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This paper proposes projectocracy and the projectariat as analytical concepts for studying the project as a dominant mode of governance, future-making, and labour extraction. Drawing on an ethnography of EU-funded development in Romania, it sets the conceptual scene for the panel.

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In a village bar in eastern Romania, a field-worker for an EU-funded project spends his morning persuading a working mechanic to register as unemployed. The project needs inactive youth. The statistics say they exist. But here, there is just life.

This paper departs from that gap to propose two concepts. Projectocracy names the governance rationality that turns social change into auditable, time-bound procedure — evaluated by logics that originate elsewhere, successful when compliant, not when transformative. The projectariat names its shadow: the brokers, consultants, field-workers, and managed subjects whose expertise accumulates across funding cycles yet translates into neither recognition nor security.

I develop both through ethnographic fieldwork on a youth employment project in rural Romania. Three mechanisms structure the argument: administrative alchemy — the brokerage through which persons are converted into fundable categories; application prose — the technocratic language that disciplines what problems can exist and what solutions are thinkable; and the emergence of post-socialist strategists — subjects who learn to inhabit the project's fictions rather than believe them.

But the Romanian case is offered as heuristic, not diagnosis. These mechanisms operate wherever persons must become legible to funding apparatus — in humanitarian camps, universities, creative industries, state reform. The paper opens three lines of inquiry the panel takes up: the gap between project promises and lived realities, the reshaping of knowledge under project-based regimes, and the central question — whose futures get projected, and whose get foreclosed?

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Exploring contemporary ‘Research Culture’ in UK higher education, this paper shows how the silent normativities and temporal structures of projects produce friction between audit culture’s managerial epistemologies and the messy, relational complexities of culture.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the project form makes the epistemologies of ‘audit culture’ visible through its friction with ‘research culture’. Debates on ‘rituals of verification’ (Power 1998; Strathern 2000; Shore & Wright 2015) track how quantification and managerial accountability have reshaped higher education. As competition intensifies and resources dwindle, these logics increasingly collide with concerns about precarity, wellbeing, and the conditions of knowledge production. ‘Research culture’ has emerged as a strategic response—an attempt to diagnose and intervene in these conditions through actionable initiatives and measurable change (Royal Society 2017).

Recent REF 2029 guidance underscores the problem: the People, Culture and Environment element has been reframed as Strategy, People and Research Environment, with a reduced weighting, signalling the difficulty of rendering ‘culture’ governable through audit-like criteria.

Drawing on eighty ethnographic interviews across three UK universities—one research-intensive institution and two post-1992 teaching-intensive universities under financial strain—we show how tensions between culture as relational practice and culture as strategic object surface through projectification (time-bounded initiatives, pilots, action plans). Projectification is itself resource-dependent: where research-intensive institutions sustain dedicated teams to “do” research culture, post-1992 institutions often lack the apparatus to respond, producing uneven compliance and a Russell Group model exported into misfitting organisational realities. The normativities and forward temporalities of projects reproduce managerial logics while displacing relational understandings, incentivising performativity in the very domain research culture initiatives claim to repair. We argue that these frictions reveal the limits of audit: projects presume problems can be bounded, measured and resolved; culture repeatedly exceeds those assumptions.

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This paper offers (auto)ethnographic reflections on the growing impact of project culture on work in academia, activism and psychotherapy. It claims that under the guise of training and voluntarism, a Big Society regime subsumes certain type of labour under a coercive cyclical funding logic.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers reflection of the growing impact of project culture on work in academia and two adjacent fields that social scientists often consider as ‘escape routes’ from university labour. Bringing (auto)ethnographic examples of my own work in and research on academic, left-wing activism, and psychotherapy workplaces, I discuss the processes, mechanisms and technologies enabling the formal and real subsumption of such forms of work under capital. I suggest the emergence of what I call a ‘Big Society’ labour regime. Pioneered by UK’s conservative government of David Cameron, this regime uses the carrot of ‘training’, ’capacity building’ and ‘altruistic’ voluntary labour while disciplining the workforce into ever more extensive coercive un(der)paid voluntarism, sustained by precarious cyclical funding. In the last part of the paper, I discuss some emerging initiatives and other possible ways ahead for academic and other communities subjected to the Big Society regime to expose, confront, and – ideally – transform the institutional logics and locations that perpetuate this regime.

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University 'refugee education' initiatives can utilise projects creatively, but are also constrained by the short-termism, intensive labour and demand for novelty in project schemes as they grapple with competing and contradictory temporalities of education, humanitarianism and projectification.

Paper long abstract

In the aftermath of 2015’s long summer of migration, when over a million displaced people sought refuge in Europe, many universities set up higher education initiatives. These included full time preparatory programmes, alternative informal courses, scholarships, and ‘education pathways’ for refugees. Though these initiatives had different aims, politics and pedagogies, the vehicle through which many were realised were the same: projects. In part this was due to funding, with university education initiatives sitting at the intersection of academic and NGO schemes where project financing dominates. It was also due to the dialectic of crisis-response, which framed the way many states and institutions approached the situation, i.e. looking for time-bound ‘solutions’ to address issues relating to the ‘migration crisis’. Based on interviews with the academic and administrative staff who run these now decade-old initiatives in different European universities, ethnographic research at project events, as well as analysis of EU, national and institutional policies that frame or contradict funding schemes, this presentation explores how refugee education initiatives use projects creatively to keep core activities running; are constrained by the short-termism, intensive labour and demand for novelty in competitive project funding schemes; and grapple with the competing and contradictory temporalities of education, humanitarianism and projectification. It further asks if the deepening hold of projects puts the quality, expansiveness and efficacy of education at risk as 'project logics' narrow pedagogic and political possibilities, side-lining radical or alternative approaches.

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An autoethnography of an anthropologist navigating EU and Romanian project funding, examining how project-based work promises agency yet produces uncertainty, self-exploitation, and guilt. It shows how constant assessment reshapes selves, blurs life/work boundaries, and manufactures fragile futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers an autoethnographic reflection on life as an anthropologist-turned-project-manager navigating the terrain of public and applied anthropology projects funded through Romanian and EU schemes. While such projects create spaces for creativity and agency and may give one a temporary sense of empowerment, their outcomes remain structurally uncertain, assessments opaque, and risks fully individualized. Failure, funding gaps, or unexpected life events such as illness, are absorbed not as systemic effects but as personal shortcomings, often leading to self-exploitation, unpaid labor, and moralised guilt.

Living from and between projects blurs the boundary between professional and personal life, creating a condition of chronic self-exploitation and emotional precarity. The structure of the project demands constant self-performance: grant-writing as self-justification, financial reporting as narrative compression, often at odds with lived complexity. In this context, the project becomes both a site of empowerment and a mode of subjectification: one that bends the self to fit bureaucratic contours while simultaneously reshaping how futures are imagined and enacted. I ask: how do we endure under conditions of permanent assessment and uncertain continuity? How does project logic fragment time and selfhood, particularly when the “team” is a one-woman operation?

Ultimately, I argue that projectocracy manufactures fragile futures: futures that are incessantly projected, audited, and reported on, yet remain structurally uninhabitable for those tasked with realizing them. By foregrounding the lived experience of “becoming the project,” the paper contributes an intimate perspective on the existential, ethical, and political costs of projectised social worlds.

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The paper draws on fieldwork in Egypt to identify the dual temporalities reigning inside and outside projects: an unpredictable hunt for new projects versus a steadier horizon of expectations once a project is underway. It also argues that similar inside-out rhythms define contemporary anthropology.

Paper long abstract

In Egypt today, projects (mashari‘; sing. mashru‘) shape both statecraft and everyday life. While the military regime launches megaprojects to signal its national development ambitions, citizens pursue small-scale business projects to secure income and social improvement. Across scales, the project form structures time, action, and aspirations for improved Egyptian futures.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with men in Cario who invest time, efforts, and money in informal mashari‘, as well as on media and propaganda surrounding spectacular infrastructure projects, this paper identifies the dual temporalities that operate inside and outside projects. Whereas the quest for new mashari‘ tends to be haphazard and temporally jumpy, a mashru‘ already in motion spans a predictable horizon of expectations; it empowers project-makers to work in the present towards a future that they feel able to control. This temporal stability appeals both to precarious men seeking stable livelihoods and to the regime constructing a New Republic in the desert.

The paper further notes that similar inside-out project temporalities are recognizable to anthropologists in the field, at the desk, and as they struggle to build academic careers. Both in Cairo’s informal economies and at European universities, the project form not only mitigates precarity but also facilitates a form of dreamwork: a blend of bold dreams of worlds transformed and vision of the concrete work towards their realization. Indeed, one reason why projects are so ubiquitous and attractive is that they specify the smaller steps needed to mold the present into substantially upgraded futures.

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My paper examines the hybrid arrangements between the development sector and the Nepali state in governing labor. I explore this through the financial architecture of state-development arrangements, the spatial configurations of bureaucratic infrastructure, and the labor regimes of local government.

Paper long abstract

My research inquires into the Nepali state’s governance of labor as a form of state projectification. I examine this process ethnographically by situating myself within the Swiss-funded migration-for-development initiative known as the Safer Migration Project (SaMi). SaMi is a sector spanning program which sets migration policy agendas and provides public services to Nepali blue collar workers as they leave for the international labor circuits. It stitches the central, provincial, and local levels of the recently restructured Nepali state together along its project chain by giving each differential access to global capital. My paper focuses on the implementation of SaMi by local government in the Dhankuta district of the eastern province of Kosi. I examine the projectification of the state in three ways. First, I track the financial architecture of state-development arrangements, namely how aid money is distributed to local government via a complex mechanism mediated by the central government. At the center of this process is the project proposal, written jointly by local bureaucrats and aid workers. Second, I trace how the fluid boundaries between the state and development projects are inscribed into spatial arrangements. More specifically, I analyze the spatial configuration of the Migrant Resource Center, a SaMi institution, located within passport offices. Lastly, I inquire into the labor regimes of local government, specifically that of ‘half-sarkari’ contract workers whose salaries are paid for by projects. Neither politicians nor pensioned career bureaucrats, these projectariats who work on curbing migration paradoxically aspire to enter the international labor circuits themselves.

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Following Nicolae Gheorge’s method of documenting the gaps between the plan and the outcome, or expert knowledge and lived experience, our dialogical research experiment aims for an ironic analysis of local development projects in the field of Roma integration in Hungary and Romania.

Paper long abstract

The late Romanian Roma sociologist and civil leader Nicolae Gheorghe proposed to search for a new vocabulary in response to what he conceived as the failure of liberal human rights-based projects in the field of Roma integration amid the rise of nationalism and anti-Gypsism on a European scale. The ironic study of development aims to document the gaps between norm and practice, or expert knowledge and lived experience, as a way to avoid doing more of the same (such as reinforcing existing polarizations). Pulay collaborated with Gheorghe while doing fieldwork in a notorious “problem zone” – actually a mixed Roma and non-Roma Romanian poor neighborhood – of Bucharest, that became the target of development projects as part of the ongoing Europeanization of Roma issues. Balázs followed Gheorghe’s analytical guidelines during her collaborative research and community organizing work in a small town in northern Hungary, where two significant conflicts occurred in the post-socialist period, each giving rise to an NGO boom and successive waves of civil society and legal interventions. While these interventions produced visible and tangible rights-based outcomes in both instances, relations between local Roma and non-Roma residents became further radicalized in the aftermath of both events, and by 2010 the town had become a stronghold of the radical right. Finally, we present our results as well as failures to address the stakeholders by revealing the deep story of the conflicts and also to evaluate the prospects of critical renewal that Gheorghe envisaged both in social analysis and intervention.

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This paper examines the afterlives of project-based humanitarianism shaping aid for urban poor Syrians in Istanbul. It traces funding cuts, deportation regimes, and donor performativity by theorizing the “project afterlife” and its tensions with return, recovery, and deservingness.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the afterlives of projectized humanitarianism amid political ruptures and disasters that reconfigure aid regimes targeting Syrians living in urban poverty in Istanbul. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how drastic cuts to and redirection of international funding (accelerated by the rise of right-wing governance, the suspension of major aid streams such as USAID, and the fall of the Assad regime in December 2025) reshaped both the material conditions of assistance and the moral economies through which displacement, recovery, and “return” are governed.

Simultaneously, the Turkish state that has long positioned itself as the savior of oppressed Muslim siblings scaled back assistance and intensified its deportation regime as it receives a diminishing share of global humanitarian circulation. Despite an acute crisis in healthcare, education, and shelter, donor institutions continue to prioritize performative interventions (such as climate justice workshops while urban poor Syrians live in disaster-prone housing) or make access to services contingent upon return to Syria. I situate these shifts within what I call the "project afterlife": the disjuncture between temporal horizons and ideological premises of donor-driven projects and ongoing, nonlinear crises that structure displaced lives.

This paper investigates three key tensions arising from this disjuncture: (1) how teleology of project-based aid obscures the structural realities of post-catastrophe survival; (2) how project mentality manufactures the subjectivity of Syrians, upholding a hierarchy of deservingness independent from material need; and (3) how local organizations metabolize and repurpose these rigid project narratives to meet the urgent, everyday demands of the community.

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Northern Uganda has been subject to prolonged humanitarian and development aid interventions for nearly three decades. This paper raises questions of what it means to do research in a social and physical landscape marked by aid projects.

Paper long abstract

Northern Uganda during the LRA war and the subsequent reconstruction processes presents a case in which suffering was commodified through the proliferation of donor money, media attention, and government instrumentalization of aid. This aid marketplace led to local moral and financial economies driven by ‘selling stories’ – particularly trauma-laden narratives of bush war survivors – for consumption by NGOs, donors, and researchers. Reconstruction mobilized new and diverse stakeholders in search of funding for projects to ‘rehabilitate’ both individuals and society. The legacies of this aid marketplace now structure life for many inhabitants of northern Uganda.

Based on our experiences navigating interlocutors’ expectations, positionalities and narratives of NGO and research intervention, the projectocracy lens highlights the way the structure of ‘the project’ underpins challenges of researching and living in Northern Uganda after the LRA conflict. We focus on the life experiences of, and our own interactions with, one individual, Otim, as an entry point to illustrate the way project-thinking structures research and navigation in Gulu and the gap between ‘project promises and lived realities’. Otim exemplifies one form of the projectariat, as someone who navigated project-structured aid responses coming ‘out of the bush’ and has since positioned himself as a broker between LRA returnees and the NGOs, academics, donors, and government officials who constitute a significant part of the resource landscape in Gulu. Our interactions with Otim, both individually and together, illustrate not only his navigation of projectocracy but broader structural forces and precarity shaping our own positions and research frameworks.