Alex Fattal
Department of Anthropology, class of 2014
PhD Dissertation Title: Guerrilla Marketing: Information War and the Demobilization of FARC Rebels
Capstone Project: Dreams from the Concrete Mountain // Sueños desde la montaña de concreto
Dr. Fattal’s work explores warfare and mediation in Colombia. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film-Video and Media Studies at Pennsylvania State University. His doctoral dissertation, “Guerrilla Marketing: Information War and the Demobilization of FARC Rebels” is an ethnographic account of the overlapping strategies, tactics, and practices of counterinsurgency and capitalism in Colombia. The work received the LASA/Oxfam Martin Diskin Dissertation Award from the Latin American Studies Association, and is being revised as a book. Fattal’s capstone project for the secondary field in Critical Media Practice is now evolving into a feature-length documentary project, tentatively titled, “Dreams from the Concrete Mountain // Sueños desde la montaña de concreto”. This surrealist visual ethnography explores the psychological worlds of former combatants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and takes place entirely in the payload of a truck transformed into a giant camera oscura. Fattal has written articles in journals such as American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, and Public Books, and his documentary projects have featured in spaces such as the foyer of the United Nations’ General Assembly Building and the Cannes Short Film Corner.
Dreams from the Concrete Mountain // Sueños desde la montaña de concreto — trailer from Alex Fattal on Vimeo
This information is accurate as of the student’s graduation year.