How Much Difference is Too Much? Political Anthropology from an Imperial Fault Line

Dace Dzenovska, University of Oxford

This talk draws on three decades of the anthropology of postsocialism and ethnographic research in emptying places in eastern Latvia to chart the reconfiguration of the political landscape after “the end of history.” Looking from the inter-imperial fault line between the European Union and Russia, I argue that twentieth-century imperial politics of inclusion—with all their constitutive exclusions—have been replaced by the equally imperial politics of separation, containment, and the moralization of difference. Across scales, at home and abroad, the rich are separated from the poor, and good is set apart from evil. Boundaries are policed and fortified. It is difficult to talk through walls or with someone one regards as evil. The differences are so stark that many fear they threaten the very foundations of polities and societies worldwide. Has the time of politics finally arrived, or is it the end of the world as we know it?

Dace Dzenovska is Associate Professor in Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford. She researches the changing relations between people, place, state, and capital in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. She is the author of School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia (Cornell, 2018), and the lead author of Living Emptiness: Place, Power, and Meaning-Making from the Baltic to the Russian Far East (forthcoming with Stanford University Press, 2026). She is completing a book entitled Empires We Choose: Migration and Sovereignty in a Double Periphery for Cornell University Press. Her articles have appeared in American Ethnologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Slavic Review, Focaal, History and Anthropology, among others. 

Anthropology in a Polarised World

We are witnessing an acceleration in the polarisation of communities, opinions and markets across the globe — and academia is no exception. As anthropologists, we have long emphasised the complexity and nuances of our interconnected, messy world. What role should our discipline and our research play today? Can we help create a world that is less divided and conflict-ridden? During the plenary session, we will explore how our discipline can approach polarisation with curiosity and care while acknowledging genuine differences and the various interests of different groups. We will also address the recurring theme of anthropologists’ engagement, the translation of ideas, facilitating encounters, and bearing witness to conflict in a polarised world. In this unstable environment, we will consider whether our methods and ways of thinking could foster healing and dialogue.

Guest speakers

Gwen Burnyeat is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Social Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, and PI of ERC-selected Starting Grant project “Stories of Divides Politics: Polarisation and Bridgebuilding in Colombia and Britain”, guarantee-funded by UKRI, which studies the people and organisations trying to build bridges across complex political divides in both countries. She was awarded the 2023 Public Anthropologist Award for her latest book, The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia  (University of Chicago Press 2022 and Spanish translation Editorial del Rosario 2024). She is also a writer, and uses fiction and narrative to explore the human experiences of political processes. Her creative work has appeared in Critical Muslim, The Dublin Review, Otherwise Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere.

Myles Lennon is an environmental anthropologist, a former energy policy practitioner, and Dean’s Associate Professor of Environment and Society and Anthropology at Brown University. He conducts ethnographic research on solar energy deployment, forestry, and agricultural land stewardship in both urban and rural communities of colour in the United States. His research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. His first book, Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism(Duke University Press 2025) was a finalist for the 2025 Julian Steward Prize for best environmental anthropology monograph awarded by the American Anthropological Association.

Luminiţa-Anda Mandache is a political and applied ethnographer examining how liberal ideals of autonomy and rights transform political cultures in communities marked by profound inequalities. Working in urban peripheries across Brazil, her work traces how non-governmental organizations and progressive movements become sites where new forms of collective morality, reproductive politics, and claims to (urban) rights are forged, reshaping what political engagement means in practice. Her work examined the local implications and potential of solidarity economy projects in transforming marginalized communities, youth citizenship, preference for female voluntary sterilization among low-income women and currently how poverty-reduction policies and class aspirations shape the reproductive plans of low-income women in Brazil. She is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Salzburg.

What's at Stake? Anthropology, AI, and Pluriversal Futures

There are arguably few paradigms in the history of technology that have stirred as intense a global uproar as Artificial Intelligence has unleashed in the last decade. A loose signifier of technical advances in self-learning systems designed as “deep neural networks” inspired by the human brain, AI is expanding across various fields of activities that anthropologists have long taken as sites of ethnographic and theoretical inquiry. Importantly, alongside actual instances of technology use and adoption, AI also comes with a thick cloud of speculation, especially about the imminence of “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) that is purported to overpower humans with self-guided goals. Will AI overtake humans with its uncontrollable agencies? Will this be the end of humanity as we know it?

The plenary discussion will take up this twinning of speculation and concrete application as an indelible feature of AI, raising questions about how we might make sense of the AI present. Compared to other disciplines, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to probe AI as sociocultural assemblages that expand within specific contexts of adoption and value regimes, challenging linear accounts of technological advancement and the dystopian-utopian binary.

Reflecting upon different aspects of AI that anthropologists have thematized in their work, the plenary will probe anthropology’s stake in defining the future course of AI and AI’s stake in defining the future of our discipline. Can anthropological scholarship on human-more-than-human entanglements and pluriversal ontologies offer critical pathways and ethical frames to recast AI? Within our disciplinary practice, how do we calibrate our methodological perspectives as AI expands as epistemic devices and how do we redefine our pedagogical techniques as students become some of the most voracious adopters of AI applications?

Speakers

Sahana Udupa (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Institut für Ethnologie)

Sophia Goodfriend (Harry Frank Guggenheim Research Fellow, University of Cambrige)

Mark Allen Peterson (Anthropology, Miami University) 

This plenary is chaired by Hayal Akarsu (EASA President, Utrecht University), and organised by Ana Ivasiuc (on behalf of the exec) and Sahana Udupa.