News from the Networks

Medical Anthropology Network

The network held a conference last year: Anthropology and Global Health: interrogating theory, policy and practice, University of Sussex, UK, 9-11th September 2015. It was jointly organised by the EASA Medical Anthropology Network and the RAI Medical Anthropology Committee at University of Sussex.  The conference attracted 418 delegates, 45 panels and 288 papers.

The Medical Anthropology Network’s mailing list has more than 400 subscribers, advertising conferences, job vacancies, calls for papers, symposia etc. The next network meeting will be held in Milan during EASA2016.

Medical Anthropology Young Scholars (MAYS)

Intergenerations, temporalities and medical anthropology

On the 23th and 24th of June 2016, the 7th edition of the Medical Anthropology Young Scholars (MAYS) will take place in Lisbon. This year’s conference will explore the temporal and intergenerational dynamics of health, illness, and medicine. Illness, health diagnostics, aging, and politics of prevention require us to reinterpret our past and to negotiate with medical professionals and healthcare systems how to intervene in the present as well as to plan or “design” a hypothetical future. Health conditions and healing processes force us to reflect on our life course in profoundly new ways.

Understanding temporalities as an inherent and intimate part of all lived experience, calls into question how health plays a role in the ways we practice and understand the temporal flow of past, present and future, and how time is embedded in relationalities, decision-making and diagnosis. The MAYS 2016 conference invites anthropologists to focus on the different ways we can understand and undergo temporalities of health and illness. We believe the discipline of medical anthropology has much to offer to these debates.

The call for papers has already been closed, but we do still have places for people to attend as active listeners. Please email Mays.easa(at)gmail.com to register.

Applied Anthropology Network

Why the World Needs Anthropologists 2016 – Humanise IT!, 4th—5th November 2016, Tartu, Estonia.

Information and communication technologies are integral to our world. Digital engineers, designers, and computer programmers are the inventors and innovators of our time who greatly affect people’s everyday lives — and they need the assistance of anthropology in making human-friendly solutions. The symposium explores how digital designers and anthropologists benefit from each other's knowledge and approaches. What is the role of culture in technology? How can technology-based thinking be humanised? And how can we get the most out of new technologies for those that use them?

Network of Ethnographic Theory (NCAT)

Workshop in Stromboli (Italy), on Vitalism, Sacrifice, and Utopia. A Workshop on the Human Impetus, organised by Ruy Blanes, Bjorn Bertelsen and Giovanni da Col. The event will take place in 18-19 June, and is sponsored by EASA Networks. With the participation of the convenors, Magnus Course, Adam Chau, Neena Mahadev, Michael Puett, Webb Keane, Roger Sansi, Dominic Boyer, Alpa Shah, Toby Kelly.

NET sponsored panel at the upcoming EASA conference, on Tactics as ethnographic and conceptual objects, organized by NET members Theodoros Kyriakides (Manchester) and Patrick Laviolette (Tallinn).

DICAN – Disaster and Crisis Anthropology Network

DICAN sponsors disaster anthropology session at the IUAES Inter-Congress held in Dubrovnik, 4-9 May 2016

The Disaster and Crisis Anthropology Network together with the Risk and Disaster Topical Interest Group of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) sponsor the panel “The increasing importance of anthropology in understanding risk and disaster review of the current state of the field” convened by Susanna Hoffman at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences's (IUAES) Inter-Congress held in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Six papers are accepted for the session. Read more about the session here.

DICAN is organising two panels at the forthcoming EASA meeting in Milan. Seumas Bates, Kristoffer Albris & Susann Baez Ullberg convene the panel Resilience, disaster and anthropological knowledge and Mara Benadusi & Aj Faas convene the panel Disaster capitalism and creative destruction.

The Anthropology of Children and Youth Network

The Anthropology of Children and Youth Seminar is a monthly meeting at Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at VU University Amsterdam. Recent speakers were:

The Value of Transcultural Family/System Therapy in Child and Youth Care, with Dirck van Bekkum & Judith Limahelu, (January)

Cartographies of Child Poverty in Policies and Programmes in Kenya: Locating Children's Voice at the Interstices of Competing Representations, with Elizabeth Ngutuku (Eliza) (International Institute of Social Studies), (February)

Hearing and Seeing: Xikrin (Brazil) ways of knowing and the schooling system, with Clarice Cohn (Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil and University of Nanterre, Paris) (March)

Observing early childhood parenting across the globe, with Judi Mesman (Centre for Child and Family Studies, Leiden University) (April)

If you are interested in presenting at one of our seminars yourself, please contact the Network chair: Dr Sandra J.T.M. Evers, s.j.t.m.evers(at)vu.nl, Chair of the Anthropology of Children and Youth Network (EASA). Website. 

Anthropology of international governance

Collaborative Dilemmas

Workshop of the ANR Research Project UNESCO Frictions and the EASA Network for the Anthropology of International Governance, 12-13 April 2016, Paris

Policymaking and implementation across state institutions, international organisations and transnational networks of civil society organisations are expanding fields of anthropological research. The complex positionalities that anthropologists adopt in these ethnographic contexts and their implications in epistemological, methodological and ethical terms are emerging as central issues in these fields. This workshop explores different and often controversial forms of anthropological engagement with global policy worlds and the dilemmas that collaboration entails against the background of a dominant neoliberal research agenda. Whether emerging from intention, serendipity or necessity, researchers’ commitment to the explored policy fields and their complicity with research subjects are recurrent patterns in these ethnographic situations. As interns, consultants, advocates, representatives of governmental or non-governmental organisations, experts or temporary employees, researchers become actors in the processes that they are observing. This insider status affords key opportunities for exploring the creative friction that different policy regimes bring to global governance. Inside-track and first-hand experience also prevents simplistic essentialisation of “institutional cultures”. Yet taking on a position outside the comfort zone of the “hands-off” approach exhumes anthropology’s skeletons in the closet and generates pressing methodological anxieties, evidence of the difficult relation between action and knowledge production that characterises social sciences’ worldly interventions.

Belonging to the “epistemic community” that contributes to shaping the explored policy programmes provides scholars with the opportunity to impact social and political debate, yet it also radically challenges the founding anthropological assumption of a distinction between self and other and is therefore regarded as an obstacle to genuine critique. Furthermore, while collaborative anthropology in the exploration of the worlds of the marginal, dispossessed or dominated is appreciated as a form of social responsibility, working with powerful organisations is suspected for its multiple responsibilities to institutional or political interlocutors and to the groups that are affected by their intervention. Within this context ethnographic research raises numerous methodological, political and ethical dilemmas, especially when it is directly or indirectly supported by standard-setting organisations and policymaking institutions.

As social sciences come to grips with neoliberal research models, academics increasingly live with this uneasiness. Trained to formulate questions aimed at unpacking policy apparatuses, they are expected to provide answers to policy issues and contribute to governance objectives following managerial, rather than speculative, logics. In these contexts, scholars face the challenge of disseminating their research while being aware of their interlocutors’ negative perception of the analytical language they use to describe policy interventions. There are clearly no easy solutions to these conundrums. This workshop sets out to interrogate collaborative dilemmas by exploring the epistemological, ethical and methodological consequences of engagement, as well as of disengagement, with governmental agendas, international organisations, and other superseding institutions.

Organizer and Contact: Chiara Bortolotto chiara.bortolotto(at)ehess.fr.

Please find the full programme on the webpages of the EASA Network for the Anthropology of international governance.