Friends, colleagues, please join us for the July instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University, visiting scholar, University of Melbourne). The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

Date: Thursday 20th July
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also: Burwood C2.05; Melbourne Corporate Center, enquire at desk; VMP 39384)

The Power of Illumination

As Sean Cubitt asserts, illumination is the focus of ‘an evolving set of meanings negotiated between scientists, engineers, manufacturers, marketers, architects, interior decorators, urbanists and their business and domestic customers’ (2013: 312) as cultural and historical contexts change, mutate and adapt. In considering how practices of illumination are entangled with power, this seminar draws on conceptions  advanced by Foucault, Marx, Bourdieu and Rancière. Firstly, it will explore how lighting is used in the surveillance, policing and control of bodies. Secondly, it looks at how lighting inscribes inequalities across space. Thirdly, it discusses how cultural capital is mobilized to assert judgements around aesthetic value and taste. And fourthly, it examines how the normative arrangements through which we apprehend everyday illuminated space are forged by those who have the power to distribute the sensible.