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- Convenors:
-
Daniela Lazoroska
(Lund University)
mette my madsen (National Museum of Denmark)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Location:
- Politicum, 135
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
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 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2026, -Paper short abstract
We examine a research funding application as a site where power relations, precarity, and mismatched expectations converge, asking how the pursuit of "fundability" and explorative research can come at the expense of the temporary and junior staff drawn into a project's planning and execution.
Paper long abstract
This presentation addresses an increasingly common manner of securing research funding in neoliberal academia: through research applications. Through a case discussion, the aim is to show how the process of making a project proposal can crystallize various power relations, precarities, freedoms, silencings, and mismatched expectations. It addresses how the process of crafting the proposal, and working to make the project more fundable and explorative, might be done to the detriment of the increasing number of temporary staff potentially involved, with the project effectively becoming a white elephant for junior scholars, both in its planning and potentially in its execution.
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.