Atmosphere, Ethics, and Public Demand: Book Talk & Roundtable
Join us to celebrate the book launch of Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace, (Timothy P.A. Cooper, 2024), winner of the 2022 Claremont Prize for the Study of Religion, awarded by the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University to support and promote cutting-edge scholarship by early career researchers.
Lahore’s Hall Road is the largest electronics market in Pakistan. Once the center of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now specializes in smartphones and accessories. For Hall Road’s traders, conflicts between the economic promises and the moral dangers of film loom large. To reconcile their secular trade with their responsibilities as devoted Muslims, they often look to adjudicate the good or bad moral “atmosphere” (mahaul) that can cling to film and media. Moral Atmospheres examines the diverse and coexisting moral atmospheres that surround media in Pakistan, tracing public understandings of ethical life and showing how they influence economic behavior. At once a vivid ethnography of a market street and a generative theorization of atmosphere, this book offers fresh perspectives on moral experience and the relationship between religion and media.
More information can be found here.
Timothy Cooper will be joined by Mike Degani, Garima Jaju, and Naveeda Khan (Online). The event will be chaired by Christina Woolner.
About the speakers
Timothy P. A. Cooper is an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
Mike Degani is Assistant Professor of Environmental Anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His research concerns the way infrastructures and the vital flows they channel animate or call into question social orders. He is the author of The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania (Duke University Press, 2022), an ethnography of a national power grid.
Garima Jaju is a Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is interested in the anthropological study of the economy, paying attention to the everyday experiences and expressions of labour, care, and politics, with a regional focus on post-liberalisation India.
Naveeda Khan is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (2012) River Life and the Upspring of Nature (2022) and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (2023) and editor of Beyond Crisis: Reevaluating Pakistan (2010).
Christina Woolner is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland (2023).
WHEN: Tuesday 7th May 2024
5.00PM - 6.00PM Roundtable and Q&A in Keynes Lecture Theatre
6.00PM - 7.00PM Drinks and Networking in Chetwynd Room
WHERE: King’s College, Cambridge
TICKETS: RSVP to tpc40@cam.ac.uk