Annika is a EU Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow, hosted by Aarhus University and the University of Cape Town (South Africa). This year, Annika will be based at AU – and more specifically Campus Moesgård and the CEH office in Nobelparken – where she will be writing articles and producing a film based on her project “Wool Worked Worlds: Studying industrial landscapes through collaborative filmmaking.”

In this presentation titled Losing Face for Filming Nearby: Troubling Human Subjectivity through Character Development with Merino Sheep on Southern Rangelands (abstract below), Annika will present parts of her ongoing work.

Following the talk, there will be a short informal reception with drinks and snacks to kick-off the semester.

As per usual, everyone is welcome. No registration needed.

Abstract
This talk asks how an experiential approach to filmmaking might generate new forms of aesthetic appreciation of the life worlds of woollen merino sheep. My research, grounded in multimodal ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa, Lesotho, Patagonia, and Australia aims to foster other ways of noticing and acknowledging sheep’s presence in the landscapes we share with these beings. The presentation builds from a chapter on multispecies filmmaking targeted at an audience of film students and filmmakers and extends it to think through how cinematography can make fruitful contributions to debates on multispecies and multimodal methods within the Environmental Humanities. Overall, the talk will tack back and forth between questions of how EH affects filmmaking and how filmmaking changes EH.

Biography
Dr. Annika Capelán holds her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, from Lund University. She is an EU Marie-Skłodowska Curie Global Fellow (MSCA) 2022-2024. Her project Wool Worked Worlds: Studying Industrial Landscapes through Collaborative Film Making is jointly hosted by the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for Environmental Humanities (CEH), Aarhus University, Denmark, and the Environmental Humanities South (EHS), University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research focuses on historical, environmental, and material-political aspects of sheep farming and industrial wool production across three southern regions: Chubut/Rio Negro, Argentinian Patagonia, Queensland, Australia, and the Karoo/Lesotho highlands, in southern Africa. She works with ethnographic methods with an emphasis on participant observation and a special interest in visual and collaborative knowledge building