The Bureau hosts meetings and events all over campus at UT Austin. Some of our events are hybrid. We try to maintain a regular meeting place in WCP 4.120.

Open Lab Hours:

Open M-F from 9am-4pm except when classes and seminars are being held. Schedule changes each semester.

The room may be locked. To get a key, contact Craig Campbell or someone in the main Anthropology office.

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The Tectonic Community

April 6, 2026
Cinema Sensate, Screening

Screening of Doruk Başoğlu’s The Tectonic Community (25 minutes)
Tuesday, April 14th at 12:30pm
WCP 4.118

This screening is part of the “prototypes & works in progress” series held by the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography

Synopsis: The ethnographic vlog draws on my research at the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute in Istanbul and its seismic monitoring network across Turkey. Reproducing the day I visited a remote seismic recording instrument in İzmir, it narrates an exploration of my vibrational presence beside the seismograph through the method of seismic data sonification. The film visits the open data archive recorded by this very seismograph in order to reconstruct the memory of a major earthquake that I vibrated with in 2020 in Izmir. Finally, drawing on another powerful tremor I experienced in 2025 İstanbul while making the film, it proposes situating personal earthquake memories within the “vibroscape” of contemporary urban earthquake culture by listening to how bodies share tectonic memories, sensations and imaginations.

Doruk Başoğlu is an Izmir-based sound enthusiast. His research at the Istanbul Technical University Center for Advanced Studies in Music examined the vibroscapes of the Anatolian tectonic plate and contemporary earthquake culture in Istanbul. He also carried out a project on the conflict between Kurdish busking musicians and municipal police on Istiklal Street in Istanbul, as well as on official sound restrictions and the November 2022 bombing in the avenue. He is now a teaching assistant a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and performs on the Anatolian kaval and drums.