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3. Overview EASA 2024 conference in Barcelona

Decisions on panel proposals imminent.

The 18th EASA Biennial Conference will be hosted by Universitat de Barcelona 23-26 July 2024: EASA2024: Doing and Undoing with Anthropology.

The conference will be hosted by the Department of Anthropology of Universitat de Barcelona (UB). Catalan and Spanish anthropology have been historically peripheral to the big schools of anthropological research, but in the last decades they have experienced a considerable development, and established an open dialogue and strong ties with European and Latin American anthropology. We have opened the call for panels to our local languages, Spanish and Catalan, in addition to EASA´s official languages, English and French.

The two main venues of the conference will be the Facultat de Geografia i Història of UB and the Museu Marítim de Barcelona. They are located in El Raval, in the centre of Barcelona. While being in the centre, El Raval is also a social periphery: a migrant and working-class neighbourhood that has experienced an intense process of gentrification and touristification in the last decades. The neighbourhood constitutes an appropriate platform to reflect on questions of interest to European (and global) Anthropology, including the flows of people, knowledge, commodities, and capital shaping contemporary social life; the human and non-human activities involved in place-making processes; the construction of meaning and hope at the intersection of centre and periphery. We would like the neighbourhood to be a protagonist in the conference: several activities, such as visits and laboratories, will be organised within the neighbourhood.

The conference theme is “Doing and Undoing with Anthropology”. 

Anthropology has been questioned from sometimes opposite directions: it has faced growing decolonial critiques as well as calls to restore the values of so –called “Western civilization”. These criticisms cut to the core of how, and what we do as Anthropology: how it produces and reproduces itself, at several levels. First, they highlight the limits of the discipline, and provoke adversary reactions to interdisciplinarity, or on the opposite, encourage anti-disciplinary and anti-academic approaches. Second, there is an increasing awareness of the uneven relations between centres and peripheries, the hegemony of English-speaking countries, at a time when international funding agencies increasingly require research produced in English. Third, they impinge upon the growing precarisation and casualisation of labour, that results not only in the general deterioration of working conditions, but also of the production of knowledge. All these problems may be common to many disciplines but seem to be affecting Anthropology with a particular intensity. Claims to “let anthropology burn” have been made, proposing to “undo” anthropology as we know it. In these terms, “undoing” anthropology may not mean simply to destroy or abandon the discipline, but to disassemble and reassemble it differently. What would “undoing” anthropology imply? How can we reimagine and reconfigure what it means to do anthropology today? How can we find new ways of doing and undoing in the broadest possible sense?

We are planning for a dual mode conference: delegates will have the option to attend in-person (f2f) and/or online with both types of delegates able to convene, present, chair, discuss, and attend the relevant sections of the conference.