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- Convenors:
-
Regina F. Bendix
(Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Ullrich Kockel (University of the Highlands and Islands)
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- Format:
- Roundtables
- Stream:
- Disciplinary and methodological discussions:
- Location:
- Aula 11
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 April, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
The disciplines gathered under SIEF's umbrella challenge scholars to be mobile and intellectually flexible. The round table brings together voices from different generations to discuss the impact of academic mobility on disciplinary configurations locally and internationally.
Long Abstract:
When choosing to study a particular discipline, perhaps pursuing a Ph.D. in that field and feeling encouraged to pursue an academic career, a young scholar rarely foresees the track changes that lie ahead, particularly in fields such as European Ethnology and Folkloristics. A postdoc may require an interdisciplinary focus; a first academic position may be focused on teaching students how to write papers and leave little time for research in one's actual field. Alternately, a position may be in a different country from the one a person has trained in and confront the lucky winner with a rather different disciplinary configuration and habitus. Positions may be confined to three or less years, foreshadowing a future move already when one begins, or they may contain the task of building up a particular new direction not as of yet articulated within one's original field of study.
Within Europe, and within the disciplines gathered under SIEF's umbrella, the opportunities and the challenges to be mobile and intellectually flexible have arguably massively increased. The present round table seeks to bring together scholars of different generations whose biographies contain multiple moves. Do such mobile spirits have an impact on disciplinary configurations locally and/or internationally? What parameters are fruitful for an internationalized, supra-local articulation of a discipline and what stumbling blocks are there?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 April, 2019, -Regina F. Bendix (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from experiences in studying and teaching Volkskunde,Folklore, (Cultural) Anthropology, and European Ethnology on two continents and in four countries, the contribution will reflect on the interface of administrative arrangements with dynamically changing disciplines.
Paper long abstract:
not ncessary - round table!
Ullrich Kockel (University of the Highlands and Islands)
Paper short abstract:
In different countries the disciplines of ethnology, folklore and indeed anthropology lead a rather precarious existence as a result of institutional decisions. While that creates volatile career prospects, it also opens up job opportunities. How does this insecure situation shape our disciplines?
Paper long abstract:
not needed (round table)
Francisco Martínez (Tampere University)
Paper short abstract:
My professional life is shaped by emigration, discontinuity and multiple imaginaries. I have a trans-career, working at the intersection of different scales, agendas & locations, going across, trans-mutating, transporting, being part of a global transmission of people, ideas, standards, & money.
Paper long abstract:
Polyglotism and the simultaneous attachment to multiple places is becoming a professional requirement and not simply an autobiographic accident, producing a multiplicity of rootedness, developing different kinds of encounters with others. More and more people find it necessary to move far away from friends and family, working in institutions and projects at the peripheries of the academic world, creating new circuits of exchange yet appearing personally painful, disorienting and time-consuming (di Puppo 2016). And yet, location still matters, affecting our temporality, mobilities, networks, conversations and access to funding. We can even talk of anthropology being done at different speeds within Europe based on our actual position. Further, the link among our fieldwork sites as well as among the locations of our academic affiliations is often autobiographical, related to our personal life and family (Jiménez Sedano).
Locality itself is being perceived as increasingly ambivalent for contemporary scholars. Also, we experience the competing logics of mobility and internationalisation, and that of privileging the locality and those who belong to it (Simoni 2016). Yet the mobility of people entails also a transfer of ideas, which might influence how geographical spaces are thought (Laviolette et al. forthcoming).
Hence, it's relevant to discuss questions such as:
- How does one know when one is at home?
- To what extend does geography matters for carrying anthropological research?
- What kind of continuities and discontinuities arise?
- What role does European anthropology play in the local economies of knowledge?
Elo-Hanna Seljamaa (University of Tartu)
Paper short abstract:
At best, mobility broadens horizons and gives rise to collaborations that contribute to the greater good. To make the most of this potential, a receptive audience is needed: curious colleagues and students, an open-minded public. Paradoxically enough, one also needs the luxury of immobility.
Paper long abstract:
This proposed contribution draws on my experiences in the field(s) of folklore studies in Estonia, Finland and the United States.
I argue that at best, mobility broadens horizons and gives rise to lasting opportunities for collaboration that contribute to the greater good. However, to make the most of this potential, a receptive audience is needed in the broadest sense of the term: besides curious colleagues and students in one's own and other disciplines, an open-minded public. Paradoxically enough, one also needs the luxury of immobility.