Webinar 1: Knowledge through gossip, rumours, suspicions &

Emotional and embodied knowledge and responses

Watch the recording online.

Chaired by Dr Anselma Gallinat  (Newcastle University, UK) 

Salman Khokhar (Newcastle University, UK)

Securitisation from Town to City for Ahmadi Muslims

This paper considers how secrecy has underpinned social mobility of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan.

Dr Mark Fenemore (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

Subverting the panopticon and outwitting the all-hearing ear: telephonic ‘catfishing’ of the enemy in cold-war Berlin 

Surveillance and the panopticon are supposed to be disarming, but what happens if a rogue agent reverses the direction? A catfish avant la lettre, Wolfgang insouciantly toyed with the Stalinist (secret) police.

Dr Rosalie Stolz (University of Heidelberg, Germany)

(Un)knowing spirits: Secrecy, stories, and the pitfalls of knowing in upland, northern Laos 

This paper discusses spirits in northern Laos as powerful others, whose potential is always surrounded by secrecy and subject to vibrant rumours.

Chaired by Dr Joanne Sayner (Newcastle University, UK)

Pradipa Rasidi (Engage Media)

“They are Turning Us to Indonistan!” Curating Twitter Secrets and Disinformation in a Public of Distrust 

This paper examines the Jakarta 2017 election in Indonesia during which rumours of a threat of the Islamic caliphate were circulated. This was partly due to the nature of the ‘public secret’ in Indonesian political culture, in which an authoritarian past has turned citizens to hyperhermeneuticism.

Dr Annerienke Fioole (Independent Scholar)

Discretion and Doubt: Alternating modes of moulding Uncertain Truths 

This paper elucidates how rural Moroccans negotiate out-of-wedlock affairs through collectively creating secrets by alternating discreet and doubtful stances in their everyday interactions.

Dr Gareth Breen  (University College London, UK)

‘We’ve found the secret of living’: Power, Presence and Secrecy in a Global Christian Following 

Relishing the secrecy of its knowledge from powerful outsiders, the global following of the Watchman Nee cultivates secrecy as an embodied experience.

Webinar 2: Theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches to secrecy and knowledge

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Chaired by Prof Sara Jones (University of Birmingham, UK)

Dr Vita Peacock (Kings College London, UK)

Digital Initiation Rites

This talk examines the logic of exposure of hidden information that bound adherents to the UK 'Anonymous' movement in the 2010s. Drawing on studies of initation and secret societies, it develops the concept of digital initiation to theorise the role of secret knowledge in the forms of politicisation now occurring widely online.

Dr Erol Saglam (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)

Knowing the Secret: Conspiratorial Socialities, Politicization, & Masculinities  

This paper explores how conspiracy theories deploy secrecy as one of the central themes and how knowing a secret opens up multiple occasions to fashion one’s political subjectivity in affective and corporeal ways. 

Aoife Ni Chroidheain (University of Oxford, UK)

‘ariadnefabrik’: Exploring the Relationship between Stasi and ‘Samizdat’ 

Using material culture as a theoretical framework, my talk presents ‘ariadnefabrik’ as a controversial case study of the relationship between the Prenzlauer Berg scene and the East German State Security.

Webinar 3: Surveillance in relation to secrecy, privacy and knowledge

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Chaired by Dr Betiel Wasihun (University of Birmingham, UK) 

Dr Annie Ring (University College London, UK)

How to disappear: short films on escaping surveillance after the Internet

This paper addresses the way contemporary short films are trying to escape digital surveillance but struggling to find a space of privacy (e.g. How Not To Be Seen by the artist Hito Steyerl).

Prof Matthew Potolsky (University of Utah, USA)

The Aesthetics of Secrecy

This paper argues for attending to the aesthetic quality of secrets, which teaches us things beyond ethical and epistemological qualities.

Dr Cristina Plămădeală (McGill University, Toronto, Canada/Loughborough University, UK)

Recruitment of Securitate Informers in Communist Romania: psuchegraphies in Securitate files 

This paper examines the concept of psuchegraphy in relation to the study of Securitate archives and to the recruitment methods of Securitate informers. 

Webinar 4: Epistemological and methodological challenges

Watch a recording of this session online.

Chaired by Dr Grit Wesser (Newcastle University, UK) 

Prof Mirco Göpfert (Goethe University, Frankfurt a. M., Germany)

Secrecy and the ethnographer’s will to know

Starting from my own obsession with closed doors and what was going on behind them during fieldwork, I’ll offer reflections about the practical, not just theoretical, problem of knowledge in anthropology.

Suzanne Kennedy (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada)

PostSecret.com: A window into the unknowable and unspeakable knowledge in families 

Engaging notions of temporality to explore meaning making when people encounter unknowable and unspeakable family knowledge.

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima (University of Manchester, UK)

Humanitarian secrets: negotiating disclosure and the ethics of ethnographic writing 

This paper explores the practicalities and ethics of disclosing humanitarian secrets through research on the International Committee of the Red Cross.