Slought and the Health Ecologies Lab are pleased to announce Into Unknown Parts, a film program and conversation about indigenous life under colonialism and the politics of care, on Wednesday, April 11, 2018 from 6-8pm. The program will begin with a screening of the film, followed by a discussion with director and scholar Lisa Stevenson and others. This program is presented with Tuttle Residencies at the John B. Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities (Haverford College), the Center for Public Health Initiatives (CPHI) and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Into Unknown Parts examines the Inuit experience of being forced to leave their home communities and live for an undetermined period of time in a southern tuberculosis sanatorium. Rather than a straightforward expository narrative, the film hopes to capture one of the most striking aspects of the dislocation this produced: the way the possibility of communication, verbal and non-verbal, was put into question.

Stevenson's recent book Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (2014) is a haunting ethnographic journey through the tuberculosis epidemic from 1940s to the early 1960s, as well as other historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit community has hung in the balance. In particular, she addresses the suicide epidemic from the 1980s to the present, where the biopolitical state's determination of what makes a life worth living has had devastating effects for the community as well as for embodied experience, communication, and kinship. Along the way, Stevenson troubles our commonsense understanding of what life is and what it means to care for the life of another.

Through close attention to the images in which we think and dream and through which we understand the world, Stevenson describes a world in which life is beside itself: the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend's newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, and the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. In these contexts, humanitarian policies make little sense because they attempt to save lives by merely keeping a body alive. For the Inuit, and perhaps for all of us, life is "somewhere else," and the task is to articulate forms of care for others that are adequate to that truth.