Archive of Staff Research Projects

Current Research

• The Glamorous Anthropologist: Fieldwork Methods with Children

Untainted by a fixed world view, open to new perspectives and ready to offer unique insights, children can be a great asset to ethnographic fieldwork given the right circumstances. As we move towards a brave new digital world, young people more than ever, need to create connections in the material world. My current work, “The Glamorous Anthropologist: fieldwork methods with children” discusses the social and cultural challenges in women’s professional lives as they embark on the co-journey of motherhood, and charts how working with children in various capacities has enhanced and frustrated my life as a visual, digital and museum anthropologist.

• Film Production: WE, THE ZEME

Producer and Director of a film about the First Zeme Olympics in Jalukie Town, Nagaland 10-17 December 2019.

• Project Seventy (2017-2020)

P.I. Dr. Alison Kahn

Seed Funding from Oxford Brookes University Research Grant

Click on the link to see a power point about the project

Madras Anglo-Indian Reunion 07-01-2019

Project Seventy is a work-in-progress interactive documentary that on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Indian independence will be constructed around seventy stories gathered from both Indian and British citizens, now mostly in their 80s and 90s, who lived through the Independence process. It will involve both sound and film recordings, and will build upon previous collaborative research with Catriona Child, daughter of Ursula Graham Bower, anthropologist, filmmaker and resistance fighter in the period of Japanese occupation of the Naga Hills in the 1940s. I have chosen the i-doc format for this project as it allows one to offer pathways through a series of non-linear connections between texts, stills and moving image. A central question will concern the nature of Anglo Indian identity, which is clearly far from uniform, as the population is now scattered across the globe.

 

• Captured by Women (2011) a film by Alison Kahn

Ursula Graham Bower with her Naga friends in Nagaland in the Late 1930s.

Funded by the National Digital Archive Fund, BFI

Part 1: https://vimeo.com/88989157

Part 2: https://vimeo.com/88989110

Part 3: https://vimeo.com/88989015

Part 4: https://vimeo.com/88988586

Lecture Notes: https://studylib.net/doc/7490900/alison-kahn-s-dmug-1-speaker-notes

Ursula Graham Bower -Pathways Through Her Archive (i-books Vols I and II)

Ursula Graham Bower- Pathways through her archive is a two-volumed ebook curated to present Bower’s life-story, films, photographs and object collections as an exhibition in a book. (available on i-tunes).

• Intrepid Women Exhibition
• Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

October 30th 2018 – March 11th 2019

Introductory Speaker at the Inaugural Event 30th November 2019

Click on the link to see a power point about Ursula Graham Bower in celebration of Women’s Day, 8th March 2019 presented at Dulwich Boys Prepatory School, London 

URSULA – DULWICH PREP 2SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH

Display case of some of the artifacts collected by Ursula Graham Bower in Nagaland dunring the 1930s and 1940s.