Anastasia (Eleana) Yalouri
Visiting Fellow, Spring 2024
- AffiliationIndependent ScholarResearch Project:Re-registering Aesthetics in the Research Praxis
Eleana Yalouri is an independent researcher with expertise in the fields of social anthropology, archaeology and material culture. Her teaching, research interests and her publications in periodicals and edited volumes include theories of Material Culture, cultural heritage and the politics of remembering and forgetting; intersections of anthropology and contemporary art, anthropology and archaeology. Her current research projects involve collaborations with visual artists and art historians exploring the borders between contemporary art and fields of inquiry dealing with the material culture of the past or present. In the past she has been an associate professor of social anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens, Greece, a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster, London, a lecturer at the Dept of Anthropology of University College London and a visiting lecturer at the University of Malta. She has a BA in Archaeology (University of Crete, Greece) an MPhil in Museum studies (University of Cambridge) and a PhD in Social Anthropology (University College London), while she undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Princeton, USA.
About the Research Project
Re-registering Aesthetics in the Research Praxis
After several years of engaging in practices borrowed from the arts both in my teaching and research, I embarked on the research project “Re-registering Aesthetics in the Research Praxis” to reflect on the challenges and the possibilities which arise when experimenting with art methods within established academic logocentric structures of learning and thinking. My central research question is why and how aesthetics matter not only as an object of research but mainly as part of a research methodology and problematization. Μy encounter with the wider scholarly community and the libraries of Princeton University provided valuable resources to explore the extent to which re-imagining the forms and aesthetics of research is not solely a matter of method, but also a fundamental matter of theory. I argue that it is a way of reflecting on and creatively challenging epistemologies, ontologies, ethics, and long-established canons. It allows for new forms of representation that remain true to research subjects’ experiences. It opens-up new sensory experiences and approaches to wider-ranging audiences.