1. President’s Letter
President Ana Ivasiuc addresses the membership
Many of us have returned from the EASA2024 conference in Barcelona with new energy imprinted by the success of the conference, the many inspiring panels, presentations, labs, and events, and the passionate conversations on the past, present, and future of EASA in a world in turmoil. I wish to thank the tireless Barcelona Local Committee, the amazing NomadIT team, the dedicated Scientific Committee, my inspiring fellow members of the Executive Committee and all those present at the conference for turning the 35th conference of our association into a success. My gratitude goes in particular to the many of you who stopped us, members of the Executive Committee, on the hallways of the University and on the streets of Barcelona to convey your appreciation of our work and to ask how you can get involved in the association’s life. This is heartwarming on so many levels and true reward for the work of our team over the last 18 months. Thank you for your kind words and for your commitment to make EASA a truly inclusive and supportive community of peers.
We enter the final stage of our mandate as Executive Committee with this energy of community and of renewal. Let me briefly mention what we have been working on in the past few months and what our plans are for this autumn and winter.
My wonderful colleagues Hege Høyer Leivestad, Hayal Akarsu and Dominic Bryan have set up our piloting Mentorship Programme, pairing seventeen brilliant early career scholars with seventeen mentors who will provide them with personalised guidance and support over the current academic year. This initiative is part of our effort to shape EASA into a community that is supportive of early career, precarious scholars, and I am grateful to those who accepted to play this role in the first piloting phase of the program. We hope future executive committees will adopt the programme as a perennial feature and develop it further to support early career scholars.
We have announced plans for a website redesign, which is now well under way. We have now settled on a new logo designed by Juhani Juurik, our designer-cum-anthropologist. The logo marks a continuity in EASA’s identity while having more colour and vibrancy, reflecting the way EASA has evolved towards inclusivity and amplifying the voice of our early-career - often precarious - scholars in the community.
The Strategy of the association will be proposed towards the end of the year. In a bid to produce a strategy that is responsive to our members’ needs and desires, we invite EASA members to fill out a survey aimed at sharing with us your vision, needs, and priorities, and attend the two participatory online workshops that we are organising in November to give further shape to the strategy and integrate our members’ vision. The workshops are organised as fora where particular strategic directions regarding themes such as anti-precarity actions, public anthropology, publishing, communication, and lobby will be discussed and rendered concrete. You will find more information in the topic on the Strategy.
This autumn our association will debate and vote on an important Motion proposed by members in accordance with the EASA bylaws. The Executive Committee takes this Motion concerning collaborations with Israeli academic institutions extremely seriously and acknowledges its importance as a peaceful method of pressure in light of the staggering Israeli violence against Palestinians. In light of debates held at the EASA2024 conference, it also acknowledges the diverging opinions of members on the issue, and the fact that some members might lack the necessary information to make an informed decision on their vote. This is why the Executive Committee worked together with NomadIT to add a members-only forum to the EASA website, where members can debate and post information with the purpose of supporting EASA members’ informed decision on the motion.
Access to the forum has been consciously limited to the EASA membership. It has come to our attention that a person from outside the association, unknown to any of our members, was present at the AGM in Barcelona and disrupted the debate on the Motion from the outset, expressing ‘disgust’ at the message of the Motion. Unfortunately, this tactic - that our Palestinian colleagues are familiar with and that is often used to disrupt debate - imprinted a confrontational tone to the discussions that should have been avoided for the sake of a truly open and respectful debate among anthropologists.
The Executive Committee urges all members to engage with each other on the forum respectfully and in the spirit of reflecting the discipline’s ability to deal with complexity and conflicting opinions. The rules for engagement in the forum are stated clearly in the forum. The forum will be moderated and expressions of disrespect or attacks ad hominem will be promptly removed.
The forum will be maintained as an internal tool of communication past the vote on the Motion and will be developed and embedded in the new website.
In what follows, you will read more about our work over the past few months and the changes that we brought to the association - changes that we hope reflect the majority of our members’ vision and wishes. For those of you who want to get involved, there is ample opportunity to do so: the time has come to call for new book series editors and for candidates for the next Executive Committee.
I end my message with immeasurable gratitude for the work of the Working Group on Academic Freedom and Human Rights, our outgoing book series editors, the NomadIT team, Juhani Juurik - our logo and website designer, Radu Racareanu - our strategy facilitator, and last but not least, my incredible fellow Executive Committee colleagues for all the work they put into what follows.
