Anne Lavanchy

Short Biography

Anne Lavanchy holds a PhD in Anthropology and is currently Professor at the University of Applied Sciences, Geneva, Switzerland. She has conducted research in South America (Chile) and Europe (Switzerland and UK). Her main topics are racialization processes, indigenism, gender and intersectionality, with strong focus on political and legal anthropology, and on kinship. Her recent publications include “Dissonant alignments: The ethics and politics of researching state institutions” (Current Sociology N° 61/2014); “How does “race” matter in Switzerland?” 2014); Politics of Interculturality (edited with Fred Dervin and Anahy Gajardo, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011, La Fabrique de l'intégration - 2018, with T. Zittoun, P. Mahon, F. DiDonato, E. Levasseur).

Course "Diversities"

Date

December 21st, 2018 (afternoon)

Description

With the topic of “diversities”, the lecture addresses the plurality of human societies and aims at building a comprehensive approach of what means “human” in the expression “human-computer interaction”. The lecture is organized around three main questions:

• All human societies are known to be “plural”, “diverse”, “complex”, but what does this mean?
• Diversities encompasses a wide scope, but how do some markers become more relevant than other ones?
• As some socio-cultural markers are relevant in a given society, how do they affect experiences, identities, statuses, positioning?

These questions allow for an in-depth discussion of norms and differences by giving analytical tools to understand social relationship, and the relational character of diversities. They thus will lead to better understandings of power relationships. The categories of diversities that will explicitly be at the core of the lecture are class, nationality, gender, sexuality, age, race, (dis)ability.

During the afternoon, the students will have the opportunity to learn about diversities through a broad range of pedagogical tools: ex cathedra moments will alternate with collective and individual exercises allowing for the appropriation of the theoretical inputs, some of them based on audio-visual material.