Dear EASA Members,
I write to you with real excitement for our upcoming conference in Poznań, 21–24 July, which the local team and the EASA Executive have been building together for the past two years. The programme is now live, and it is rich: panels and roundtables sit alongside film screenings, ethnographic labs, and a full calendar of social gatherings. I encourage you to spend some time with the full programme before you arrive, if only to start planning which sessions you cannot miss.
None of this happens on its own. My heartfelt thanks go to the Local Poznań Committee, the Scientific Committee, our Networks and Working Groups, the EASA Executive, NomadIT, and every one of you presenting or convening in Poznań. The scale of interest this conference has generated is itself a sign of something larger: EASA is growing quickly, and gaining reputation as a leading professional association not only in Europe but well beyond it.
That growth is a gift, and it came with a real cost this year: we were unable to accept more than half of the panel and paper proposals we received, simply because Poznań’s venue could not hold everyone who wanted to be there. You can read my detailed statement on the selection process elsewhere in this newsletter. Turning away so many colleagues and their work sat uneasily with all of us on the Scientific Committee, which I had the responsibility of chairing this year, and with the Executive as a whole. It is precisely this growth that is now pushing us to rethink our conference model, building on work the previous Executive had already begun. We will bring initial proposals to the AGM in Poznań, including an open discussion on necessary updates to our constitution, to carry this work forward. I hope to see many of you there.
As you know, in 2024 we published our strategic plan around three priorities: strengthening public anthropology, embedding equity and justice across EASA’s activities, and offering members a high-quality range of professional development. Initiatives like the Mentorship Programme and the newly established Working Group on Public Anthropology are already turning these priorities into lasting practice, part of a broader effort to make EASA’s governance as horizontal and inclusive as possible. If any of this speaks to you, please reach out. There is room here to help shape what EASA becomes.
As I wrote in my last letter, the solidarity and care we build in our professional lives matter all the more at a time when academic freedom and human rights are under open attack, through shuttered departments, budget cuts hollowing out critical scholarship from the UK to Germany to Georgia, and more direct forms of censorship and repression, and against the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza and the wars in Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, and Iran. In Poznań, our Working Group on Human Rights and Academic Freedom is organizing two spaces to sit with these questions together: an Open Mic on Voices for Academic Freedom (Wednesday 22 July, 1:30–3pm, Historicum Library Hall), an informal floor for anyone who wants to speak, listen, or simply stand alongside others, and a roundtable, Anthropology and Anthropologists at a Time of Repression, Genocide, and Militarization (Thursday 23 July, 1:30–3pm, Historicum, 2. 102). I hope to see many of you at both.
Finally, some excellent news to celebrate: in 2026, Social Anthropology / Anthropologie sociale returned to Q1 status in the SCImago Journal Rankings, after a dip in 2022. This is a real achievement, and it belongs to all of you, our community of authors, reviewers, and editors, whose quality and rigour made it possible. A heartfelt thank you, and an invitation to keep this collective effort going. I want to especially thank our editors, and Ana Ivasiuc, our former president and current vice-president, for her dedication to the journal over these years. We are also circulating a call for two new editors to join Martin Fotta, Leonardo Schiocchet, Magda Crăciun, and Ville Laakkonen on the editorial team; details are in this newsletter. If you would like to meet the current editors informally, or simply learn more, mark the Social Anthropology reception in your calendar: Friday 24 July, 6 pm.
Let me close on a more personal note. I was in Istanbul last week for a workshop, and found myself picking up Olga Tokarczuk’s Kadim Zamanlar ve Diğer Vakitler (Prawiek i inne czasy; Primeval and Other Times) again, the book that gave me my first exposure to Polish literature, back when I was an undergraduate student in college. Meeting it again felt like a small coincidence, and it reminded me why it stayed with me all these years. Full of compassion and gentleness, the novel shows how people, animals, trees, and spirits are all part of one cycle of birth, growth, and decay, told across sixty fragments, each narrated from a different vantage – a family, a saint, a millstone, a stretch of forest, a dream, with no single voice allowed to speak for the rest. There is something in that structure I keep returning to for an association like ours: many vantages, held together not by agreement but by a shared devotion to the integrity and dignity of anthropological scholarship, and to one another as critical intellectuals.
I look forward to seeing you in Poznań, for the conversations our discipline demands of us, and for the joy and solidarity we still know how to make together, despite everything. And wherever our paths cross there, over coffee, in a corridor, between panels, I hope you’ll say hello.
With warm regards and anticipation,
Hayal Akarsu
President, European Association of Social Anthropologists