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Based on original archival research, this paper asks what alternative re-shapings of concepts of failure and success the history of the longest standing socialist utopian colony, Llano del Rio, provide and reveal about genealogies of and entanglements with material and idealogical failure.

Paper long abstract

“The colony failed, but failure provides meaning,” (Shepperson 1966:176) Wilbur Shepperson writes in the conclusion of Retreat to Nevada: A Socialist Colony of World War I. Shepperson’s book is a study of Nevada City, Nevada, a socialist cooperative colony of people who opposed World War I and who sought new communal and experimental ways of life there from the spring of 1916 until the colony’s demise in 1918. Today, like other 20th century socialist utopias in the US such as the Llano del Rio colony (first located in California and then re-located to Louisiana), the Nevada City colony contains only a few remains, and Nevada City is but another of Nevada’s many ghost towns. Founded on May Day, 1914, just two months before the beginning of World War I, Llano del Rio declared its existence to be the “birth of a new order of social relations" and became the longest standing socialist utopian experiment in the US though it stands only in ruins today. Based on original archival research on the history of Llano del Rio held at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, this paper asks what alternative re-shapings of history the ruins of Llano del Rio provide. If the same logic and narrative that has conventionally been applied to Llano del Rio—the ruin as a symbol of the experiment’s failure, and an implied inevitable failure at that—was applied to our contemporary physically resplendent ruins, how would that re-conceptualize failure?

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This paper examines how peripheral failure shapes queer life in Kutaisi, Georgia, producing affect, care, and belonging under authoritarianism, migration pressures, and hierarchies of success.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores failure as a spatial and affective condition produced by processes of peripheralisation, in which queer bodies, places, and futures are hierarchically ordered. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Kutaisi, a post-industrial city in western Georgia, I examine how queer people inhabit spaces and temporalities marked by political stagnation, economic decline, and moral narratives of "non-success," and how these conditions shape everyday practices of care, attachment, and belonging.

Within national and increasingly authoritarian imaginaries, the periphery is not simply distant from centres of power but is actively produced as a space of delay, insufficiency, and non-arrival. Kutaisi is repeatedly framed as a city that failed to: modernise properly, remain economically productive, and to embody the future-oriented promises of the nation-state. Queer lives within this space are folded into these narratives, becoming emblematic of peripheral failure itself - non-reproductive, morally suspect, and temporally out of sync with hegemonic visions of success.

Georgia’s recent authoritarian turn has intensified these dynamics. The shift from a quasi-democratic to an openly authoritarian regime was articulated during electoral campaigns centred on "protecting families and children from a non-traditional future". Notably, early campaign events were staged in peripheral cities, marking the periphery as both more "traditional" and more governable, while simultaneously deepening the peripheralisation of queer bodies.

The paper considers how peripheral failure shapes queer everyday life in ways that are open-ended, contingent, and sometimes contradictory, raising questions about belonging, care, and the limits of hegemonic narratives of progress, success, and futurity.

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This paper explores how the performance of ‘being European’ as experienced by Greek young adults impacts the sense of belonging in different spaces. It details how "failing to be European", succeeding to, or rejecting the performance altogether, polarizes the lived experience in different ways.

Paper long abstract

The paper starts by addressing the general lived experience of ‘post-failure’ Greek society, resulting from the discursive language that surrounds the 2008 economic crisis. This event, placing Greece as indebted to the EU and other Member States, sets the scene for the framework of escaping from failure or reaching success by inhabiting or performing ‘Europeanness’. Young-adults, who in the current societal sphere and economic deficits already find themselves having feelings of failing to reach the signifiers of adulthood, have to navigate this secondary collective identity, next to their national one, on an axis from failure to success. The paper further argues that this axis is often also experienced as going from ‘Greekness’ to ‘Europeanness’, holding similar connotations.

The paper continues to posit that this leads to polarization surrounding any conversation on European integration, collaboration, labour migration or globalization; making these contested topics in society, politics, and the lived experience alike. Similarly, framing failure to ‘be European’ on this axis posits inhabiting ‘Greekness’ as the opposite of success, leading to the recreation of foreign negative stereotypes amongst Greeks themselves. Depending on the space, the placement upon this perceived axis impacts feelings of belonging, ingroup dynamics and opportunities for these young-adults navigating their future-making. Additionally, within that framework, individuals have experienced alternatively or sometimes simultaneously being shamed for not being successful enough in their Europeanness, losing their Greekness, and their expressed desire to try and change their position on this axis.

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In Cuba’s migration/return encounters, failure-talk allocates entitlement and polices belonging: migrants’ non-sharing is read as inability or refusal (“bad” belonging). Returnees invoke choice and discretion. Tracing disputes across scales, the paper situates this in a North/South moral economy.

Paper long abstract

Return migration and diasporic visits to Cuba activate a failure/success axis that does more than evaluate trajectories: it functions as a distributive judgement through which entitlement and belonging are negotiated. Based on ethnography in Havana and Viñales and research with Cuban migrants in Europe, this paper examines disputes that erupt when returnees and visiting Cubans face claims on migration’s gains (money, goods, investments).

In these encounters, non-migrants who remain on the island (“stayers”) leverage a key asymmetry: the capacity to police who counts as “from here”. They link belonging to solidarity, reciprocity, and "repartir", and treat redistribution as a test of loyalty and worth. When returnees do not share, the same fact is made to mean two things that can coexist and intensify polarization: incapacity (the migration “failed” to yield fruits, a failure often individualized), or refusal (choice and discretion are recoded as disloyalty and moral failure).

Tracing these classifications across scales, from household quarrels to neighborhood reputations and broader narratives about “real” nationals and quasi-foreigners, the paper complicates any neat separation between personal “moral failure” and collective politics of belonging. It situates failure-talk within a wider North/South moral economy that structures expectations of sharing and raises epistemological and political questions about which moral languages ethnographic analysis ends up reproducing.

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This paper examines how migrant activists in Chile contest hegemonic narratives of failure through alternative practices of citizenship. Based on ethnography, it shows how ciudadanía migrante reimagines belonging and political engagement beyond exclusionary value hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how migrant activists in Chile engage and contest hegemonic narratives of failure that structure contemporary politics of belonging and citizenship. In the context of restrictive migration regimes and discourses that frame migrants as failed subjects—failed workers, failed citizens, or failed members of the national community—I analyze how activist networks rework political engagement through alternative understandings of citizenship. Drawing on ethnographic research with migrant organizations, the paper explores how the notion of ciudadanía migrante is mobilized not as a fixed legal status, but as a political and moral project oriented toward collective belonging.

I argue that migrant activism can be understood as a creative response to polarising value axes that distinguish success from failure, inclusion from exclusion, and legitimacy from rejection. Through three interconnected dimensions of political practice—festive protest, acts of solidarity and care, and more conventional forms of political activism—activists unsettle dominant expectations of political participation and citizenship. These practices refuse the framing of migrant political action as deficient or ineffective, instead reimagining citizenship as an ongoing, relational process of community-building.

By attending to both activists’ practices and the meanings they attribute to them, the paper shows how citizenship becomes a tool for contesting failure as a hegemonic classification and for opening alternative political horizons beyond polarisation. In doing so, it contributes to anthropological debates on failure, political subjectivity, and belonging by highlighting how marginalized actors creatively challenge exclusionary regimes of value and articulate possibilities for more democratic and inclusive futures in contexts of heightened global mobility.

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This ethnography examines how failure under hegemonic pressures polarizes radical offshoots in Israel/Palestine, catalyzing moral crises, prefigurative practices, and abolitionist visions that redefine belonging, identity, and collective hope.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how failure operates as a polarising principle, shaping belonging, identity, and collective action among radical offshoot groups in Israel/Palestine. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, I study two opposing mobilizations – radical left-wing anti-occupation groups and radical hilltop settler groups – that emerged from the collapse of their parent movements’ ideals. On both sides, the failure of these movements and the Israeli state to uphold their core principles has sparked moral crises, spiritual disorientation, and collective doubt, revealing the limitations, exclusions, and contradictions of dominant political and societal orders.

Failure is relational and hegemonic: by casting out those deemed obsolete or morally compromised, it generates axes of inclusion and exclusion that structure social and political belonging. Each side interprets its movement’s failure as caused by the other, producing simultaneous radicalisation in opposite directions. Failure thus functions as both a tool of polarisation and a catalyst for prefigurative practices, enabling groups to imagine and enact radical alternatives to state institutions and mainstream society.

Despite divergent ideologies, both sides converge on abolitionist imaginaries, seeking to replace rather than reform the state, orienting collective hope toward morally coherent futures. By tracing how failure is experienced, operationalised, and contested ethnographically, this study illuminates the relational, affective, and political dynamics of polarisation, showing how moral collapse under hegemonic pressures can generate radical visions, prefigurative strategies, and new possibilities for reconfiguring societal norms and belonging.

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The paper examines how experiences of failure, resulting from lost elite status, are processed through AfD membership. The far-right party functions as a moral collective, allowing members to reinterpret failure and identify as a counter-elite through ritualized denigration of the liberal order.

Paper long abstract

Actors describe “failure” as situations in which intended goals are not achieved. This panel contribution examines how, amid systemic transformations, experiences of failure arise from actors’ inability to realize an “imaginative” identity (cf. Bohnsack 2017) of elite membership, and how these experiences are addressed through joining the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Based on 17 life-story interviews, I identify latent biographical issues that lead individuals to join the party. In this panel, I present a preliminary type of cases whose central concern is social and symbolic status loss following the systemic transformations of 1945 or 1989/90. Prior to these transformations, the cases belonged to social or cultural elites. The systemic changes altered the symbolic order, producing a mismatch between the actors' aspired and attainable status, experienced as a failure to live up to claims of elite membership.

Drawing on the interviews, I show how these status-related experiences of failure are processed through AfD membership. Rather than abandoning their orientation toward elite identity, actors reinterpret and erase their failure by portraying liberal society as corrupt, unfair, and doomed – a context in which climbing the social ladder is not only impossible but also undesirable. Practically, the AfD functions as a “moral collective” (Pettenkofer 2019) that, through the ritualized denigration of liberal elites as “naïve” or “corrupt,” makes it plausible for members to self-identify as prophetic counter-elites.

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The ethnographic study of so called "Fuckup Nights" sheds light on cultural transformation and new ways of dealing with failure and performing resilience.

Paper long abstract

Over the past decade, public representations of failure have taken on positive connotations. Beyond simple optimism, failure thereby is paradoxically framed as productive, detached from shame. Endeavours towards such ‘good failure’ become evident in ‘Fuckup Nights’ (FUN), the empirical base of my ethnographic study (Veit 2024). FUN are globally organized talk- and networking-event-series claiming to celebrate failures. They lend narrative authority to failed speakers who publicly share their stories with applauding audiences. By that, FUN encourage individual’s passages from failed to reinvigorating self and even aspire to foster cultural transformation.

An analysis of the stories, the “sayings” (Schatzki 1996, p. 89) alone, invites readings of FUN as yet another neoliberal technique of self-optimization. However, I argue, investigating the “doings” (ibid.) of the bodily and material practice of sharing failure in a stage-performance, highlights the role of performativity in the formation of an emotional and moral community in the framework of the event. By dealing with failure in this format, FUN allow individual “emotion work” (Hochschild 1979) through playful and celebratory “emotional practices” (Scheer 2012, 2016) of temporal order, flow, community, exposure, subjectivity, etc. However, despite their ritual-like transformative power (Fischer-Lichte 2012) FUN exemplify an emergent, yet fragile, cultural practice: While the event-format creates visibility and is broadly acknowledgeable considering its emotional, joyful style (compared i.e. to protests (cf. Gould 2009)), its accessibility, its mundane, noncommittal character and entanglement with market logics and affective capitalism limits their effects and renders their claims rejectable.

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Indigenous populations in Mexico have been considered for centuries as lagging behind Europeans and their descendants. This paper describes an anthropological experiment with decolonial humour with which urban indigenous individuals highlight the need to recognise them as part of the social fabric.

Paper long abstract

A group of amateur urban Indigenous comedians in Mexico are writing and recording jokes about the prejudices and discrimination they regularly face. Such centuries old bigotry is partly due to ideas of racialisation, but also to a sense of Indigenous peoples as failing to catch up with the rest. These ideas have determined not only attitudes and acts by individuals, but also structural discrimination with social and bureaucratic harmful repercussions. Hegemonic power in the country, as in most of Latin America, follows colonial forms of racialised and class-based ideas. These in turn have shaped the polarisation in the country between affluent and deprived populations, with racist and classist comments and humour invading public spheres. Nevertheless, the group of amateur urban indigenous comedians seeks not to focus on these colonial categories, but simply to poke fun at such inequalities. Their comedy does not include bitterness or indignation; it is rather light-hearted and conciliatory. The project that informs this paper is an anthropological experiment of decolonial humour from an indigenous perspective. Originally aimed at addressing racism that Indigenous migrants face in Guadalajara, Mexico, the experiment has evolved at the hands of participants. The jokes and sketches they have so far written and recorded include not only forms jests at discrimination and hostility but also about simple misunderstandings and squabbles. They laugh at tensions while also offering a vision of what communal life could be. In their view, the failure worth laughing about is that of polarisation itself.