Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Olivia Casagrande
(University of Sheffield)
Viola Castellano (University of Bayreuth)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Mariya Ivancheva
(University of Strathclyde)
- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Monday 29 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The roundtable is addressed to early-career scholars and asks how to critically document and engage with forms of precarity lived and witnessed in the field, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities they present to anthropology's epistemic crisis and the possibility for "thick solidarity"
Long Abstract:
This roundtable is addressed to early-career scholars and takes into account a specific triangulation happening in contemporary anthropology: the shrinking of academic employment, the political and epistemic crisis of (European) anthropology, and precarity as a generational condition affecting both ethnographers and research participants. In so doing the roundtable wants to interrogate the pitfalls, struggles, challenges as well as opportunities arising from such configuration, dialoguing with the EASA Report "The anthropological career in Europe" (Fotta, Ivancheva & Pernes, 2020).In the wake of calls for responsibility in the field of anthropology and to "Raising our voice" (AAA, 2020), early-career researchers' risk to bear the weight to redeem the discipline while struggling in the bounded condition of generational precarity. If precarity is "the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails" (Muehlebach 2013), what does it mean for precarious anthropologists to be subjected and, at the same time, to bear witness of its various degrees of dispossession? Instead of uniforming the experience of precarity in the name of generational proximity, imagining racial capitalism as an epistemic and material steamroller flattening global inequalities, the panel asks how to critically document and engage with the multiple forms of precarity lived and witnessed in the field. We welcome contributions reflecting on the potential for "thick solidarity" (Liu and Shange 2018) entailed in a shared condition of precariousness and confronting simultaneously the power differentials engrained in ethnographic practice and in the epistemic status of anthropology as an historical "white public space" (Jobson, 2019).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 29 March, 2021, -Ioanna Manoussaki-Adamopoulou (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper reflects on the present opportunity to review the conceptual distance of social and academic settings, by placing shared experiences of dispossession and solidarities per/formed in the field in the centre of anthropological praxis.
Paper long abstract:
Practicing Anthropology 'at home' has allowed me to observe a 'conceptual gap' between the experience of fieldwork as an embodied, deeply invested practice affected by socio-economic changes that shape the social experience of researcher and research participants alike and the setting where analysis takes place, systematically denying these interconnections. Whilst Anthropology assumes empathy towards research subjects, shared dispossessions and 'thick solidarities' enacted in the field are regularly discarded from academic writing. Beyond being a historically 'white public space', the epistemic status of Anthropology also often demands the performance of 'middle-classness'; adopting a position of 'safe' social distance, instead of recognising entanglements with situations of precarity and discrimination we write about. I argue for the 'bridging' potential of solidarity (Rakopoulos 2016) not only to counter the effects of the 'business of Anthropology' (Cabot 2019), still reproducing the neo-colonial violence it critiques, but also to produce 'thicker' descriptions of contemporary social experience.
Letizia Bonanno (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
What's pushing us to keep on engaging with precarious and often unwaged academic work? Is it love for knowledge or, rather, the individual pursuit for power and prestige which, as such, undermines any possible forms of solidarity?
Paper long abstract:
We, early career scholars, face multiple forms of precarity deriving from hyper- and inter-institutional mobility as well as from an increasing casualisation of work. Not least, from the dramatic shrinking of the academic job market. Much of the work we do in academia is unwaged: we’ve to write grants and job applications while dealing with many invisible administrative tasks attached to teaching duties.
Yet, we continue to comply with the demands of academic institutions, abiding by the neoliberal imperative of flexibility. Flexibility is now synonymous with precarity.
Yet, we trick ourselves and say we do it for the sake of love. Love for what? Love for knowledge, a love of philosophical nature a là Badiou, which is political and aims at reshaping power relations? Or do we do it for another kind of love? That love which looks more like an individual pursuit of power and prestige and, as such, undermines any possible forms of solidarity? We keep on doing unwaged academic work; we know it is exploitative. Yet it grants us some status. And possibly hope?
Francesco Fanoli (Independent Scholar)
Paper short abstract:
Through a comparison between the situations of young Senegalese wrestlers and early-career anthropologist, this provocation reflects upon the possibilities and challenges of building a politically efficacious solidarity.
Paper long abstract:
“Sociology is a combat sport”, Pierre Bourdieu famously said. While he was pointing to the social sciences’ usefulness as a self-defence tool against the naturalization of social arbitrariness, I’ll take Bourdieu’s sentence more literally. In a provocative stance, I’ll stress some similarities between the condition of young Senegalese wrestlers and that of early-career scholars. The differences between academia and làmb (Senegalese wrestling with punches) are so evident that this could not be more than a mock (but hopefully productive) comparison. By proposing this comparative provocation, I’ll reflect upon two interrelated questions: How does apprehending the situation of Senegalese wrestlers through a critical anthropological approach can best serve as a base to forge a politically efficacious solidarity? How does viewing the situation of early-career anthropologists through the lens of làmb can cast a new light on it and help acting upon our predicaments?
Lisa Grund (Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi)
Paper short abstract:
What forms of continuity and solidarity can we establish with our research and relationships in the field, throughout times of uncertainty and precarity? How to transform our professional gaps into something meaningful and empowering?
Paper long abstract:
As early-career scholars/anthropologists, we spend many periods in our lives in temporary, tax-free scholarships and teaching contracts without rights to social security. Simultaneously, especially those with caring responsibilities, experience the impossibility of keeping up with the rat race in productivity. Riddled with this precarious work-life situation, what are ways we can create continuity with our projects and research relationships laboriously nurtured over time? How can we keep our political engagement with and moral commitment to our research and field?
We spend much time in a felt “non-place" and seemingly insignificant “in-betweenness” of existential waiting. We experience gaps between applications and negative results, between the ending of grants and yet another extension. It is becoming pressing to rethink and appropriate these apparent empty spaces. Indeed, is this limbo not creative and critical to our professional development as anthropologists?
How can we transform our shared precariousness into something empowering and meaningful, despite its numbing and silencing effect? It becomes ever more urgent to consider ways to confront this crisis collectively and establish solidarity outside academia’s walls and consider the fight for social justice as a continuation and moral responsibility with the other.