Short Abstract

This panel invites critical ethnographic explorations of how "the project" has emerged as a dominant funding, organizational and ideological form that shapes development interventions, knowledge production in NGOs and academia and the imagination and possibility of the future itself.

Long Abstract

In this panel we seek to interrogate simultaneously projectocracy - the governance rationality that fragments social transformation into time-bound and donor-driven initiatives - and the projectariat, the precarious workers whose labor sustains this regime in three overlapping instances.

First, we invite critical anthropologies of how various institutions and programs like the World Bank, USAID or RRF produce temporal horizons, claims to social change and concrete realities of intervention, while reproducing broader structural constraints and hierarchies. The aim is to examine the gap between project promises and lived realities, the audit cultures that govern success metrics, and how "projectized" development reproduces dominant logics under technocratic guise and „application prose”.

Second, we seek to turn the anthropological lens towards the social sciences, ethnographically examining academic knowledge production under project-based funding regimes and the birth of academic projectocracy, entrenched in very specific bureaucratic circuits, application networks and experts casts. How do competitive grants shape what questions get to be asked, what topics to be researched and which communities become "researchable"? What counts as critical and dissident knowledge in such an environment? We also analyze the tensions between long-term ethnographic commitment and short-term funding cycles, and the ethical and political implications of parachute research.

Finally, we suggest to look at projects as specific neoliberal designed vehicles for manufacturing social worlds and their futures. Whether in development programs or research proposals, projects demand predictable outcomes, measurable impacts, and linear timelines. Yet whose futures are being projected and what does the future look like as it is imagined through the constraints of the project. Project-to-project existence also fragments biographical time, precluding long-term planning and entrenching short-termism. The casualized workforce represented by the projectariat experiences chronic precarity while shouldering responsibility for project success. Their expertise accumulates across projects yet remains unrecognized and unusable in future endeavors.

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