easa

Dr. Lionel Thelen is Psycho-Anthropologist by background and has performed various fieldworks in Brazil and Europe about the comprehension – through ethnographic methods - of the various ways by which our own habitat impacts one’ social skills and delineates one’s (Self-) Consciousness. Since 2009, he has been working as Scientific Officer in the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC is – with regard to individual research teams – the most important funding body of the European Union for ALL Sciences and, concerning social sciences, one of the most generous worldwide. Lionel is especially in charge of core social sciences, id est Sociology, Criminology, Social Psychology, Education studies, Media & Communication studies, STS and, last but not least, Social Anthropology: on a yearly basis, he coordinates various evaluations of research proposals and scientifically monitors a portfolio of circa 50 funded projects.

Dr. Maddalena Gretel Cammelli (PhD Anthropology) is Associate professor in cultural anthropology at the Department Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin, where she is also Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project The world behind a word. An anthropological exploration of fascist practices and meanings among European youth (F-WORD), started in May 2023. Her research interests range from political anthropology and social movements to the anthropology of fascism, the ethnography of neo-fascism and racism, and the local impact of immigration management in a logic of ’emergency response’.

Dr. Tessa Diphoornis an Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on policing, security,violence, and power and her research is primarily based in South Africa and Kenya. She is the author Twilight Policing. Private Security and Violence in Urban South Africa (University of California Press, 2016) and also conducted research on the various ways in which police (mis)conduct is documented and regulated in Nairobi, Kenya. In addition, Tessa Diphoorn is the co-host and co-founder of the podcast series Travelling Concepts on Air. Together with Brianne McGonigle Leyh, they explore the notion of travelling concepts in academia. In 2023, she was awarded the ERC Starting Grant on the project, ‘Making Sense of Communities of Armies’ (ARMIES). In this project, she will analyse the various ways firearms produce divergent communities in Brazil, Germany, and South Africa.

Dr. Elżbieta Drążkiewicz received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She is a researcher at Lund University, where she is leading the ERC project CONSPIRATIONS, examining conflicts over conspiracy theories in Europe. She is also involved in the CHASE project REDACT analysing how digitalisation shapes the form, content, and consequences of conspiracy theories. Between 2014-2016 she held a Maria Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at Maynooth University, where she also held the position of assistant professor. In addition to researching conflicts over truth, Dr Drążkiewicz is also researching democratic participation and the world of NGOs. She is the author of Institutionalised Dreams: the art of managing foreign aid (Berghahn, 2020).

In this webinar, we discussed the ways in which universities, networks, and professional associations such as EASA could address mental wellbeing going forward. What are the institutional tools at the disposal of EASA and ReMO to pursue an anti-precarity agenda that is attuned to understanding mental health struggles and improving mental wellbeing?

The webinar was open to all anthropologists and researchers who aim to raise awareness of mental health issues and to mobilize efforts in support of mental wellbeing in anthropology, professional associations, and generally in academia.

Speakers

Dr. Brian Cahill, grant manager of the Researcher Mental Health Observatory (ReMO) at Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology
Dr. Brian Cahill works in the Learning and Skills Analytics Lab of the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) in Hannover as Grant Manager of the COST Action CA19117 on Researcher Mental Health Observatory (ReMO). He serves as a Member of the Governing Board of EuroScience, a Member of the Board of Directors of the SciLink Foundation and served as Chair of the Marie Curie Alumni Association from 2016 to 2018. In these roles, he engaged with early-career researchers on topics ranging from researcher career development, innovation, research funding, science communication, science policy, pension literacy, research integrity, responsible research and innovation and many more.

Dr. Mariya Ivancheva, Senior Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and PrecAnthro co-founder
Dr. Mariya Ivancheva is an anthropologist and sociologist of higher education and labour. Her academic and research-driven advocacy work focus on the casualisation and digitalisation of academic labour, the re/production of intersectional inequalities at universities and high-skilled labour markets, and the role of academic and student communities in broader processes of social change especially in transitions to/from socialism. She is the author of multiple peer-reviewed and book chapters, op-ed and policy reports, and has recently published the monograph The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela (Stanford University Press, 2023).

Dr. Alexandra Oancă, Postdoctoral Associate at the KU Leuven, Vice-president of EASA, and PrecAnthro member
Dr. Alexandra Oancă is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the KU Leuven, Belgium, and is currently serving as the Vice-president of the EASA Executive Committee. Her research analyses discourses of expertise, and knowledge production in bureaucracies and policy networks. As a longstanding member of PrecAnthro and current member of the EASA board, Alexandra is interested in strengthening EASA's work on the theme of mental health and putting mental health and its relations to academic precarity on the agenda of the European anthropological community.

Luisa Solms, PhD Candidate at the University of Amsterdam, Co-host of the podcast PhD Unplugged, and ReMO member
Luisa Solms is a PhD Candidate at the department of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. She was also a visiting PhD student at the University of Melbourne, Department of Management and Marketing. She is a board member of the pHResh network for PhD students in the fields of Human Resource Management and Organisational Behavior and a member of the Researcher Mental Health Observatory (ReMO). Together with her sister Lara Solms, she co-hosts the podcast PhD Unplugged. In PhD Unplugged, PhD students talk to professional coaches about PhD-specific struggles and how to overcome them. The well-being and career experiences of PhD students are central themes in Luisa’s research.

Convener: Alexandra Oancă, Postdoctoral Associate at the KU Leuven and vice-president of the EASA Executive Committee

The destruction of cultural and historical heritage is always a risk of war. This destruction is not only a “casualty” of conflict. It is often weaponized to subjugate civil life, by eradicating the traces of multiplicity and alternatives histories written into stone and memory which so often work to refute the destructive ideologies of a given conflict: we think here of the Bouddhas of Bâmiyân Afghanistan, the citadel of Hatra in Iraq or the mausolea of Tombouctou (among many sites). The destruction of archeological and historical heritage, like the destruction of landscapes, is, as such, a tool for terror. It produces a moral wounding by anchoring the destruction in a scale and temporality that go well beyond a singular life span. These issues are also at stake in the war waged by Russia in Ukraine. In response to the technologies and politics of destruction that target human lives and beyond, this webinar will focus on the Trypillia megasites located in today's Ukraine, as sites of knowledge that must be protected, but that can also protect us from the epistemic and political foundations of the global security architecture, and our over-militarized yet impotent societies. Indeed, the vestiges of the megasites built 6-7 millennia ago have raised interest and attention. As case studies, they open an empirical field and raise new questions for the writing of a feminist urban prehistory and history that challenge our understanding of social organization and power, as The dawn of everything, recently published by late David Graeber and David Wengrow highlights.

In the current war and radical destruction of civil life in Ukraine, it is timely to explore what Trypillia megasites, sometimes called “Ukrainian megasites” can teach us, and to seize hold of their “memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” to paraphrase Walter Benjamin. What is the history of their archeological exploration? What insights do these traces offer to think about social organization and power? How does this resonate and help us make sense of the Ukrainian resistance?

Bisserka Gaydarska is a Bulgarian-born European prehistorian, currently working as a post-doctoral research assistant for the “Project Radiocarbon' - Big Data, integrated cross-national heritage histories” at Manchester Metropolitan University. She received her first degree in Sofia University, followed by a PhD in Durham University on landscape archaeology in Bulgaria. Her broad research interests in material culture studies, landscape archaeology, inter-disciplinary studies, identity and early urbanism brought involvement in numerous field projects and research collaborations. She worked as a post-doctoral research assistant and co-director on the “Early urbanism in prehistoric Europe?: the case of the Ukrainian Trypillia megasites” Project and was the author and main editor of the project monograph (2020).

John Chapman is Emeritus Professor of European Prehistory at Durham University. He retired in 2018 after working in Durham since 1996, after 17 years’ work in Newcastle University. He has spent his career working on archaeological theory and later Balkan prehistory, co-directing major field projects in Croatia (the Neothermal Dalmatia Project), Hungary (the Upper Tisza Project) and Ukraine (the Trypillia Megasites Project). He recently published two complementary books - a synthesis of his Balkan research (Forging identities in the prehistory of Old Europe, 2020) and a memoir entitled A life in Balkan prehistory (2020). He was the first Editor of the European Journal of Archaeology and served as Vice-President for the UK Prehistoric Society.

David Wengrow is Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UCL) and has been a visiting professor at New York University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Freiburg. He is co-author with David Graeber of the international bestseller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Wengrow has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Africa and the Middle East, and has contributed op-eds to The Guardian, and The New York Times.

Convener: Chowra Makaremi, CNRS/EASA exec

In particular we are interested in discussing:

How can we understand the ‘selective compassion’ phenomenon when it comes to both the war and the refugee wave that emerged? How does the institutional, media, and grassroots reaction compare to other waves of military and economic warfare that have caused mass migration? What is this crisis revealing about the mechanisms generating or preventing humanitarian compassion? What is this crisis revealing about the current state of the aid industry: its structures, modalities, trajectories and principles? The last 20 years have shown the aid industry to be highly divided. The proliferation of actors, and the growing competition between aid providers revealed strong hierarchisation of the aid structures and the increasing frictions between new and old players, established and emerging organizations. How is this tension playing out in Ukraine? How is it shaping the response to the crisis? Are we observing a shift towards bottom-up, civilian and network led assistance? What are the pros and cons of this shift?
• When the ‘new’ Eastern European countries joined the EU not as aid recipients but as donors, most of them were strongly criticized in Brussels for their reluctance to provide support for African states, and instead prioritising the Eastern Partnership countries, in particular Ukraine. How is this trajectory influencing their current response and ability to support Ukraine? Finally, what does the current crisis means for the moral economy of aid: its global ‘principles’ but also local variants of the aid ideology. What is the furture of neutrality paradigm, especially vis-a-vis controversies surrounding the work of the IRC? , the actions of the IRC once again brought to the light the question of neutrality in humanitarian assistance. What is the future of humanitarian industry?
• What is the impact of the war and resultant mass migration in Ukraine, where the shocks of a severe post-socialist crisis of social reproduction has long been absorbed by labour migration into Europe with Ukrainians taking up precarious insecure positions in some of the most undervalued and underpaid sectors such as agriculture, construction and care work? What would a meaningful long-term strategy look like and what would be the challenges to recuperate the social fabric of the country once war is over? In what ways can the outcomes of this crisis be mitigate to prevent further exploitation of the country such as economic exploitation, brain drain or emptying towns and villages?

Dr Elżbieta Drążkiewicz is a graduate of Cambridge Anthropology and she is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sociology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She is an author of ‘Institutional Dreams: the Art of Managing Foreign Aid’ (Berghahn) - book analyzing Polish humanitarian and development activities in Eastern Europe and in Africa. Her expertise builds not only on extensive fieldwork but also practical experience of working with numerous NGOs and the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Dr Olena Fedyuk is an expert on transnational labour migration, distant motherhood and transnational youth, her regional focus is on Ukraine and wider EU-Eastern Partnership relations. Her work appeared in numerous academic journals, she has also directed two documentary films Currently, she is a MSCA IF fellow in a project “RightsLab: Towards Transnational Labour Rights? Temporary Work Agencies and Third Country National Workers in the EU” at the University of Padua.

Dr Anna Balazs received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research explored how residents in the East Ukrainian city of Mariupol re-evaluate infrastructural and symbolic legacies of the Soviet past after the start of the Donbas war. Dr Balazs is currently working as a researcher at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include temporalities of crisis and transformation, deindustrialization and the material afterlives of socialism.

Dr Céline Cantat research concerns practices and politics of migration as well as migrant solidarity. In the past she held several research positions in Sciences Po (Paris) and at the Central European University (CEU). She also acted as Academic Program Manager for CEU's Open Learning Initiatives, which focus on providing access to higher education for displaced students. Currently she servs as Academic Advisor at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po.

Chair: Prem Kumar Rajaram, Central European University

It will also address the scientific, ethical, juridical and technical incentives and barriers to the opening of such data. The webinar engages in dialogue researchers, archivists and other data managers who can bring in their experience coming from the opening of anthropologists’ data sets.

Katja Müller conducts research into digitization, museum studies, material culture and visual anthropology, as well as energy and environmental humanities. She is Visiting Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, and Privatdozentin for social anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Her latest book analyses online access to heritage material in India and Europe.

Jessica De Largy Healy is an anthropologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France. Building on long term ethnography and collaborations with Yolngu collectives in Arnhem Land (northern Australia), with a focus on digital repatriation and Indigenous archiving practices, her recent research interrogates the Open Access movement and its relevance for anthropological and Indigenous knowledge(s).

James Rose is a forensic social anthropologist with 20 years’ experience providing legal evidence and advice on Indigenous Australian claims to data assets, land and natural resources, cultural heritage, and child custody. James is Senior Research Fellow with the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne.

Chairs: Monica Heintz (University of Paris Nanterre and EASA Secretary) and David Mills (University of Oxford and EASA Treasurer).

This webinar will explore how Open Access debates have changed over twenty years and the key questions that remain: open for whom, by whom, at what cost, and with what infrastructural support (Meagher et al 2021)?

At a time when EASA’s journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale is about to be published by Berghahn under a ‘subscribe-to-open’ model, we will explore different approaches to, and financial models for, Open Access publishing initiatives across the disciplines and around the world. We ask why sustainability and community control are important principles for Open Access, and explore how they are being implemented in low resource settings. We also look beyond journals to think about the future and alternative forms of digital scholarship.

Marcel is Open Research Manager at the Public Library of Science (PLOS). Trained as a librarian and an anthropologist, he served from 2015 to 2019 as the managing editor of Cultural Anthropology. He sits on the executive committee of Libraria, a collective of researchers in the social sciences who seek to bring about a more open, diverse, and community-controlled scholarly communication system.

Vivian Berghahn is Managing Director and Journals Editorial Director at Berghahn Books. She has over 20 years of experience in academic publishing, and previously worked for Blackwell Publishing and Northeastern University Press. She serves on the AAP-PSP Committee and was co-opted member of the ALPSP Council (2015-2020), and is currently completing her PhD in Anthropology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Angela is an Associate Editor for the Open Access journal, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society where she supports contributors to experiment with new genres and mindful sharing of ethnographic data objects towards scholarly community building. Further, building on ten years of work in Nairobi’s tech research sector, Angela co-founded and maintains an experimental, open ethnographic data portal called Research Data Share (www.researchdatashare.org) that leverages the open-source “Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography” (PECE) to hold space for thinking about what postcolonial objectivity in Kenya is and could be. Angela will receive her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine in December 2021.

Chair: David Mills, University of Oxford and EASA exec member

A reform of these reward systems would be an important step to incentivizing better research practices, but communities of researchers should remain the main actors in this transition. This is why the Initiative for Science in Europe (ISE) is preparing a policy paper to put researchers' voices at the heart of the process.

Join us for a presentation of this paper with Toma Susi and Marco Masia.

Toma Susi is Assistant Professor in nanomaterials at the University of Vienna and an ERC Starting Grantee. He has long been an advocate for open access publishing, participating in national and international policy discussions, and in his research work, contributed open data and code as well as an open grant application. In 2018, he was elected Vice-Chair of the Young Academy of Europe (YAE), coordinating the organization’s efforts in science policy, especially around Plan S, until the end of his tenure in 2020. He chaired the open science task force of the Initiative for Science in Europe (ISE).

Marco Masia is the Executive Coordinator of the Initiative for Science in Europe, an umbrella organization representing researchers from multiple learned societies and scientific organisations. He coordinates the work of different task forces and brings ISE positions and recommendation to the attention of EU policy makers and other relevant stakeholders. Marco holds a PhD in physics; after 10 years of professorship at the university, he graduated from an Executive MBA.

Chair: Monica Heintz, University of Paris Nanterre and EASA exec member

To address these questions, we will speak in this webinar to Celine Cantat and Barak Kalir about their experience with EU funded research (Horizon 2020 and ERC). Drawing on Celine and Barak’s experience navigating EU funding requirements while trying to make meaningful policy impact through their research on migration and border regimes during the ongoing EU border crisis, we will open the discussion to the audience and ask: What are the opportunities and limitations of cyclical research funding to contribute to social change? What can learned societies such as EASA do to facilitate better use of anthropological insights into EU/national policies?

This event is the first in a series which continues our EASA webinar tradition initiated during the coronavirus pandemic. In the series we discuss pertinent issues that affect the anthropological community in Europe and beyond. In this webinar, we specifically connect two of the topics that the previous and current EASA exec committees have prioritised in our agendas: the question of research funding as structured within the framework of the EU and national agencies, and the question of scholars imperilled by the escalating political crises in Europe and beyond.

To foreground the discussion we suggest two texts from the contributors that speak directly to these issues: Cantat & Kalir 2020 and Guild & Makaremi 2021.

Chair: Chowra Makaremi, IRIS (CNRS/EHESS) and EASA exec member

Céline Cantat is Academic Advisor at the Paris School of International Affairs. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of East London, an MSc in Globalisation and Development from SOAS, University of London, and a BA in European Studies from King’s College London. Her academic work has focused on migration, humanitarianism, solidarity mobilisation and the relation between macro processes, such as globalisation and state formation, and the forced movement of people within and across borders. She is also interested in higher education and in particular on the politics of university access.

Barak Kalir is an anthropologist based at the University of Amsterdam. He is the co-director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies and is currently involved in the H2020 project: Advancing Alternative Migration Governance. Barak recently rounded off an ERC-funded project entitled: The Social Life of State Deportation Regimes. His recent publications include: “Departheid: The Draconian Governance of Illegalized Migrants in Western States” (Conflict and Society), “Repressive Compassion: Deportation Caseworkers Furnishing an Emotional Comfort Zone in Encounters with Illegalized Migrants” (PoLAR), and a co-edited special issue on “Re‐searching access: what do attempts at studying migration control tell us about the state?” (Social Anthropology).