Dr. Gregory Gan conducts visual anthropology research on postsocialist urban environments, especially in the context of art, architecture, and the production of affect amongst Germany’s postmigrant society. Gregory is also a visual anthropologist and watercolour artist, teaching and practicing all aspects of visual anthropological film production. Currently, Gregory is a postdoctoral researcher with the European Center of Just Transition Research and Impact-Driven Transfer (JTC) at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, working to foster an academic exchange amongst scholars examining Just Transition themes. He is also carrying out visual anthropology research in Halle-Neustadt, a socialist-planned city of “chemical workers” in former East Germany.

2021-2024

Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine prompted scholars working in Eastern Europe and former CIS countries to re-evaluate the links between Soviet authoritarian ideology and the present day political and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ukraine. Gregory approached this challenge by investigating the affective afterlives of socialism, considering how socialist ideology persists through aesthetic and social attachments. He developed this research as a guest Postdoctoral Fellow with “Leibniz ScienceCampus EEGA: Eastern Europe – Global Area,” and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at SFB1171: “Affective Societies,” Freie Universität (2023-2024). Gregory has been awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship as the highest-scoring candidate of his cohort, which he also held at SFB1171 (2021-2023) under supervision of Prof. Dr. Birgitt Röttger-Rössler. In addition to academic publications, Gregory’s postdoctoral research resulted in the production of a feature-length, animated ethnographic film, “Empathy for Concrete Things” (2023), which has screened at international film festivals.

Dissertation

In his doctoral research, Gregory has contributed to the wider understanding of Russian-speaking transnational migrants in Berlin, Paris, New York by investigating how symbolic meanings migrants attach to material culture shift with new transcultural experiences and understandings. As part of his PhD research under the supervision of Prof. Alexia Bloch, Gregory created a multimodal installation titled “Still Life with a Suitcase,” which was recognized by the Public Scholar Award at the University of British Columbia, and received an Outstanding Graduating Student Award by the Canadian Anthropology Society. The artwork developed as part of this research received First Prize in the Mobility Category from the Centre of Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia.

Education

In his MA research at Memorial University of Newfoundland under supervision of Prof. Sharon Roseman, Gregory investigated how women of the Russian intelligentsia navigate the transition to postsocialism. This work resulted in the production of a feature ethnographic film “Turning Back the Waves” (2010, 96 minutes). Gregory received training in ethnographic film at Toronto Metropolitan University (2007), the Digital Research Centre for Qualitative Fieldwork (2008-2010), and SoundImageCulture (2010) a nine-month master class in ethnographic filmmaking, which resulted in the production of “The Theory of Happiness” (2014, 82 minutes), nominated for Best Canadian Documentary at Hot Docs International Film Festival.