On Wednesday, the Work in Progress seminars host Judith Okely, formerly Professor of Anthropology at Edinburgh University, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Hull University, and now Deputy Director of the International Gender Studies Centre at Oxford University.

Her paper is entitled: Ethnographic know-ledge has the power to transform: it may also be ignored, blocked or misappropriated. It revises her Eric Wolfe Lecture to the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna. She will be submitting her study to the journal Current Anthropology and therefore looks forward to critical reaction. Professor Okely is the author of The Traveller Gypsies, Own and Other Culture and Anthropology and Autobiography.

She is deeply involved with feminist literature and has published Simone de Beauvoir: a Re-reading (Virago Press). Her book Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method will be published by Berg in 2008. Prof. Okely will first outline her interpretation of ethnographic knowledge.

She will then explore how her ethnographic research had the power to influence UK government policy towards gypsies. But with a change of government after Thatcherism, the ethnographic research was discarded and policy was reversed. This produced a crisis. Finally, Judith Okely will analyse how ethnographic knowledge can inform visual representations, especially those by journalist photographers.

The seminar will be held between 6 and 7 pm, followed by a discussion, at the Mediterranean Institute Room 124, opposite University Library by the Arvid Pardo Study Area (behind HSBC on campus). Entrance from Carpark 4. The public is cordially invited to attend.