is an inquiry into the long relation between environmental heat and the body in South Asia. I find historically emerging meanings of words and concepts powerful. My teaching is often grounded in questions of ethics and creative negotiations with power around practices, technologies, and ideas that acquire palimpsests of meanings over time and across place.

Tanzeen Rashed Doha (PhD Anthropology, University of California, Davis; M.A. Philosophy, San Jose State University; M.A. Humanities, San Francisco State University) is a global racial justice postdoctoral fellow at the Einaudi Center. Doha is an anthropologist of Islam and secularism. His most recent research explores the relationship between race and religion as categories of modern secularity, specifically looking at questions concerning blackness and Islam. His current ethnographic work examines problems of betrayal, hypocrisy, false worship, disbelief, and other political and moral actions, and psycho-existential conditions, through an engagement with 20th century Islamist thought.

Tamta Khalvashi is a professor of Anthropology and the Head of the PhD Program of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University in Georgia. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Copenhagen University (2015). She has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships from Fulbright Program at New York University, Department of Anthropology (2016-2017) and Cornell University, the Society for the Humanities (2022-23). Her research interests are located in the overlap of experimental anthropology, the interdisciplinary field of affect theory, and cultural anthropology with a particular focus on postsocialist transformations, peripheral histories, marginal social identities, space and materiality. Her article Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia (Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018) has been awarded Honorary Mention from Soyuz (Postsocialist Cultural Studies Research Network of the American Anthropological Association) in the Article Price Annual Competition (2018). Currently, Khalvashi is finalizing two books Peripheral Shame: Affective City and Politics on the Margins of Georgia and A Sea of Transience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics on the Black Sea Coast (with Martin Demant Frederiksen).