Credits: Dan Vigne- sketch

AgeNet Guide to EASA2026

The EASA 2026 conference in Poznan is approaching ! Take a look at the AGENET guide to the EASA 2026 conference, which contains panels and roundtable focusing on aging, life course, and/or care. 

More about the EASA2026 conference here.

If you think your EASA 2026 panel, lab, film or paper (from a panel other than these presented below) should also be included, please contact AgeNet Comms Officers Piero Amand and Melanie Stewart at ageneteasa[ag]gmail.com.

Credits: Dan Vigne – sketch from a work session, field research at Le Rize (Villeurbanne), 2018. https://www.artstation.com/danvignes

AgeNet sponsored panel

P176 Beyond Enclosures and Disclosures: Possibilities for Invisible and Uncertain Sites and Subjects for Novel Ethnographic Aging Trajectories

Convenors: Jared Epp (University of Alberta), Yvonne Wallace (University of Toronto) & Christine Verbruggen (KU Leuven)

Short Abstract

We invite critical reflections on the possibility of doing ethnography with uncertain or ambiguous sites and subjects of aging. We hope to challenge normative spaces of ethnography and the relationship between the where and who of research and the knowledge that emerges in hyper visible spaces.

Other panels, roundtables and films focusing on aging, life course and/or care

P010 Everyday violence and the moral economies of care

Convenors: Paulina Kolata (Harvard University) & Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko (Kyoto University)

Short Abstract

This panel explores how everyday, slow violence takes shape within economies of care and neglect and through the moral and material infrastructures that sustain and erode social worlds. We invite papers that trace how violence folds into care and how people make sense of its slow demands.

P032 Methodologies of Care: Navigating Polarization in Medical, Memory, and Mobility Fieldwork 

Convenors: Izabella Main (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan), Anna Witeska-Młynarczyk (University of Marii Curie-Skłodowska) & Monika Golonka-Czajkowska (Jagiellonian University)

Discussant: Frances Pine (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

Short Abstract

This panel explores how methodologies of care—understood as ethical, reflexive, and relational approaches to research—can help navigate the complexities of polarized fieldworks. We welcome contributions concerning medical contexts, memory-laden landscapes, or sites of mobility and border-making.

P065 Ethnographic and qualitative approaches to care poverty and care inequalities

Convenors: Francesco Diodati (Politecnico University of Milan), Gabriela Ramos Bonilla (University of Southampton), Yasemin Ozer (Ibn Haldun University) & Violeta Schubert (University of Melbourne)

Discussant: Francesco Diodati (Politecnico University of Milan)

Short Abstract

The distribution of care poverty worldwide has mainly been addressed through quantitative methodologies. This panel welcomes papers that employ qualitative and ethnographic approaches to critically explore lived experiences and categories of unmet care needs, both theoretically and empirically. 

P088 Ageing at crossroads: Polarisation and possibilities of caring and ageing well paradigms in Central and Eastern Europe 

Convenors: Ana-Maria Cirstea (Newcastle University) & Cristina Douglas (University of Edinburgh)

Discussant: Jessica Robbins-Panko (Wayne State University)

Short Abstract

The emergence of Western paradigms of ageing well has shaped policies and experiences of later life in Central and Eastern Europe. This panel asks how this interplay of different models and practices of ageing can lead to new ways, both polarising and bringing possibilities, of ageing and caring.

P105 Dementia, Difference, Critique: Thinking with the Other in Dementia Socialities

Convenors: Ida Marie Lind Glavind (The Danish Center for Social Science Research), Ida Vandsøe Madsen (University of Copenhagen), Laura Vermeulen (University of Humanistic Studies) & Lone Grøn (VIVE The Danish Center for Social Science Research)

Discussants: Lawrence Cohen (University of California Berkeley) & Janelle Taylor (University of Toronto)

Short Abstract

This panel explores how dementia can help us as anthropologists to critically think about differences, the relation between anthropologies of suffering and of the good, and our methods.

P132 Regeneration: Kin Relations, More-than-Human Worlds, and Practices of Change

Convenors: Koreen Reece (University of Bayreuth) & Magdalena Suerbaum (Bielefeld University)

Short Abstract

This panel explores regeneration as a relational practice of seeking change in multispecies contexts of injury, violence, and loss – and as a frame for bridging polarisations between generations, and between human and more-than-human worlds. 

P134 “Medical pluralism” under scrutiny: the polarisation of care in therapeutic pathways

Convenors: Georgeta Stoica (Université de Mayotte (France)) & Mathilde Heslon

Short Abstract

This panel welcomes ethnographic explorations of the ethical, political and social implications of medical pluralism, examining how care pathways, the legitimacy of practitioners and power relations between stakeholders are organised around and with those affected.

P139 Holding Conflict, Making Care: Lived Experience in Polarised Mental Health Worlds 

Convenors: Delia Da Mosto (King’s College London, London), Cristian Montenegro (King’s College London), Giulia Pollice (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), Martín Correa Urquiza (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) & Luca Negrogno (Città Metropolitana di Bologna, Università di Bologna)

Short Abstract

The panel asks how experiential knowledge reshapes mental health across polarised contexts. How can such knowledge gain authority within mental health services, academia and social movements? How is it negotiated, co-opted, or resisted? How can it foster collectivity or deepen divides?

P150 Care and Violence: Rethinking Articulations in Theory and Practice

Convenors: Giuseppe Troccoli (Universidad Católica de Temuco) & Angélica Cabezas-Pino (Universidad de La Frontera)

Short Abstract

Assumptions of care as inherently good have been unsettled, revealing its entanglement with its apparent opposites. It is time to place the care–violence nexus centre stage. What theoretical, analytical, and methodological possibilities emerge when they are examined explicitly together?

P170 Circular care: experiencing infinity/eternity in the small gestures of life [Muslim Worlds Network (MWN)] 

Convenors: Fabio Vicini (University of Verona), Lili Di Puppo (KU Leuven) & Stefan Williamson Fa (University of Cambridge)

Chairs: Sergio Gonzalez Varela (University of Warsaw) & Stefan Williamson Fa (University of Cambridge)

Short Abstract

By exploring small, tender, and “passive” modes of being, the panel aims to foreground new understandings of humanness, human agency, and relationality as connected to eternity and the transcendent beyond the emphasis on “flat” circularities found in both ontological and posthumanist perspectives.

P189 Standing on the Shoulders of Giants? Intergenerational Critique and Epistemological Vigilance in Medical Anthropology [MAYS network panel] 

Convenors: Marie Thérèse Voerman (Erasmus Medical Centre), Simona Maisano (University for Foreigners of Siena)

Chair: Matteo Valoncini (University of Bologna)

Short Abstract

This panel explores how early-career scholars in medical anthropology inherit, negotiate, and challenge the discipline’s intellectual legacies, balancing continuity with rupture in re-imagining health, care, and epistemic futures.

RT12 Structuring Affects in Black and White: On Care and its Others  

Convenors: Mauricio Najarro (King’s College London) & Charles Briggs (University of California, Berkeley)

Discussant: Tanisha Spratt (King’s College London)

Short Abstract

This roundtable examines the intersections of race, affect, and (in)communicabilities to ask how relational affective paradigms structure relations and engagements that include predation, appropriation, and care in an increasingly polarized world.

RT15 Polarised bodies. Fatigue, care, and the affective politics of survival 

Convenors: Sara Bonfanti (University of Genoa) & Ester Micalizzi (UNIVERSITY OF TURIN)

Discussants: Anne Sigfrid Grønseth (Inland Norway University, Lillehammer), Caroline Gatt (University of Graz) & Annelieke Driessen (University of Amsterdam)

Short Abstract

This roundtable examines fatigue and care as terrains of struggle and endurance. Drawing on feminist and decolonial thought, it probes how moral polarisation, precarity, and debility (Puar 2020) expose both the limits and creative politics of care in unequal worlds.