About this Event
This workshop brings together two works in progress that examine how people make sense of power that does not explain itself, and what that work costs them. Across different sites, both papers treat legibility as something produced from below: assembled by those subject to unaccountable forms of governance, and never fully secured.
Clara Beccaro (Anthropology, The New School for Social Research) draws on ethnographic fieldwork with Les Mutilés Pour l'Exemple, a French collective of protesters maimed by police "non-lethal" weapons. She traces how the collective's name, which recalls First World War soldiers executed "to serve as an example," offers members a vocabulary for understanding their injuries. The name also shapes their claims to recognition and justice, which often have to pass through the state.
Ran Wang (Sociology and Communication, University of Pennsylvania) examines how Chinese fan content creators develop folk theories about opaque platform censorship. She argues that producing this knowledge is itself a form of interpretive labor, with physical, cognitive, and affective costs that reshape cultural production.
Read together, the papers ask what it takes to render violence and governance intelligible, who bears that burden, and what forms of agency, collectivity, and exhaustion emerge in the process.
Event venue & nearby stays
Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics, 133 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, United States
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