Seminars with external speakers will be once or twice a month. On other weeks, seminars are held by the internal AMGC researchers, students, and guests.
For more information or to propose speakers, please contact Axel Cerón González, Charlotte Van Riet, Oriana Chiappa, Vendula Smolikova or Maxwell Thiemens who are in charge of the seminar organisation.
PROGRAM 2025-2026
PREVIOUS SEMINARS
THURSDAY 9 October 2025, 4 PM CET, Room 10G
Dr. Katharina Ameli
Lecturer at the Institue for Sociology and coordinator at the Interdisciplinary Center for Animal Welfare Research at Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen
Multispecies ethnography in animal-assisted services
Following professor Tim Ingold’s thought-provoking seminar in March, our research group continues the conversation on more-than-human approaches with a focus on multispecies ethnography. Dr. Katharina Ameli will share with us insights from her work on animal-assisted services, inviting us to consider how non-human beings actively shape social worlds.
Multispecies ethnography offers an innovative methodological framework for researching animal-assisted services by understanding human-animal interactions not only as functional relationships, but as reciprocal, socially and materially embedded practices. Instead of viewing animals as objects of human care, this approach places their agency, perceptual worlds, and individual contributions at the center of analysis. The talk will address the inclusion of animals within multispecies ethnography in animal-assisted services.
THURSDAY 06 November 2025
Prof. Alison Beach
Professor in Medieval History at University of St. Andrews
Medieval Work as Embodied Experience: The Case of ELS215 from Bone to Biomolecule
Alison Beach is a professor in Medieval history at the School of History, University of St. Andrews, UK. In this seminar, Alison will present a historical osteobiography of a female individual (burial designation ELS215) buried in the medieval monastic cemetery of Elstow Abbey (Bedfordshire, UK) in the twelfth or thirteenth century. Combining burial topography, osteological analysis, dental calculus analysis, proteomics, and stable isotope analysis, I will venture an integrated story of a medieval woman who both performed manual work within her community and experienced extreme physical impairment from advanced tuberculosis myelitis (Pott’s disease). I will offer evidence of the type of manual work in ELS215 engaged, as well as her diet, oral health, and ingestion of medicinal materials. This case study is part of the AHRC-funded project Word of Mouth: Embodied Stories of Premodern Women at Work. The Word of Mouth project seeks to recover, contextualise, and synthesise women’s stories, providing an unprecedentedly fine-grained picture of women’s work and occupational health in monastic contexts.
THURSDAY 13 November 2025
Dr. Jonathan Goldenberg
Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo
SHARKSense: Reading the ocean through the colors of sharks
Pollution is one of the most pervasive threats to biodiversity, yet assessing its ecological impact remains costly and complex. In the SHARKSense project, we explore an unconventional but promising bioindicator: skin darkness. Sharks, as meso-apex predators, accumulate heavy metals from both their environment and the food chain. Intriguingly, melanin - a pigment responsible for dark coloration - can bind and sequester these toxic compounds. Could pollution be driving the evolution of darker-skinned individuals?
SHARKSense investigates this question by integrating computer vision, evolutionary biology, biochemistry, and fieldwork to uncover correlations between melanin deposition, skin darkness, and pollution. By spanning taxa, geography, and time, we aim to determine whether integument color can serve as a reliable, non-invasive proxy for ecosystem health, beginning with a foundational framework that links pigmentation patterns to environmental stressors. This talk will introduce SHARKSense, present early findings, and discuss how pigmentation might offer a scalable tool for ecological monitoring, bridging molecular mechanisms with conservation strategy.