As mentioned in the last newsletter, we are living in interesting times. In the past, learned societies such as EASA had two basic roles: to provide a conference in which colleagues could present their work and meet each other, and to provide a journal and a book series in which scholars could publish peer-reviewed work and circulate their ideas and knowledge.
Today, things are somewhat different. In addition to those highly important roles, EASA exists increasingly in a world that has, on the one hand, drawn academics more into political debate than ever before (in this era of the infamous ‘knowledge economy’) while, on the other hand, the institutions and structures that used to support our scholarship and discipline have been radically changing. Not only open access issues and research funding issues, but also administrative restructuring of universities so that disciplines are increasingly disappearing from view; funding regimes that have created chronic precarity and short-term perspectives (see above); a speeding up of the need to react to events due to social media; a deep scepticism of ‘experts’ in many parts of the world; threats to our members’ freedom to speak and even threats to their liberty; questions about conferences, and how we should respond to the climate emergency at the same time as provide platforms for mutual conversation.
All of these issues and more are increasingly pointing to the need for EASA to take a step back and think about its role in the world, and how best to serve its members. It is not sufficient to just react whenever a department closes, a member is arrested, a government attacks academic freedom, or another government cancels the word ‘anthropology’ in its list of disciplines. We need to consider what learned societies such as ours are actually for, and work towards developing carefully considered strategies for responding to these kinds of challenges.
With that in mind, we are initiating a debate that we hope to develop further in Lisboa 2020, and in future AGMs. Below is one list of the topics we might consider in the process of developing a strategy. We will prepare discussion documents for these topics in time for Lisboa 2020.
