Dr Silvia Posocco

Overview

Biography

I am a social anthropologist with interdisciplinary research interests in gender and sexuality studies and violence, conflict and genocide studies. I have studied ethnographically insurgent movements in Guatemala, the archives of transnational adoption across sites and temporalities, and most recently, forensic archives, bioinformation and cultures of evidence.  

Highlights

• Queering Knowledge: Analytics, Devices and Investments after Marilyn Strathern is awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize 2020

Office hours

By appointment.

Qualifications

• PhD Anthropology , University of London (London School of Economics Gender Institute)
• MSc Gender Relations , London School of Economics, University of London
• BA Social Anthropology/Art-Archaeology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Web profiles

• Silvia Posocco on Wordpress
• Silvia Posocco on Twitter

Administrative responsibilities

• Director of Postgraduate Research
• Equality and Diversity Lead, Psychosocial Studies
• Internationalization Lead, Psychosocial Studies

Professional activities

Co-Chair, European Network for Queer Anthropology (ENQA, part of EASA)

Co-editor, Theorizing Ethnography Book Series, Routledge Anthropology

Editorial Board Member, Feminist Anthropology

Editorial Board Member, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

Associate Editor, Quaderns de Psicologia

Advisory Board Member, Association for Research on Childhood and Families (Afin)

Advisory Board Member, Loving Attachment: Regulating Danish Love Migration (2017-2021)

Associate Fellow, Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters, SHAME

Professional memberships

• American Anthropological Association (AAA)

• Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth (ASA)

• European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)

• Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

• Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)

• Guatemala Scholars Network (GSN)

ORCID

0000-0002-2075-1480

Research

Research interests

• Social Anthropology, Social Theory and Cultural Analysis
• Transnational Gender and Sexuality Studies and Theories
• Violence, Conflict and Genocide
• Anthropology of the State and the Law
• Transnational Adoption Circuits, Documents and Archives
• Forensic Archives, Biorepositories and Bioinformation
• Relations, Subjectivities, Socialities
• Ethnography
• Petén, Guatemala; Tabasco, Quintana Roo, Mexico; London, UK.

Research overview

My background is in social anthropology and gender studies. My work to date has focused on a profoundly theoretically inflected ethnographic approach to the study of relations and relational categories through research on socially, culturally and historically situated practices.

My first research monograph on histories of violence and socialities of secrecy in Petén, northern Guatemala, was published in January 2014 by Alabama University Press. Secrecy and Insurgency: Socialities and Knowledge Practices in Guatemala deals with the experiences of guerrilla combatants of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces) in the aftermath of the Peace Accords signed in December 1996 by the Guatemalan government and guerrilla insurgents. The book focuses on 'secrecy' as both sociality and knowledge practice, and demonstrates the relevance of thinking 'gender' in the coalescence of novel objects of analysis in a broad field of contemporary theory.

I am committed to long-term, albeit intermittent, ethnographic research in Guatemala. I am currently writing a new research monograph, Traces, Remnants, Genocide, on transnational adoption circuits and the traces and remnants of violence, conflict and genocide in the country and the diaspora.

With Adi Kuntsman (MMU) and Jin Haritaworn (Toronto), I co-edited the volume Queer Necropolitics. With Suhraiya Jivraj (Kent) and Sandeep Bakshi (Paris - Diderot), I coordinate the AHRC-funded Decolonizing Sexualities Research Network. We co-edited the volume, Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions and our new special issue on Decolonial Trajectories was recently published. We coordinate a blog and will soon be celebrating the first 10 years of DSN with a global virtual event. The volume Queering Knowledge: Analytics, Devices and Investments After Marilyn Strathern - a collection of essays co-edited with Paul Boyce (Sussex) and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo (Goldsmiths) - was published in 2020. With Cecilia McCallum (Federal University of Bahia), Martin Fotta (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Technical University, Prague) and a terrific group of authors, I have been working on The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality. This 26-strong volume of original essays for Cambridge University Press will appear in print in 2021.

With Dr EJ Gonzalez-Polledo, I have been studying transformations in the field of forensic science in England and Wales. We are currently writing about forensic archives, bioinformation and cultures of evidence in a new edited volume, Bioinformation Worlds and Futures (Routledge) and other journal publications will be out in 2021.

Research Centres and Institutes

• Steering Committee Member, Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS)
• Member, Centre for Research on Race and Law
• Steering Group until 2000, Birkbeck Institute for Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Member, Centre for Medical Humanities

Research projects

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

I welcome enquires from perspective students who are interested in pursuing research in my areas of research expertise.

Former and current PhD projects include:

Dr Lorena Fuentes, (Re)Reading the Boundaries and Bodies of Femicide in (Post)War Guatemala, supervised with Dr Jasmine Gideon, see Dr Fuentes' article in Antipode

Dr Erol Saglam, Memory, Identity and Subjectivity in the Case of Romeika-speaking Communities in Trabzon, Turkey, co-supervised with Professor Stephen Frosh, see Dr Saglam's article in Anthropology Today

Dr Matthew Martinez, Reading Resilience, Exploring Non-normative Modes of Writing and Being, co-supervised with Professor Elizabeth Hoult

Lemonia Gianniri, Psychoanalysis, Families and Desires in the Greek Homosexual, Transgender and Feminist Press and Archives, co-supervised with Dr Gail Lewis, UBEL DTP

Adeline Moussion, The Social Uses of Trauma in Feminist Organisations and Rape Victims in France, co-supervised with Professor Joanna Bourke, SHAME Research Project

Hatty Nestor, Accounting for the Body and the Feminist Archive of Ana Mendieta, co-supervised with Professor Stephen Frosh and Dr Jodie Kim, CHASE DTP

Eoin Fullam, The Social Life of Chatbots, co-supervised with Professor Stephen Frosh, UBEL DTP

Nadine Chambers, Black and Indigenous Geographies: Archives and Accountability in the Shadow of Canadian Settler Colonialism, co-supervised with Dr Sarah Keenan, see Nadine Chambers' recently published article

Richeárd McDonald, Gay Masculinities,  Sexual Risk and Chemsex, Principal Supervisor, with Dr Annette van der Zaag Second Supervisor

Teaching

Teaching modules

• Theories and Sites of the Psychosocial (PSSL040S7)
• PhD Psychosocial Research Seminar (SSPA034Z8)
• Power (SSPA073S4)
• Bodies (SSPA101S5)

Publications