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Paper short abstract

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.