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Accepted Paper:
Filling the gaps: solidarity and cooperation in times of crisis
Lisa Grund
(Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi)
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.