EASA LAWNET workshop- From Critique to Political Practice

12 May 2023, University of Sussex

This one-day workshop will take place at the University of Sussex on 12 May 2023, but online participation is also possible. The event will be open to the public and will be broadcast online  on Allegra Lab. 

Thanks to funding from the University of Sussex and EASA, we are in a position to contribute to travel and accommodation costs for up to eight early career / precarious / unemployed  colleagues travelling within Europe. You do not need to be an EASA member to participate in  the workshop, but we will ask that you join the LAWNET mailing list.

The LAWNET convenors: Agathe Mora, Julie Billaud and Judith Beyer

Workshop rationale

What is the role of researchers in articulating critique in a time of heightened political, social, economic and environmental upheaval? What kind of critique is necessary, possible, and useful in our current times, when the very idea of critical thinking seems threatened by authoritarian, illiberal power and post-truth politics? As such, we ask: What are the moral implications of a social science that remains mostly concerned with critique? What are the limitations of such a framing outside the walls of academia? What alternatives do we have? Linked to this conceptual preoccupation is a practical one. In a time when critical perspectives are often not welcomed by institutionalised power, ethnographers face ever more difficulties in gaining and maintaining access to legal and governance institutions. What does increasing institutional closing down mean for political and legal anthropology as a field of research, but also of practice?

Brought together, these ethical and methodological dynamics in many ways reflect the balancing act between pragmatism and utopianism we also witness in our interlocutors’ experiences. These experiences, which chart a delicate track between utopia and dejection can serve as a yardstick for our own reflexive practice, beyond the intellectual double impasse of cynicism and relativism. As such, we encourage participants to reflect on the positionality of political and legal anthropologists as researchers-in-the-world and, through this, on the future of research on legal and political processes.

EASA Network for an Anthropology of History NAoH

1. informal meetings - check website for dates - approx twice termly 

2. Network launch - April 21 - roundtable discussion Diana Espirito Santo Spirited Histories in conversation with Marjorie Murray (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) , Matan Shapiro (Kings College London), Charles Stewart (University College London), and Stephan Palmié (The University of Chicago). Workshop public anthropology/history

3. Book launch online for Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic Monumental Names with Yael Navaro and Zahira Aragüete Toribio

4. seminar series - autumn 2023 - watch this space! 

The European Network for Psychological Anthropology/ENPA

European Network for Psychological Anthropology (ENPA) 2023 Conference: Psychology and Anthropology in a Changing World, 7-9 June 2023, The University of Oslo, Norway (and hybrid). No registration fee. More info on the conference website: https://enpanthro.net/enpa2023-conference/

Medical Anthropology Youth Scholars (MAYS)

1) MAYS Annual Network Meeting:

The 14th MAYS Meeting will take place from 20-23 July in Geneva and online (hybrid). This year’s meeting topic is “Medical Anthropology and its Future(s): Between Waves and Currents." The Call for Papers is open until April 2nd, and more information is available here. A small amount of funding for participants is available for this event. 

2) MAYS Career Development Workshops:

This year, MAYS has began hosting career development workshops. The first workshop took place in March and was titled “Teaching medical anthropology in health professions’ education” by Margret Jaeger. The second workshop will take place on April 28th, 4PM CET, titled “Engaging and collaborating with public health and medicine practitioner-researches as a medical anthropologist: opportunities and challenges for ethics, epistemology, and funding," and will be led by Victoria Boydell. A recording of the first event and more information on the upcoming event is available here. 

3) MAYS Peer Meetings: 

MAYS hosts monthly and/or bi-monthly peer meetings on sub-topics of medical anthropology of interest to MAYS members. These meetings are meant to be informal, allow researchers studying similar topics to meet each other, and do not require preparation. Some of these groups have developed into open reading and writing groups. Throughout 2023, a number of peer meetings will be scheduled. These meetings are scheduled frequently, and information on the next planned meetings can be found here. 

Mediterraneanist Network (MedNet)

CALL FOR PAPERS: Crossing the divide: Exploring Mediterranean places across Mediterranean, European and Middle Eastern Anthropology

26-28th October 2023, Salle Duby, Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme, Aix-en-Provence, France

Keynotes: Dionigi Albera (IDEMEC - CNRS), Ruba Salih (Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna)

Deadline for papers: 15th June 2023

For more information see the network event page.

Anthropology of Fascisms (ANTHROFA) and EASA Anthropology of Economy Network (AoE)

1) Workshop Capitalism, Fascism, and the Environment

Dates: July 3rd and 4th 2023

Venue: University Cologne, Global South Studies Center (GSSC)

Convenors: Maddalena Gretel Cammelli, Michele Fontefrancesco, Ognjen Kojanić, Juliane Müller, Ingo Schröder, Andreas Streinzer, Sabine Teryngel

Keynote: Alexandra Coţofană

Capitalism has produced ongoing environmental crises. Degradation, mass extinction, and violent conflict about resources dominate the relations between ecology, communities, and economy. While the signs of environmental collapse appear as floods, drought, and storms, capitalism as the dominant global economic model reigns mostly unquestioned. Often, green capitalism is seen as the only alternative in the fight against climate change. Around the world, resource-intensive lifestyles provide the blueprint for the aspirational dreams of many. Fascist movements and a political climate of authoritarianism seem to align with radicalised extractivism and a violent exacerbation of environmental destruction to sustain such lifestyles.

The academic community sees a rise in literature discussing “fossil fascism” (Zetkin Collective 2021) or “carbofascism” (Acker 2021). This literature suggests a connection worth exploring between, on the one hand, fascism as a political movement and, on the other, capitalist modernity and its process of human exploitation of the Earth's resources. Examining this connection in relation to capitalism and past and current economic crises is equally important.

To increase anthropological collaboration in the investigation of a decisive conjuncture for humankind, we propose to focus on the nexus between capitalisms and fascism through the prism of the environment. The sites where we locate the intersection are manifold and range from the preventive incarceration of climate activists in Germany, to the role of coal optimism in US politics, to ecofascist terrorist attacks in New Zealand and the US, to Hindu nationalism and its weaponization of “spiritual capital” in India, or to the destruction of indigenous livelihoods in Brazilian extractivism. Hence, the range of ethnographic entry points are manifold — whether as hopeful trajectories of green capitalism, the violent dispossession of some people’s resources to fuel others’ lifestyles, or how “nature” features in discourses of contemporary fascisms — and we are looking forward to the suggestions of anthropologists inspired by our call bringing together scholars from the Anthropology of Economy network with the Anthropology of Fascisms network.

2) Anthropological dialogues on Capitalism and Fascism

Dialogue Series organized by the EASA Networks Anthropology of Fascisms, Anthropology of Economy, Anthropology of Labour and European Network of Queer Anthropology

Starting end of April - official announcement and program will follow at the end of March

Anthropological dialogues on Capitalism and Fascism 

A series of contemporary political developments suggest that we need to talk about fascism and fascist tendencies. The proposed series of online seminars foregrounds a compilation of topics that help us tease out contemporary political transformations and their relation to fascism and capitalism. We see e. g. the radicalisation of carceral states, racial capitalism and genocide and a mix of radical conservative, far-right and religious extremist movements and governments on the rise. These developments comprise widely different forms, e.g., radical Hindu politics in India, the Taliban government in Afghanistan, genocide in China, natalism in the US, or deadly migration regimes in Europe. Yet, we argue, setting them alongside one another helps thinking about fascism and tease out differences from other political formations.

We want to inquire how these articulate with contemporary reconfigurations of capitalism through forms such as extractivism, dispossession, necropolitics, differentiation, and inequality. Hence, we seek to summon anthropologists interested in or working on these various themes and relate them to a critical and conceptual understanding of the power and dynamism of fascism.

The aim of the series is threefold, (1) to analyse a wide range of topical and regional developments, (2) to work on a shared understanding of fascism, and (3) to inquire into the articulation between fascism and capitalism.

EASA Muslim Worlds Network

The workshop "Rethinking anthropology in light of 'Muslim Worlds'" is the launching meeting of the newly established EASA Muslim Worlds Network. It will be held at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, Turkey, on 7 and 8 September 2023. More information can be found here: https://fb.me/e/ZEytGudp 

Age and Generations Network (AGENET)

Webinar series
On the 24th April, 11:00-13:00 CET a webinar on “Multimodal Ethnography and Digital Curating in Research on Ageing, Generations, and the Life Course” was organised.

Speakers: Daniel Miller (Anthropology of Smartphone and Smart Ageing, University College London), Megha Amrith, Victoria Kumala Sakti, Nele Wolter and Alvaro Martinez (Ageing in a Time of Mobility, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity), Tomás Sánchez Criado (Stadtlabor Berlin, IN3 - Internet Interdisciplinary Institute)

May/June 2023 webinar on social robots/technology for the ageing population. More event details will be made available closer to the session on our EASA website as well as the website of the network.

September 2023 webinar on “Aging as a Human Condition and Elderliness in the Absence of the Young in Muslim Kyrgyzstan”

Speaker: Maria E. Louw (Aarhus University)

October/November 2023 webinar surrounding the upcoming special issue “Ethical Concerns: Envisioning Ethnographic Fieldwork with Cognitively Impaired Older Adults”

In collaboration with Barbara Pieta (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Cristina Douglas (University of Aberdeen), Matthew Lariviere (University of Bristol) and Maria Vesperi (New College of Florida).

EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network (ANTHROMOB) 

Workshop: connectivities, ecologies, engagements: recrafting mobilities in the 2020s

13-15 September 2023

Sheffield, UK

From a once fringe approach within the social sciences to a now core field of inquiry in both research and policy, mobilities have become a central part of how many people conceive of the contemporary world. Yet, many of the challenges and changes that the world has faced over the past decade also necessitate rethinking the role of mobilities, and mobility studies, in the 2020s. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Fielding Challenges, Challenging the Field: The Methodologies of Mobility AnthroMOB workshop held at COMPAS, Oxford in 2013, this international workshop seeks to foster and develop new collaborative approaches for studying mobilities from an anthropological perspective. As human and non-human phenomena become at once more mobile and more sedentary, anthropologists, along with counterparts in fields such as media and environmental studies, sociology, and human geography, have taken to researching life in motion and lives in situ. This widening transdisciplinarity has called for the development of research methods that can approach the spectrum of new digital and non-digital forms of mobile life, as well as new interdependencies, materialities and ecologies. Taking inspiration from these shifts, this workshop will examine the connectivities and ecologies an (im)mobility approach affords. In particular, we seek to develop new inclusive ways of thinking about the human/non-human and digital/non-digital that help us engage with other disciplines, fields and stakeholders. Working with colleagues from across EASA networks (FAN, VANEASA, Medianth) this approach necessitates exploring how the methodologies circulating within overlapping areas of the human sciences have created new ways for anthropology to engage with the world.  Submissions will explore both novel methodological approaches and re-framings of "traditional" ways of doing research that reinvigorate the value of anthropology's understanding of mobility and method in these challenging times.

Call for papers out soon. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact: j.coates@sheffield.ac.uk

Anthropology of peace, conflict and security network (APeCS)

Online presence on EASA's site: /networks/apecs/
@Anthro_Security

We had our inaugural event on the 14th of March: a round table on Ukraine, One Year On: Listening to Ukrainian anthropologists: /networks/apecs/events. A second event took place on the 25th of April on the rise of the right in Palestine/Israel. 

Future events that we are currently working on will tackle the EU lethal border politics, as well as the ethics and politics of ethnographic research in violent contexts.

Call for panels is open for the joint, interdisciplinary conference organised by The Collaborative Research Centre “Dynamics of Security” (SFB/TRR 138) and the Anthropology of Peace, Conflict, and Security (APeCS) Network:

Peace, conflict, and security in times of existential crises: Critical, interdisciplinary, and public engagements 21–22 March 2024, Marburg, Germany. The aim of our conference is threefold:

1. First, we aim at deconstructing dominant narratives of existential crisis by showing the historicity of today’s crises and their perceptions, and the ways in which multiple overlapping and sometimes contradictory processes have led to the current state of turmoil in the world.
2. Second, we aim at strengthening interdisciplinary understandings of existential crisis that are grounded in solid empirical and historical examinations.
3. Third, we aim at enhancing the academy’s possibilities of engaging critically with the broader public regarding the articulation of responses to burning issues that occupy the public space of debate in our times of crises.

(Limited) funding will be available to precarious scholars. Deadline: 7 July 2023. View details.