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- Convenors:
-
Tom Bratrud
(University of Bergen)
Chakad Ojani (Stockholm University)
Matthew Keracher (University Milwaukee-Wisconsin)
Rigas Karampasis (University of Oslo)
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- Chair:
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Dimitra Kofti
(Panteion University, Athens)
- Discussant:
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Kari Dahlgren
(Monash University)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores places previously understood as ‘peripheral’ that are (re-)emerging as ‘centers’ in a polarised, saturated, and interconnected world. As maps are revised and territories revalued, we ask: For whom, and when, is a place considered central or peripheral—and why may it matter?
Long Abstract
This panel explores how places typically considered ‘peripheral’ may (re-)emerge as ‘centers’ in a polarised, saturated, and interconnected world. Ideas of ‘center’ (as hubs of activity, influence, or strategic interest) and ‘periphery’ (as distant, subordinate, or unimportant) were central to dependency theories of the 1960s-70s, where they were used to explain development and underdevelopment through the lens of capitalist expansion. The concepts have also been applied to more local contexts, particularly to understand interdependencies between cities and the countryside.
However, both ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ can be problematic and misleading terms, especially when applied literally to areas and ideas. Places understood as peripheries to some may be central to others, and the experience or status of a place may shift depending on geopolitical dynamics, technological developments, nostalgia, or changing cultural values. In the panel, we invite papers that ethnographically explore the potential of places previously understood as ‘peripheral’ that are 'becoming (again)' in a world increasingly without a clear center. As maps are revised and territories revalued, we respond: For whom, and when, is a place considered central or peripheral—and why may it matter?
By focusing on the ‘becomings’ of previously ‘peripheral’ locations, we examine how new strategic relationships, resource demands, or infrastructure projects reveal shifting and contested understandings of place. In doing so, we adjust the anthropological lens, which has more commonly sought out sites of enduring displacement (e.g., the post-colonial) or loss of prominence (e.g., the post-industrial) when engaging with peripheral concerns. Instead, we explore places whose (re-)emerging qualities challenge and inspire claims to both periphery and center—including seasonal settlements, remote working villages, digital nations, and outer space—and the contexts through which these evaluations are made.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
In Norway, there is a renewed interest in moving to abandoned rural smallholdings reflecting a desire to escape urban pressures, seek digital detox, and reconnect with nature. This paper explores how such rural ‘peripheries’ gain value and emerge as new centers of longing and meaningful living.
Paper long abstract
In Norway, a country of rugged landscapes, smallholdings (small farms) have historically formed the backbone of the national settlement pattern and played a major role in shaping ‘the Norwegian model’ of dispersed settlement. While 90 per cent of the Norwegian population lived in rural areas of this kind in 1835, today around 80 per cent live in cities, and more than 30,000 smallholdings are abandoned. In late modern Norway, however, there is a renewed interest among young adults in returning to rural smallholdings. This interest is typically driven by desires to escape urban pressures and digital stress, to be closer to nature, to gain a greater sense of autonomy, and to do meaningful physical work. The trend is reflected in the popularity of social media accounts documenting the refurbishment of abandoned smallholdings—which often attract (hundreds of) thousands of followers. For over a decade, ‘smallholding’ has also been one of the most frequently searched terms on Norway’s dominant online marketplace, Finn.no. Similarly, the long running TV series Where No One Would Believe Anyone Could Live (2002–), which showcases people living in remote places, remains one of the national broadcaster NRK’s most-watched programmes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural and urban Norway in 2020–2026, this paper examines how the return to rural smallholdings—seen by some as the epitome of the periphery—has become the central site of longing and a meaningful way of life for others.
Paper short abstract
Situated at Moldova’s tri-border with Romania and Ukraine, Giurgiulești has shifted from a peripheral Danube port to a central borderland infrastructure hub, revealing how geopolitical disruptions can rapidly elevate marginal sites to strategic importance.
Paper long abstract
This presentation analyzes Giurgiulești, Moldova’s only port on the Danube, tracing its transformation from a peripheral and corruption-marked outpost into a site of heightened European strategic significance. Completed in 2005 at Moldova’s southernmost tip, the port was originally envisioned as a driver of national economic development but remained marginal for more than a decade. Russia’s war in Ukraine has since reconfigured regional transport corridors, elevating Giurgiulești into a critical logistical node. This rapid shift has generated contestation among local, national, and international stakeholders, each advancing competing visions of the port’s role within an evolving regional connectivity network. In response, EU-funded initiatives have sought to adapt the surrounding infrastructure by repairing broad-gauge rail links to Romania, modifying customs regimes to alleviate road congestion, and adjusting waterways ill-suited to intensified traffic. Drawing on initial interviews with port managers, local officials, and national and international actors, the presentation examines how these cross-border interventions materialize shifting power relations and foreground the frictions inherent in governing geopolitical borderlands. The analysis employs the concept of the chokepoint to illuminate these dynamics. Chokepoints, whether physical crossings or bureaucratic bottlenecks, make infrastructural vulnerabilities and geopolitical tensions legible by concentrating delay, control, and uncertainty (Carse et al., 2019). The turning of the port into a chokepoint exemplifies how peripheral sites can “become” centers through congestion effects produced by geopolitical and geo-economic change. Ultimately, the case reveals the impact of imperial peripherality when formerly marginal locations gain strategic relevance.
Paper short abstract
As food systems receive renewed attention amidst concerns about climate change, sustainability, and local livelihoods, this paper focuses on how Spain's “peripheral” agricultural zones emerge as key sites of transnational migration, European food production, and populist discontent.
Paper long abstract
In the summer of 2025, the hottest summer on record in Spain, anti-migration riots broke out in Torre Pacheco, in response to the beating of an elderly Spanish man. The beating had been attributed to migrants of North African descent, with right-wing populist groups such as Vox inflaming anti-immigration sentiments in the ensuing days. Rioters took it upon themselves to “hunt” for migrants in the town of 41,000 inhabitants (Forero 2025), of which over thirty percent are migrants, and many of them agricultural workers.
The province of Murcia, where Torre Pacheco is located, is often referred to as "la huerta de Europa [the orchard of Europe]” for its outsized role in the supply of fresh fruits and vegetables in the European food market. Murcia and other key agricultural zones such as Valencia and Andalucia attract new arrivals to Spain who do not have their documents in order and who often find agriculture to be the only sector where they can find employment. The work is dangerous, exploitative, and precarious, yet essential for the Spanish economy and the European food system.
As food systems receive renewed attention and urgency amidst concerns about climate change, sustainability & resilience, and local livelihoods—as seen in the European protests against the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement—this paper focuses on the agrofood industry in Spain and its rural agricultural zones to examine how Torre Pacheco and other towns previously understood as “peripheral” emerge as key sites of transnational migration, European food production, and populist discontent.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how - despite dominant framings that render it peripheral through narratives of smallness, remoteness, and victimhood - doomsday tourism and the "Future Now Project" have paradoxically positioned Tuvalu as central to contemporary debates on climate justice
Paper long abstract
Tuvalu's emergence as a global symbol of climate crisis appears paradoxical: a nation the colonial world rendered "small," "remote," and "disappearing" now commands unprecedented geopolitical influence. Yet this paradox dissolves when examined as deliberate strategy and not an accident. Through decades of international diplomacy that strategically mobilizes vulnerability as capital, Tuvaluan leadership has transformed narratives of weakness into instruments of moral authority and defiant presence.
This paper demonstrates how tourism, diplomacy, and digital nation-building function as contested sites where Tuvaluans assert control over their own representation. When young Tuvaluans reject doomsday merchandise and online content about "the disappearing islands" they contest not the reality of climate threat, but their reduction to international spectacle. Similarly, Te Ataeao Nei" (the Future Now Project) extends this logic, as a defiant assertion that Tuvaluan sovereignty and "fenua" -- an indivisible entanglement of physical territory, cultural identity, ancestral belonging, sociality, and community -- will persist regardless of physical inundation. Yet these governmental and youth-driven refusals coexist with competing visions. Thousands of Tuvaluans pursue migration through the Falepili Union; others invest in coastal adaptation; still others embrace digital preservation. Each choice reflects different calculations about futurity, belonging, and survival.
The paper traces how Tuvalu's historical trajectory from colonial marginalization through ethnonational consolidation to contemporary digital innovation reveals a consistent pattern: the strategic mobilization of apparent weakness into forms of power. The centre Tuvalu now occupies reflects neither fantasy nor gift; it emerges from the persistent labor of refusal, adaptation, and world-making under climate-induced existential threats.
Paper short abstract
Middle-class mobilities from "central" Istanbul to peripheries illuminate how negotiating the boundaries between these normatively charged signifiers entails class contestations. Classed apprehensions of urban imaginary vis-à-vis center and periphery continually relocate and thus magnify Istanbul.
Paper long abstract
Istanbul’s center and peripheries have historically shifted yet the normatively and politically charged relationship between these two signifiers endures. This ongoing shift is enabled and enacted through border negotiations and contesting boundaries between center and periphery simultaneously entails negotiations over class. Istanbul’s in-between middle classes – waged Istanbulites who pay rent, tuition and feel ambivalent about “making it” in the city – redefine and recenter peripheries to maintain and claim middle-class urban positions. Thus, social class is necessarily spatial.
Istanbul’s in-between middle classes reckon with “farness” as sought versus imposed. Unlike affluent Istanbulites who claim choosing farness through suburban residence, in-between middle classes must continually come to terms with whether, how and why they are literally and conceptually “far” from the center. Moreover, dwelling in the periphery entails constantly fencing off places of sociality to avoid mixing with neighboring “others.” Finally, these ongoing border negotiations relocate Istanbul, possibly in the periphery yet still distinguished from Turkey’s countryside.
This talk is based on 18 months of fieldwork in 2024–2026 with middle-class Istanbulites who have in the past decade moved from Istanbul’s central neighborhoods to three peripheral locations. Through outward mobilities we analyze the classed apprehensions of Istanbul’s changing urban imaginary vis-à-vis center and periphery. This exercise also unsettles common analyses of Istanbul’s housing construction boom since the 2000s by illuminating how economies of desire, i.e. the revalorization and resignification of the periphery thus magnifying Istanbul, can be gauged as bottom-up incentive for what is generally interpreted as a one-sided, government-led process.
Paper short abstract
Focusing on cross-border care work and care entrepreneurship in the Czech borderlands, this paper shows how peripheral positions enable strategic navigation of transnational inequalities through geographic arbitrage, complicating centre–periphery understandings of East Central Europe.
Paper long abstract
Centre–periphery frameworks have long conceptualized East Central Europe as structurally dependent, marginalized, and shaped by extraction toward Western European centres. This paper engages critically with these approaches by examining how peripheral positions are not only constraints but also conditions for strategic action within transnational care economies. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Czech borderlands, it focuses on care workers commuting between the Czech Republic and Germany and on care entrepreneurs who establish transnational institutional care arrangements for German-speaking clients.
Care workers engage in geographic arbitrage by living in the Czech Republic while working in Germany, navigating wage differentials, labour regimes, and costs of social reproduction across borders. Care entrepreneurs similarly mobilize centre–periphery asymmetries by situating care provision in the borderlands, balancing regulatory, linguistic, historical, and economic inequalities between Germany and the Czech Republic. These practices depend on the region’s peripheral positioning within European political and economic hierarchies, yet they actively reproduce and recalibrate these hierarchies in everyday organizational practices.
Rather than challenging centre–periphery relations by recentring the borderlands, the paper conceptualizes peripherality as a relational and productive condition. It shows how peripheral regions function as strategic interfaces where transnational inequalities are translated into care arrangements, thereby complicating static understandings of periphery as merely exploited or neglected within European integration.
Paper short abstract
In West Papua, Asmat rituals animate an underground cosmos as a centre of sovereignty. Rejecting linear progress, its cyclical temporality challenges governance and theology, revealing power beyond modern cartographies.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how the Asmat underground in West Papua reconfigures notions of centre and periphery through cosmological endurance and ritual resurgence. Often framed as marginal within Indonesian governance and Catholic theology, the underground emerges as a vital centre of sovereignty during longhouse (jee) inaugurations. These rituals revive an immanent cosmos where ancestral and metahuman presences animate social life, challenging transcendental frameworks that separate sacred from mundane. Rather than a nostalgic return, the underground asserts its autonomy as a withdrawn yet potent object, shaping politics and ethics alongside and beyond bureaucratic and ecclesial structures. Its temporality contrasts with linear development and state chronologies: cyclical, recursive, and resistant to closure. This layered temporality positions the underground as a site of asynchronous sovereignty, a smoldering force that exceeds official recognition. By foregrounding the underground as a cosmopolitical centre, I argue that what counts as peripheral is contingent on temporal and ontological frames. The Asmat case invites anthropological reflection on how places deemed marginal endure as centres of power, not through infrastructure or capital, but through ritual intensities and cosmological depth that destabilise dominant cartographies of governance and modernity.
Paper short abstract
Swedish space professionals navigate a throny contradiction: they seek to make peripheral geographies central, even as their value depends on their constructedness as peripheral. Key to their efforts is the reframing of emptiness from a precondition for extraction to a resource in its own right.
Paper long abstract
This presentation focuses on Sweden's sounding rocket range, Esrange, located outside the subarctic city of Kiruna and overlapping with the reindeer-herding territories of several Sámi reindeer herding villages. As part of the Swedish state's efforts to tap into developments in the global space economy, the launch site is currently undergoing expansion to enable small-satellite launch capability. The paper examines how space professionals navigate the contradiction of attempting to reposition peripheral geographies as central, even though their perceived value to space activities depends on their historical constructedness as empty and peripheral. This involves a shift in how emptiness is framed: whereas earlier narratives of the region's presumed emptiness were tied to promises of abundant resources – such as timber and iron ore – space professionals seeking to establish an Arctic space hub increasingly treat emptiness as a resource in its own right. Drawing on ethnographic research among some of these actors, as well as on science-fictional portrayals of northern Sweden, I foreground the topological quality of (extra)terrestrial relations as a challenge to assessments of spatial emptiness, including the region's imagined proximity to outer space and its remoteness from things terrestrial. The presentation ultimately asks whether a topological perspective could help calibrate classic ethnographic methods for inquiry into domains that remain peripheral to conventional, grounded ethnographic research.
Paper short abstract
This paper takes up the vantage point of remote working software developers in a rural Norwegian village living in an ‘everted periphery,’ where spatial distance and infrastructural proximity create new dilemmas around autonomy amidst technological connection.
Paper long abstract
Steven E. Jones (2013), drawing on William Gibson’s notion of “eversion,” describes a hybrid condition in which the digital network has “turned itself inside out” and “colonised the physical world”. This eversion reconfigures spatial perception: “Here” now names the mundane state of constant connectivity underpinning everyday life, while “There” marks the rare zones where the network recedes. Rather than two discrete realms, we inhabit a “mixed” or “augmented” reality in which the digital and material are inseparably meshed.
In a mountain valley village of around 300 people in rural western Norway, the infrastructural challenges of a rugged landscape once secured what James C. Scott might call a “zone of refuge,” where the friction of terrain kept distal power and bureaucracy at bay. In 2026, with 5G connection in the air and fibre-optic cable underground, that landscape has been ‘everted’ by the opaque grounds of constant connection. The terrain that once compelled autonomy has become eclipsed by a transnational digital “stack” fostering an ethically unresolved and pernicious dependence.
Within this context, this paper follows a cohort of remote-working software developers living in this ‘everted periphery.’ Intimately engaged with digital technology's making, yet wholly dependent on closed-source proprietary services in everyday and professional life, their position offers one vantage point on the stakes of realising new paradigms of autonomy amid ethically unresolved infrastructural dependence.
Paper short abstract
This paper focuses on the emergence of identity politics following the relocation of Indonesia Capital City (IKN) to East Kalimantan. By recentering its periphery, political configuration and contestation on indigenity and other identities arises in the local realm responding new hope and fear.
Paper long abstract
This paper discusses the identity politics that emerged following the relocation of Indonesia New Capital City (IKN) in East Kalimantan. When the state is recentering its periphery-from Java Island to East Kalimantan- a new political configuration and contestation on indigenity and other identities arises in the local realm. Local people started to reconstruct or invent new cultural identities by distinguishing, enacting or uniting ethnic/group boundaries through various mechanisms, justifications and interests. They started to create new political entity based on indigeneous, kingdom, and local strongman identities. These cultural politics became prominent due to a new power constellation and resource distribution that created hope and fear-inclusion and exclusion- in the context of rapid social change generated by the construction of the new capital. From this case, the reconstruction of new indigenous group (Balik people) is an attempt to respond to the exclusionary effects of IKN development by strengthening their identities and seeking support to achieve recognition of land right. On the other hand, the other two groups actively seeking opportunity and perceive state project not as an enemy, but as a basis to access resources. Forum Mufakat (local strongman-based organization) and the Aji Telik Foundation (kingdom-based organization) build justification and legitimacy to leverage resources. When the former incorporating themselves on new services sectors economy by utilizing racketering, the later focus on (potential) land claim based on historical justification.