Past event
Saints Talk: Dr Stavroula Pipyrou Too Close, Too Distant: The Perpetual Transformation of the Political
Development is delighted to invite you to the next instalment in our Saints Talk series from Dr Stavroula Pipyrou, ‘Too Close, Too Distant: The Perpetual Transformation of the Political' on Microsoft Teams.
This talk addresses how people relate to the category “minority” through the navigation of multiple sources of knowledge and fluid proximities. It asks what happens when there is too much proximity, when connection is unwanted or threatening, or when institutions operate through categories in search of security and systems of governance. There is often a grind between philosophical ideals of fluid identities and the ethnographic reality: categories of ordering and sorting, such as “minority”, “refugee” and “ethnicity”, carry indexes of power and serve disciplinary functions. In conversation with Sigmund Freud's ‘narcissism of minor differences' and Michel Serres' ideas about categories of belonging, the talk explores how much connection is desirable and where categorization becomes an inevitable tool of governance for sorting and sanitizing difference.
Stavroula will also present ongoing work in the Centre for Minorities Research and their vision for the future.
Stavroula is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Minorities Research. She works on minority politics, displacement, governance, and the Cold War. Publications include The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and she is working on a new monograph Lurking Cold War (Berghahn, forthcoming). Stavroula is a Fellow of the Young Academy of Scotland and editor of the interdisciplinary book series Routledge Advances in Minority Studies. Stavroula regularly writes for the Royal Opera House.