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- Convenors:
-
Daniela Lazoroska
(Lund University)
mette my madsen (National Museum of Denmark)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how the discipline of anthropology can sustain rigorous, accountable work from within an increasingly precarious, short-term and uncertain disciplinary landscape.
Long Abstract
As the world grows increasingly fragmented and polarized, the urgency for anthropology to address divisions becomes ever more pressing. Anthropology plays a vital role in emphasizing interconnectedness, equity, and collaboration, and in imagining a more inclusive world. Yet core anthropological practices, such as sustained engagement and deep understanding of social worlds, are challenged by an academic employment and funding landscape that is itself precarious and unequal.
This panel reflects on the consequences and possibilities for the anthropological project and ethos in a context defined by short-term employment, limited specialization opportunities, precarious working conditions, and reliance on diverse, and often industry-driven, funding.
How should we e.g. navigate growing dependence on funding bodies while remaining accountable to the communities with whom we work? What happens when open-ended research questions are reshaped to fit funders’ expectations? Meanwhile, cutbacks in the social sciences and humanities have rendered junior researchers increasingly replaceable, producing short cycles of shifting field-engagements and temporary contracts, or exits from academia altogether. We must ask: how does short-term employment affect our ability to conduct rigorous research, attend to the complexities of people’s lives, and represent social worlds with depth - especially under accelerating pressure to publish? Furthermore: What becomes of research when projects end prematurely? What happens to us as researchers, and to the people we work with, when we are abruptly forced to withdraw?
We invite participants to reflect on the tensions between anthropology’s disciplinary ambition to engage deeply with a fractured world and the increasingly fragmented disciplinary landscape in which we work. We ask contributors to explore possibilities for collective action across countries, institutions, and tenure statuses: What can we do for one another, for the issues we study, and for the discipline itself, so that anthropology may fulfill its ambitious potential?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Through crip time and crip futurity, disability anthropology refuses ableist temporality, instead using extended pauses, asynchronous collaboration, and variable pacing as conditions for staying with trouble and cultivating crip futures.
Paper long abstract
This paper argues that disability anthropology, as a disability‑centered, action‑oriented, and Indigenous‑inspired project, offers a concrete model for imagining inclusive worlds from within anthropology’s own fragmented, precarious landscape. Drawing on crip time and crip futurity, I show how disability anthropology refuses the discipline’s default ableist temporality—its assumption of a non‑disabled researcher who can move freely, stay indefinitely, and conform to linear fieldwork and publication schedules (Kafer 2013; Ginsburg & Rapp 2024). Instead, it operates on crip time: projects involve extended pauses, asynchronous collaboration, and variable pacing that reflect disabled lives, without treating these shifts as failures.
Disability anthropology inherits action anthropology’s double mandate (Tax 1975) but reorients it around disabled and Indigenous epistemologies as co‑equal sources of theory and method (Menzies 2013; Montoya et al. 2023). It treats media, archives, and film festivals as sites of crip occupation, where disabled creators take up space that settler and ableist orders have reserved for other bodies (Moore 2023; Linton 2015). In this way, disability anthropology is not a redemption of the discipline, but an ongoing experiment in staying with its trouble: bending the clock, refusing to leave, and cultivating the crip futures disabled people and their communities are already building.
Paper short abstract
This talk explores the anthropologists’ efforts to make Anthropology more institutionalized and visible through their interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary large-scale research projects in Turkey, based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 15 anthropologists.
Paper long abstract
Currently, there are only 11 Anthropology Departments in Turkey, five of which were founded in the 2000s onwards. Considering that there are 208 universities in the country, it is safe to say that the discipline has a marginal status. This inevitably prompts anthropologists to be employed in other departments, such as Sociology, Cultural Studies and Political Sciences, and conduct large-scale research projects with scholars from other disciplinary backgrounds.
In this framework, this talk explores the anthropologists’ efforts to make their discipline more institutionalized and visible through their interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary large-scale research projects, funded by the national and European Union organization. It is based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 15 anthropologists, which focus on sharing experiences in conducting research together with researchers with various disciplinary backgrounds like computer sciences, linguistics, and political sciences in Turkey since the 2000s. This talk explores how the anthropologists take initiative in incorporating anthropology within these projects, such as theories of care and affect and methods of auto-ethnography and participant observation, as well as narrative and discourse analysis. Their efforts also include constant negotiations of disciplinary boundaries in trying to reach a consensus on practical tasks, such as time periods to be allocated for specific work packages of the research and analytical ones, such as the argumentation style while co-authoring an article. The talk covers different strategies that the anthropologists use to be as crucial teammates as the others within the projects, challenging the disciplinary hierarchies and making their disciplinary perspectives more visible and influential.
Paper short abstract
Increasingly precarious academic structures compress ethnographic time and ethics. Drawing on doctoral fieldwork with a marginalised community, this paper shows how ‘finishing on time’ can undermine care, trust and accountability, and considers alternative models of funding and scholarly solidarity.
Paper long abstract
Anthropology’s commitment to slow, relational and ethically grounded scholarship sits uneasily in an academic landscape increasingly shaped by precarity, compressed timelines and market-oriented funding regimes. My paper explores how these conditions reshape anthropological knowledge and the ethical commitments that structure research practice. Through reflexive analysis of my doctoral research in the Australian PhD system, I argue that the contemporary PhD is misaligned with the temporal and ethical priorities of social research. Short funding cycles, coursework compression, performance metrics and precarious employment produce uneven access to time, training and care, privileging candidates with institutional, social and economic capital while narrowing what topics can be pursued and how deeply researchers can engage. These pressures are consequential in research with marginalised or traumatised groups, where trust depends on sustained presence.
Based on my fieldwork with Vietnamese boat refugees and their families in Sydney, Australia, I illustrate how institutional imperatives to ‘finish on time’ conflict with community rhythms, memorial cycles and obligations of care. These tensions are intensified by my own positionality as the child of Vietnamese-Chinese boat refugees, rendering exit from the field not only methodological but also relational. By foregrounding doctoral training as a site where disciplinary values are enacted or eroded, I invite reflection on the kind of anthropology precarious systems produce. I also propose some alternative models of funding, supervision and solidarity needed for the discipline to remain accountable in a fragmented world.
Paper short abstract
This article is based on a practice of public anthropology in constructing soundscape database in indigenous communities in Taiwan. This paper not only explains this project sparked the community’s interest in listening to and recording daily life sounds, but also reflects on its limitation.
Paper long abstract
This article reflects on soundscape research in indigenous communities in Taiwan. Since 2019, I have conducted soundscape research in a Puyuma community. Puyuma people is one of the indigenous groups in this island. This research was designed as a practice of public anthropology and cooperative research with indigenous people, beginning with information sessions and sound workshops in the community. This paper explains this project sparked the community’s interest in listening to and recording daily life sounds, leading to nearly four years of work on the digital sound database. Although these sound recordings are fragmented and diverse, they piece together a multifaceted sensory world encompassing the community's relationships with environment, memory, identity, and emotion.A key challenge that emerged as we constructed the database was preserving indigenous intellectual property while also making the database accessible to the public. The solution to this problem was not straightforward. I also explain the experience of collaborating on a podcast with the community over the last three years to document the process of turning practical sensory ethnographic research into innovative social practice. Finally, I reflect on the challenges of this public and practical social science research, discussing the limitations as well as possibilities of collaborative, community-based social science research in contemporary indigenous societies.
Paper short abstract
In this experimental, auto-ethnographic narrative, I reflect on navigating the highly precarious context of academic anthropology and social sciences as an early-career researcher with a PhD.
Paper long abstract
In this experimental, auto-ethnographic and meta-textual presentation, I reflect on my experiences and emotions of navigating the highly precarious terrain of academic anthropology and social sciences following the completion of my doctoral studies at a large public university in Sweden. In doing so, I draw on my anthropological research on care labour, which looked at diverse forms of embodied and infrastructural care in urban settings, to provide a critical commentary on the disciplinary effects of fragmentation. First, I remark on how academic precarity and racialised border regimes shape and constrain transnational scholarship. Second, specific to the experiences of navigating Swedish higher education, I discuss how the welfare state and trade unions, though vital in supporting unemployed degree holders, effectively render scholars as ideal disciplinary subjects. Third, drawing on themes of care, social reproduction, and solidarity, I reflect on the unique challenges of algorithmic encroachment in academia and other professional domains, which both illustrates ongoing and new forms of precarity and depoliticization. In doing so, this presentation foregrounds how diverse and, more often than not, invisible, gendered and racialised forms of care work and caring remain central to not just the sustenance of academic scholarship, but also to forms of critique and solidarity that shape further epistemic, ethical, and political projects.