Short Abstract

This panel examines polarisation as a splitting of the chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981): fractured times and spaces that unsettle ethnography. We ask how anthropologists write, think, and live within these fragmentary temporalities, navigating uncertainty, relational tensions, and collective possibility.

Long Abstract

This panel examines the temporal and spatial dynamics of polarisation within anthropological practice. Building on the conversations begun at the 2025 summer workshop convened by the Network for an Anthropology of History and Heritage (NAoHH) and the Future Anthropologies Network (FAN), we approach polarisation not only as a political or epistemic condition but as a chronotopic one—a pulling apart of shared time and space that unsettles the encounters and narratives through which anthropology is made. If ethnographic knowledge relies on a shared time-space of sense-making—extending beyond the encounter to include “past experiences, future events and imaginative (narrative) space–times” (Ritella & Ligorio, 2016, p. 218)—what happens when chronotopic articulation becomes fragile or impossible?

As practitioners and as people, we experience swings between aspiration and exhaustion, solidarity and competition, engagement and the slow violence of precarity, often alongside our interlocutors. These dynamics echo the asymmetries that shape our field relations, where participation, recognition, and hope are unevenly distributed. As early-career anthropologists, we reflect collaboratively from a shared yet contingent standpoint.

We invite contributions that disrupt anthropology’s presumptively homogeneous ethnographic present. We explore what it means to work in fragmented, intimate spaces where positionalities shift and stable ground is elusive, and suggest that such spaces can be generative reservoirs (Dinerstein, 2022) for rethinking method, time, and relation. How, then, do we witness, record, and remain accountable within these entangled temporalities? What does polarisation feel like, how is it embodied, and what methodological or collective possibilities does it open or foreclose?

We seek reflections that move between poles and attend to the grey spaces in between—those unstable coordinates where ethnography continues to unfold and where alternative futures may become imaginable.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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