FASS Staff Profile

DR KIVEN STROHM
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Appointment:
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Office:
AS1-03-26
Email:
kiven.strohm@nus.edu.sg
Tel:
+65 6516 6113
Fax:
Homepage:
https://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/socsk/
Tabs

Brief Introduction

I completed my B.A. in Anthropology and Philosophy at Concordia University (Montréal) and received an M.A. in Cultural Analysis from University of Amsterdam, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Université de Montréal. From 2014-2016, I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at The American University in Cairo, and in January 2017 became assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at National University of Singapore. I presently hold a joint appointment with NUS College where I teach on social design and anthropology.

My present book project, Experiments in Living: Art and and Politics in Palestine/Israel, centres on the relation of art and politics among the Palestinian indigenous community living within a liberal settler colonial state. In this book I think with artworks as reassemblages whose politics is approached through their affordances for the making of alternate worlds. In my recent research, I'm looking at urban community gardens in Southeast Asia as forms of placemaking. This project works at the intersections of social design and anthropology, and how these two disciplines are ontological practices of worldmaking/worlding. Across my different projects I maintain a collaborative approach to the intersections of art, design, and anthropology as a way to attend to their affinities and tensions, as well as how they can be practiced together.

My research interests include: art, social aesthetics, and visual culture; material studies (neo-materialisms, assemblage theory); design culture and design anthropologies; postcritical anthropology, theories of ethnographic analysis, and methods of experimental collaboration. Areas of research include Middle East/West Asia (Palestine/Israel, Egypt) and Southeast Asia (Singapore, Indonesia). 


Teaching Areas

TEACHING AREAS

Art, Social Aesthetics, and Visual Culture

Material Culture: Things and Objects, Neo-Materialisms

Ontoloigical Turns in Anthropology

Design + Anthropology

 

Recently Supervised ISMs:

“Anthropology of art”; “Contemplating the Notion of Creativity”; “Affect Theory”; "Anthropology and the Anthropocene"

 


Graduate Supervision

I'm happy to supervise BA, MA, and PhD students working on any topic that relates to art, social aesthetics, and visual culture; material studies (neo-materialisms, assemblage theory); design culture and design anthropologies. I especially welcome those interested in exploring the idea of a postcritical anthropology, experiments in ethnographic analysis, and methods of experimental collaboration. Areas of research include Middle East/West Asia and Southeast Asia. 

 

Recently Supervised Honours Theses:

“⽼友” [Old Friends/Cellmates]; “We Came From the Sea: Environment and the Constitution of Personhood”; “False St(art)?: What happens after Art Education”; “Apotheosis: Perceptions and Experience of the Honours Thesis”; “The Public Art Museum in Singapore as Democratic Space for Youth”; “Materiality and the Lives of Singapore’s Bangladeshi Migrant Workers”

 

MA and PhD Supervision and Committees: 

Haytham Althubaiti, Anthropology (Ph.D. Advisor); Samra Irfan, Cultural Studies in Asia (Ph.D. Advisor); Sandeepan Tripathy, Sociology (Ph.D. Committee); Adhvaidha Kalidasan, Cultural Studies in Asia (Ph.D. Committee Member); Susan Shih Chang, Department of Sociology (Ph.D. Committee Member); Han Minli, Cultural Studies in Asia (Ph.D. Committee Member)


Current Research

Since 2009, I have been working with Palestinian artists living and working in Israel around issues of art and politics within a settler colonial condition, for which I am presently completing a book manuscript entitled, Experiments in Living: Art and Politics in Late Colonial Palestine. In my present research, I'm exploring experimental collaborations between design and anthropology, alongside local communities as epistemic partners, to think and engage with the making of community gardens as forms of placemaking in urban Southeast Asia (Singapore, Penang, Yogyakarta, Bangkok). This project is situated at the intersections of design and anthropology, particularly around the notion that these two practices are fundamentally ontological practices of worldmaking/worlding.


Research Interests

Research Interersts
 

• Art, social aesthetics, and visual culture

• Material culture studies (neo-materialisms, assemblage theory)

• Design culture and design anthropologies

• Postcrititcal anthropology

• Theories of ethnographic analysis

• Experimental collaborations 

• Middle East/West Asia (Palestine/Israel, Egypt)

• Southeast Asia (Singapore, Indonesia)


Publications

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

  • "Not, not citizen: Fugitive aesthetics in the settler colony" Citizenship Studies (forthcoming, 2023)
  • "The Sensible Life of Return: Collaborative Experiments in Art and Anthropology in Palestine/Israel" American Anthropologist 12 (1): 243-255 (2019)
  • "Special Section: How does anthropology know? Preface: Ethnographic knowledge and the aporias of intersubjectivity" (with Bob W. White), HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1): 189-197 (2014)
  • "When Anthropology Meets Contemporary Art: Notes for a Politics of Collaboration", Collaborative Anthropologies, Vol. 5: 98-124 (2012)

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

  • "Aesthetics" in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Edited by George Ritzer and Chris Rojek (2020)
  • "Ghosts of Resistance: Dispatches from Palestinian Art and Music" (with Yara El-Ghadban) In Palestinian Music and Song Expression and Resistance since 1900, Edited by Moslih Kanaaneh, Stig-Magnus Thorsén, Heather Bursheh, and David A. McDonald (Indiana University Press, 2013)

BOOK REVIEWS

  • Review of Gil Z. Hochberg, Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone. ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies, 2:1 (2016): 117-120.
  • Review of Thomas Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and DIfference in a City of Myth. American Anthropologist Vol. 118, No. 3, pp. 646–703 (2016)
  • Review of Bashir Makhoul and Gordon Hon, The Origins of Palestinian Art. Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Autumn 2015)

Other Information

EDITORIAL SERVICE

• Book Review Editor, Asian Journal of Social Science

• Reviewer, City and Society

• Reviewer, Journal of Cultural Economy

• Reviewer, Geoforum

• Book Reviewer, The American University in Cairo Press (AUC Press)

• Reviewer, Journal for Artistic Research (JAR)

 

GRANTS AND HONOURS

Startup Grant, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore (2017-2020)

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, The American University in Cairo (2014-2016)

 

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS/ASSOCIATONS

• Asia Research Institute (ARI), Associate, Asian Urbanisms, National University of Singapore

• American Anthropological Association (AAA), Society for Cultural Anthropology

• Canadian Anthropology Association (CASCA)

• European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA)

• Anthropology and the Arts EASA Network (co-convener as of September 2019)

• Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation (#colleex) EASA Network

• Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World (AMCA)

• Middle East Studies Association, University of Arizona (MESA, USA)

• Palestinian American Research Center (Washington D.C., USA)


Works in Progress

BOOK PROJECT

Experiments in Living: Art and Politics in Late Colonial Palestine/Israel

 

REFEREED ARTICLES IN PROCESS

“Fugitive crossings: On the condition of being Palestinian” (with Nadeem Karkabi) In Producing Palestine: New Visions, New Technologies, New Knowledge Helga Tawil-Souri & Dina Matar, eds. Stanford University Press (forthcoming)

“The politics of affordances: Art as reassemblage in occupied Palestine” (Public Culture)

"The Fictioning of Hope, the Hope of Fictioning” (Journal of Palestine Studies)

“Soil as infrastructure: Digging into our urban assemblages” (in preparation for Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space)

“An object that is not one: On the artwork as (re)assemblage” (in preparation for The Trouble with Art: Essays for a symmetrical anthropology of art, Roger Sansi and Jonas Tinius, eds., London, Bloomsbury)

“Philistine as Method: The Figure of the Trickster in Palestinian Art.” (in preparation for Cultural Critique)

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