Thomas Stodulka is Junior Professor for Psychological Anthropology at FU Berlin. His work focuses on affect, emotion, childhood, mental health, datafication, and methods. He conducted long-term fieldwork with street-related communities (2001–2015) and he has co-directed international network projects on affect and emotion in fieldwork, comparative perspectives on envy, big data and epistemology, and public anthropology. He currently focuses on connectivities of permaculture school gardens in Timor-Leste and mental health in Eastern Indonesia. He is the co-founder of ENPA, co-director of the Winter School Culture, Psychology, and Qualitative Research, co-editor of BrillSocial Sciences in Asia, and associate editor at Ethos(AAA).

Roundtable “Cultural Diversity?”

 29th May 01.00 – 02.30 pm | Monique Scheer, Boris Nieswand, Michael Boiger, Thomas Stodulka, Moderation: Birgitt Röttger Rössler

 In contemporary academic writings the term culture, which is not only central to anthropology but also to the social and cultural sciences in general, increasingly appears only in word compositions such as “cultural plurality/multiplicity/variety”, “cultural diversity”, “cultural heterogeneity”, or “multiplicity of cultural orientations”, “diversity of social and cultural backgrounds” etc.

The roundtable provides a platform to discuss what these adjectival collocations denote precisely? Provocatively, it asks whether culture as adjectival becoming has transfigured into a leftover-category that lumps together the conceptually uncanny and empirically enigmatic? Invited scholars from sociology, social and cultural anthropology, cultural psychology and cultural studies will critically debate the analytical value of the terms “culture” and “diversity” and their entanglements from different disciplinary perspectives. Furthermore, they will pay attention to the affective dimensions of living in “culturally diverse settings”.