This paper will examine the nature of digital images in contemporary architectural practice, as crafted, mobile objects (Latour 1990, Pinney 1997, Gell 1992), which acquire altered meanings as they circulate among, and are received by, the various actors in a transnational network of globalised architectural production.

Drawing on ethnographic research in eight offices in the UK, we will describe how digital images are 'crafted' through the assembled technical and artistic expertise of architects and visualisers, within an overarching process of sharing and negotiation between designers, consultants and client on a large-scale urban redevelopment project in the centre of Doha, Qatar. We will show how these images move around a global network of localised sites during this process, as visual artefacts in both electronic form and different physical formats, according to the context in which they are viewed; and how they acquire as much tangible and emotive substance as objects with social agency in their own right as the future buildings they evoke and represent.

We will explore the altered and new meanings with which they are inscribed during their circulation and reception from place to place, in different contexts of social practice, and how these images in turn mobilise affect that has significant agency in the production of new architectural and social environments, and contribute to the complex negotiation of cultural difference between 'producers' and 'receivers' in processes of postcolonial urbanism in the Arab world and other global contexts (Sheller 2009, Elsheshtawy 2008, 2010; Ren 2011).

Afro-American cults are becoming increasingly global, mainly due to immigration, the influence of a strong religious industry and the massive presence of these religions on the Internet. This nomadism alters the practice, meaning and function of the rituals —both religious and artistic— and especially modifies the material cultural elements associated with them.

Given this, and based on ethnographic data gathered in Spain on the practice of Afro-American cults in diaspora, this paper has two main objectives: on the one hand, it aims to show how material culture —and especially that associated with religious and artistic practice— is not only a "reflection" of social change, but also a strategy for dealing with this change and modifying the present. In our case, this implies that the objects become a tool for dealing with the transculturalism which characterizes diasporic processes. On the other hand, this paper upholds that the alterations which Afro-American cults are experiencing as a result of their nomadism should not be interpreted as a "loss" of authenticity, but rather as another example of their dynamic, hybrid and unifying nature.

Visual anthropology is a discipline which is particularly appropriate for analyzing the nomadism of objects in Afro-American cults, since it enables us, through edited images, to relate the experiences and objects filmed in different contexts, thus undertaking comparative and multi-situated anthropology.

In the opening lines of 'Touring Cultures' (1997), Rojek & Urry state that migration is not only a people phenomenon - it applies to cultures and objects as well. This paper, based on a short residency at the Yale Centre for British Art (January to March 2012) addresses the world of moving artworks. By exploring how landscape and diaspora co-exist in the works of Cornish based artists in the YCBA collection, it draws together many features regarding colonial, British and European modernism. An early inventory of this collection revealed it possessed sixty-six works from eight iconic St Ives School artists. After further archive excavation, we see that this estimate only skims the surface.

One objective is to highlight some of the key landscape depictions that have migrated away from their vernacular, creative settings. I shall do so by examining a selection of pieces in terms of their biographical trajectories and abstract spatial representations. Conceptually, the idea is thus to consider how these artworks act as diasporic objects of identity for this peripheral rural region that has been a well-known land of labour emigration and exile. Increasingly the case within the rubric of global markets, artworks often factor as exchange commodities. And yet, less attention has been given to the ways in which various forms of cultural identity also move when such harbingers of taste are relocated. Such theoretical undercurrents guide the interpretation of this case study of Cornish artworks in a university owned, philanthropic research collection.

Wool production has intensified in many parts of the world. Tons of wool crisscross the oceans annually. Dirty wool sheared in Spain travels to Uruguay where washed, and shipped on to China. International standardization programs assure and enhance its value. Wool's trade value is particularly vulnerable to the flux of global markets, making every moment in its production an uncertain business. Yet not only in market trade do woolen values shift. It is subject to various qualitative evaluations - 'rustic', 'noble', 'organic', 'imperishable' - that also entangle the quality of life for thousands of wool workers. Intrigued by the multiplicity of fibrous values and their qualitative mobility, this paper explores it ethnographically. It picks up the thread with sheep farming, shearing, spinning and knitting on the South American Pampas. When unraveling the ball of Merino wool through ethnographic detail, a series of cuts appear. It details how one particular knitted sweater becomes a work of art and what happens when it is accidentally cut by an art collector. It introduces a laboratory that measures the quality of fiber samples, by testing their breaking points. These 'accidental cuts' and 'breaking points' provide the basis of the argument. It suggests that one cut dislodges a series of qualitative values that rely on the onto-political links between wool, fiber sample, science and art. Fiber and its cuts emerge as a comparative device - a quasi-object - that scopes human-nonhuman entanglements. This provokes reflections on the possibilities of ethnographic theory to both trace and stir up unforeseen relations.

This presentation will address the different meanings and uses the kora, an African harp, assumes when it is contextualised as Diasporic and how these meanings can be understood with ethnographic film-making methodologies. I will draw from material collated during two years of intermittent fieldwork in Benelux amongst West African musicians, amongst whom the kora features prominently, and address how film-making can inform understanding the inconsistent and complex signifiers of the kora when in a Diasporic context.

Ethnographic film-making methodologies begin with objects and the relationships they facilitate, rather than with the discourse and semantic associations. They articulate how objects facilitate practise, generate social relationships, and constitute space. A result of this approach is to move away from the insularisation, racialisation, and authenticity politics of objects. Another result, is to take objects seriously and prioritise how they serve to constitute social relations rather than represent them.

Drawing inspiration on the works of Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour, this paper will reveal the relation between the agency of material objects - namely their capacity to act and shape the contexts surrounding them - the distributed person and the transnational migration experience. The argument is that objects not only transmit meanings but, first and foremost, they produce and represent relations and sociabilities. What Marilyn Strathern (1988) has shown for the Melanisian context seems particularly pertinent to understand the way migration, personhood and memory are lived transnationally.

This argument will be explored through multi-sited ethnographic case studies of Brazilians and Bangladeshis migrants in Portugal and in their home countries. In spite of all the differences in the objects circulated, in the gender logics and in the discursive formations, both cases reveal the importance of the transnational circulation of quotidian objects for the making of personhood.

This paper looks at the redefinition of local cultural heritage with African diasporic communities, through their 'diasporic imagination' and in relation to their traditional objects included in colonial collections, displayed in British museums. Within this context, the term 'diasporic imagination' will be used to indicate the reinterpretation of the past on the basis of present, experienced memories of displacement (Ang, 2011).

As Jeanette Joy Fisher points out: 'as human beings, we all have a desire to feel as if we belong to a social and cultural community. We long for a feeling of attachment, of being rooted in a particular place, and of feeling as if we have ownership of something significant in our lives' (http://environmentpsychology.com/place_identity.htm). However, diasporic groups, including the African/Yorùbá ones, lack this attachment and ownership to a particular place. Museums can certainly support diasporic groups in overcoming this estrangement, by assisting them to create a sense of place and negotiate their identities. Nevertheless, in order to do so, it is essential that museums construct narratives of redefinition and reinvention that claim the present, through the past.

The paper will focus on the local Yorùbá diasporic communities (first and second generation) based in Manchester and it will explore the ways this diasporic group redefines its African/Yorùbá diasporic identity and mediates it with its new, British identity, by relating and interpreting their traditional objects displayed in museums in the North-West England.