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?