Pop Theory Pop Theory

How does Staten Island adopt the same nickname as a Buddhist monastery in China? Well, action movies, convoluted distribution schemes and a lot of relating to other POC groups.  For a while there Kung Fu movies took over the world. But their audiences were very different. From the Wu-Tang Clan to the young gangs of Abidjan, it seems that everyone could somehow relate to these heroes from abroad. 

Hosted by two new Kung Fu fans Michelle Olguin and Arveen Sodhi, 

with a spectacular interview with Alessandro Jedlowski, media anthropologist and the coordinator of the “Chaire Diasporas Africaines” of the Bordeaux Institute of Political Sciences, and proof that media anthropology is just the best topic out there. 

We have so many adaptations nowadays we can hardly tell where one thing came from and how it was transformed. But if you'd asked me which movie they'd be making into a musical next, I definitely wouldn't have gone for an auteur Israeli movie about people finding connexions in the middle of the desert. Yet, that's exactly what The Band's Visit did!

But for some reason it works, well when I say, for some reason, obviously I'm gonna give you all the reasons, if you just listen. 

For our very first episode in this podcast, we will be discussing *drum roll* images, or pictures, or whatever you want to call them. 

We see them every day, they scroll past us on screens, they take up most of the free spaces around us but do you ever really notice them? 

Well, we do, and then we analyze them, and then we overanalyze and introduce jargon to make us feel better about ourselves as serious scholars. 

Joining us today as Co-hosts we have:

- Paras Arora: Second year Master's candidate and Hans Wilsdorf scholar at the Department of Anthropology & Sociology. Paras has wide-ranging research interests and has most recently conducted ethnographic fieldwork in New Delhi, India around questions of gender, disability and care work. In the past, he has presented his research on Delhi-based feminist, collectives and archivists' practices of image production and circulation at the Universities of Cambridge, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Singapore, and Delhi. As the UNESCO Aladdin Youth Ambassador for Peace and Intercultural Dialogue, Paras has also worked closely on sexuality, international migration, and religion.

- Samhita Bharadwaj: First Year Masters Student at IHEID in MIA, specializing in Environments and Sustainability and a minor in Global Health. A background in Psychology in her Bachelors, she's aware of the use of images and visual media on cognition and perception.





Music: Tu connais Babar by Mocke