As we are all gearing up for the EASA2026 conference in Poland, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the many emails of support, inspiration, ideas, and proposals for how to make EASA more accessible, reflexive, multimodal, and public! We have received messages of productive and generous critique as well as of encouragement, and we take them all equally seriously. EASA would not exist without its membership and as a connecting node between you and our executive, I appreciate and encourage these conversations. For that reason, we have instigated conversations on foundational aspects of EASA: our conference format and how to make it more inclusive as well as more affordable, our culture of anti-discrimination and openness and how we can take your concerns about well-being seriously, and of course your ideas for making a critical anthropology publicly heard. For that reason, we are extremely excited to have constituted the Working Group for Public Anthropology (WGPA), which has taken up its work just before the 2026 conference and will work on its mandate and first actions in the coming weeks and months.
We have also taken further steps to work on the history and self-understanding of EASA. This year, we will be working with colleagues from the Austrian Academy of Sciences to develop a project for the inventorising, analysis, and further study of our EASA archives stored there since moving from the RAI in London. We hope to take these archives as a basis for a wider debate about the constitution of a European anthropology after 1989, and a self-reflexive and self-critical view on Europeanisation and the multiple practices of what constitutes European Anthropology and its manifold meanings and complications. This is an ongoing process and we look forward to continuing this conversation with you all; a conversation that is about trauma and repair, but also about futures and dreams. As the curators Johanna M. Keller and Tomke Braun from the Academy of Arts in Berlin wrote in the preface to their exhibition on the life and work of Eslanda and Paul Robeson: “An institution’s sense of responsibility is particularly evident in its treatment of archives – viewed not as a neutral space, but as a political locus in which history is produced.” Indeed!