Paper Short Abstract:

Research explores Slovak pastoralists' voice in the Transhumance nomination. Though the 2003 Convention emphasizes community participation, the state retains final authority, raising concerns about representativeness. Using participatory observation, it maps actors and power dynamics.

Paper Abstract:

This research explores the involvement of the pastoral community in Slovakia in the nomination of Transhumance on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. While community participation is central to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the inscription process involves multiple stakeholders. The final decision on inscription remains within the authority of state parties, raising questions about the representativeness of pastoral community involved.

Using participant observation and ethnographic interviews, this research examines the inclusion of the pastoral community's voice during the real-time Transhumance inscription process. It maps the network of actors involved, their interrelations, and the power dynamics at play unwriting the narrative of pastoral communities as remote, timeless and backward. By employing feminist methodologies (Dupuis et al., 2022) and drawing on the theory of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), the study critically analyses the extent to which the inclusion of local pastoral communities aligns with the 2003 Convention's stated goals and interrogates the broader implications of representativeness of pastoral communities in safeguarding living heritage. The poster features a detailed network analysis of the actors involved.

Paper Short Abstract:

The Romanian summer solstice feast is in decline in the rural areas. But since 2013, it started to be celebrated in the cities, under the influence of a new feast of the Romanian national shirt. The poster sketches the main lines of forging of a new national identity through an invented tradition.

Paper Abstract:

The summer solstice feast, celebrated all over Europe around 24th of June, takes two forms in Romania: one – Drăgaica – was traditionally related to the domesticated plants, while the other – Sânziene – was linked to the healing power of the savage plants. Both faces of the feast have almost disappeared, being encountered in many regions only as revivals.

But in the last few years, things started to change, in an accelerated rhythm. In 2013, an NGO dedicated to the promotion of Romanian values proposed the day of 24th of June to become The Universal Day of the Romanian Shirt (Ie). The new, invented feast was thus legitimated through the connection to the old feast of the summer solstice, when, as some Romanian folklorists claim (without having real data), the good fairies used to dance and bless the healing plants. This claim led to a plethora of new, invented practices, with little to no connection to the old solstice feast. Even more, this newly shaped feast got the role of forging or enhancing the Romanian identity, through the appeal to the Romanian blouse as well as to the ”traditional” (read: invented) feast of the solstice. The present poster tries to outline how the reshaping of the feast leads to the reshaping of the national identity.

Paper Short Abstract:

This study explores women’s experiences with parental leave , focusing on cultural expectations, work-life balance, and career reintegration. Using narratives from mothers, it proposes fiscally neutral flexible policies reflecting modern values addressing fairness and rethinking gendered labor norms

Paper Abstract:

This study examines parental leave policies from the perspectives of women’s lived experiences, addressing the congress theme of “unwriting” established norms around labor, gender, and family dynamics. It interrogates what has been done, what could be done, and what should have been done to align these policies with evolving societal values and economic realities.

Through an anthropological lens, the research explores how parental leave policies intersect with cultural expectations, work-life balance aspirations, and career reintegration. Drawing on narratives from mothers in Israel over the past six years, it reflects on societal shifts, including the rise of hybrid and remote work models, and their implications for fairness, flexibility, and continuity in the workforce.

The study proposes an innovative approach to unwriting traditional policy frameworks by identifying key elements of an ideal, fiscally neutral parental leave system. These elements aim to accommodate diverse family needs while balancing economic sustainability and gender equity. By analyzing parental leave as a dynamic intersection of personal and cultural dimensions, the research contributes to rethinking public policy to reflect contemporary values.

This דstudy invites engagement with the medium itself, reflecting on the relationship between form and content, and fostering dialogue on the role of unwriting in shaping progressive parental leave policies for future generations.

Paper Short Abstract:

In 2022, the saltwater lagoon Mar Menor became the first ecosystem with legal personality in Europe as a result of a large-scale grassroots mobilization. What happens if a "natural" entity is legally represented as a subject? Can that be a tool for a multi-species democracy in the Anthropocene?

Paper Abstract:

In this Poster Presentation, I will present the results and preliminary interpretation from data gathered during my first extended research stay at the saltwater lagoon Mar Menor in the southern Spanish region of Murcia. After severe eutrophication events caused mainly by agricultural run-off, the unique but highly degraded ecosystem has been granted rights and legal personality as a result of a law fought for by a large grassroots campaign. Stuck in the constitutional court until end of 2024, the new bodies that are to represent the Mar Menor can finally be instituted and can start working. But how can the interests of an ecosystem be noticed, listened to, interpreted and effectively translated for the arenas of law and politics? How are these representations done in practice and how are they being contested? What does the regeneration of the lagoon mean in a Rights of Nature Framework and in the Anthropocene where conservation baselines become less and less obvious in the face of global environmental change? Does the relation to the lagoon and its governance change and what difference does that make for stakeholders and the everyday life of people? Can the relationality that constitutes the more-than-human world be articulated in law?

Paper Short Abstract:

Photos of melting glaciers are symbolically loaded imagery of climate change, epitomizing the extend of loss through charismatic imagery. Arguing that glacier ontologies become defined with through ‘glacier gaze’, we turned it to a mundane site, and invited a snow dump to become an urban glacier.

Paper Abstract:

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. The melting of those charismatic massives is a central element in the shared imaginary of the loss followed by the anthropogenic climate change. Indeed, photo series of vanishing glaciers are recognized as some of the most iconic and symbolic imagery of the effects of climate change. Drawing from performative theory, we argue that glacier ontologies become defined through this ocular performance, which we coin a ‘glacier gaze’.

As glaciers are loaded with their rich symbolism, attuning to glacial thinking demands us to recognize loss, making glaciers as naturecultural entities ‘good to think with’. Thinking with glaciers, we turn our attention to more mundane and urban experiences of the effects of climate change. In a series of performative, collective workshops organised in a local snow dump site in Rovaniemi, Finnish Lapland in spring 2025, we turned the ‘glacier gaze’ to this mundane yet obscure site in an urbanized cryoscape, and invited a snow dump to become an urban glacier. By playfully amplifying the glacier gaze and changing its object to an urbanized, mundane everyday site, we aim to explore the effects and expectations implicated in the visualized practice of performing the glacier. Re-imagining an everyday site, like the snow dumps, could open a possibility to potential new ways of recognizing, researching, and thinking with climate change related loss.

Paper Short Abstract:

This poster explores the cultural and spiritual value of the ocean, emphasising its role in well-being, healing, and identity. It advocates for integrating these dimensions into marine management, addressing historical divides, socio-economic disparities, and access inequalities.

Paper Abstract:

The sea exerts a powerful influence over coastal communities, shaping their social and cultural landscapes through a variety of intricate and diverse interactions. While these connections highlight the ocean’s cultural value and its essential place in coastal lives, they are neither uniform nor equally distributed across communities. The research presented on this poster advocates for a broader recognition of these relationships within marine management frameworks, pressing for the inclusion of spiritual and well-being dimensions that are presently overlooked. The poster highlights themes of spirituality, cultural expression, interconnectedness with nature, healing, and the sense of access and loss emerge as crucial aspects of these relationships. This poster shows how differing relationships and understandings of the ocean expose historical divides between communities and ongoing socio-economic disparities that affect access to the sea. These narratives underscore the ocean’s role in supporting health and well-being, affirming the need to incorporate such values into marine management policies.

Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on a long-term individual and collective ethnographic engagement with plants, this poster concerns methodologies in/of more-than-human worlds and inquires into the processes of undoing, rewriting, and developing methodological approaches within an interdisciplinary research team.

Paper Abstract:

This poster concerns methodologies in/of more-than-human worlds, with a particular focus on plants, and presents the process of developing methodological approaches within an interdisciplinary research team consisting of anthropologists and biologists. There seems to be agreement that ethnographies of more-than-human worlds require breaking down disciplinary boundaries (Tsing, 2010), but the practicalities of transdisciplinary approaches remain ambiguous. In relation to ethnography, concepts such as the 'mode of wonder' (Ogden, Hall, & Tanita 2013) or the 'arts of noticing' (Tsing 2015) speak to our imaginations but tell us little about research methods and strategies. Drawing on a long-term individual and collective ethnographic engagement with plants in Istanbul (Turkey) and Gdańsk (Poland), this poster discusses research methods and strategies and the processes in which they were developed, as well as their limitations and potential outcomes. If undoing and rewriting concern ethnographic practice, this poster aims to bring to light the practicalities of research, with its muddiness, ambiguity and unpredictability.

The poster unfolds as follows. First, it presents the main research 'toolkit': our initial research methods and strategies, which were inextricably linked to personal and professional biographies. Secondly, it discusses the process by which the methodology was developed through more-than-human affective encounters. We argue that research is not only about dialogue, interaction, collaboration, friendship and fun, but also about conflict, friction, ambiguity and frustration. Thirdly, the poster explores the questions of more-than-human agency, representation and genre, and inquires into the practicalities of undoing and rewriting ethnographies with plants.

Paper Short Abstract:

This poster explores generative AI's role in student content creation, memory, and self-understanding.​ It highlights implications to collective memory, representational practices and personal narrative creation.

Paper Abstract:

This poster explores the integration of generative AI in student, building of personal experiences and interviews. The poster emphasizes how technology influences how students group their thoughts, think about time, recreate ‘memories’.

The goal my study was to contribute to existing discussions on the discursive perspectives on AI in education. By using lived experiences, I’m examining gAI’s role in aiding student’s content creation, how it assists students in interrogating institutional authority and enhances understanding of self. This work is situated was inspired by Herbert Blumer, Nicole Maurantonio, Martin Heiddegger, and Lisa Nakamura, among others. In this the poster I am to encrouage a rethinking of symbolic construction as it traditionally occurred.

The telos is to understand how gAI works with mental processes both in cataloging experiences and in forming collective memory. AI is changing the way we think about folklore; through interviews I explore the role of memory and imagination as intertwined with co-creation. Pre-lim interviews indicated that gAI assisted students in linking representational practices and narratives, especially when they wrote personal stories. for example, a student who is from a war zone using gAI to mentally locate landmarks that no longer exist. By co-creating assignments, gAI results in the formation of alternative discourses, for better or for worse.

In this I also foreground ethical considerations, emphasizing the need for students to verify AI-generated content and understand its limitations. This poster concludes by advocating for the thoughtful integration of AI in education, suggesting that banning these tools is impractical.

Paper Short Abstract:

This poster grapples with who to approach writting unspoken understandings, that have come to be the bulk of my PhD data. Through allusions and implications, the unspoken understanding of Hong Konger's quasi-refugeeness shadows most of my fieldwork. What does one do when silence unwrites data?

Paper Abstract:

Initially based on recording oral histories, much of my PhD data was to remain unwritten. However, during my fieldwork, I found that most of the things people ‘told’ me were unspoken, alluded to, and not recorded in the oral histories. Warned before every new introduction to ‘not talk politics or ask why [the Hong Kongers] left,’ conversations around the political tensions in Hong Kong and the reasons for migration shadowed most of my conversations and interactions in the field. It was well known, and never explained to me, why the BN(O) visa had been created by the UK government, and why so many Hong Kongers chose to apply for it. Since the mass protests of 2019 in Hong Kong, the creation of the National Security Law, and the persecution of any business, emblem, song, or person seen as too pro-Hong Kong independence, with particular focus on publishing housing and university students, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers have migrated. This poster tackles the dilemma I face when much of my research comes from allusions and unspoken implications, occasionally elaborated on through comments in private homes, where my position as researcher or friend became more ambiguous to my interlocutors. How does one reflect and write about what remains unspoken? When participation was explicitly driven by a desire to preserve oral migration histories, what does the ethnographer do with largely silent, compelling data on remembering unspoken quasi-refugeeness?

Paper Short Abstract:

How do positionalities oscillate during fieldwork, across multiple [state] fieldsites? How do bureaucratic processes limit the role of the ethnographers and, in doing so, reposition them as an extension of the state? What does this mean for the emancipatory possibilities of anthropological research?

Paper Abstract:

In this poster, I reflect on my current PhD research with claimants of the UK disability benefit 'Personal Independence Payment' (PIP). Conducted as a multi-sited ethnography, my field(s) span across legitimised stages of the PIP process and, simultaneously, extend beyond its officiated bounds to include support groups, preparatory workshops and activist spaces. However, this multi-sited approach has brought with it additional, and unanticipated, consequences: my positionality as a lived-experience researcher has varied significantly across my fields.

In my research with disabled benefit applicants, relating to one another across the intersectional axis of disability and class has been fundamental to co-constructing trust with my interlocutors. This is, in part, aided by the very dynamic of the ‘unofficial’ spaces that relatedness to my interlocutors has taken place. This relatedness has unlocked emancipatory research possibilities (Hartblay, 2020), too. In relating to one another’s circumstances, a level of mutual de-individualisation takes place – a catalyst of undoing internalised ‘deservingness’.

Contrastingly, my ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the PIP system has exacerbated alienation – entangling me within the process. Being restricted to non-participatory observation during my time at the Magistrates' Court gives me little opportunity to foster relationships with applicants. Simultaneously, employees demand, as equally as they ask, claimants’ consent for me witnessing their tribunal hearing. Far from mutual vulnerability, my ethnographic fieldwork within the PIP system has forced one-sided intimacy (Mingus, 2017) reminiscent of harmful disability research practices. In essence, how do we retain emancipatory rigidity within the multi-sited restrictions and limitations of the state?

Paper Short Abstract:

This poster expands on experiments with precarious methods in order to make ethnographic methods more interdependent and vulnerable to the hands of others. It will invite the audience to contribute their perspectives on methods in increasingly precarious worlds.

Paper Abstract:

This proposed poster presentation seeks to expand on my forthcoming book’s experiments with precarious methods. The book “‘You don’t know’: Precarious Methods and Life in a Workers' Hostel” experiments with precarious methods to enable more vulnerable and interdependent ways of apprehending and surviving wrecked worlds. Drawing on ethnographic research in a London hostel for precarious workers the book explores the political, analytical and practical limitations of using traditional methods when researching life in precarious worlds. It argues that in order to better apprehend precarious worlds it is necessary to experiment with precarious methods. This includes: 1)Enacting survivable methods to create room for immediate survival tactics and move towards other ways of being in the world; 2) Making the text precarious and unfinished to open up for more diverse analytical apprehensions, political reimaginings and collaborative potentialities; 3) Unsettling divides between academia and precarious worlds to facilitate a more intra-dependent exchange of methods, tactics and survival skills between people in precarious circumstances; 4) Resisting authoritarian knowledge by bringing forward and exposing analytical uncertainties and inconsistencies to disrupt academic and political desires for certainty and control and beliefs in glorified individual geniuses. Expanding on the book's experiments the poster presentation seeks to engage the audience to talk, write or post (on padlet) their own perspectives on the role of ethnographic methods in precarious worlds. The purpose of this will be to make my experiments with precarious methods more vulnerable and interdependent on the hands of others.

Paper Short Abstract:

Through an ethnography of people practicing trance states with therapeutic objectives, this poster presents a methodological reflection on the embodied exploration of these practices, the space for researcher experimentation, and the role of intersubjectivity and empathy in analyzing practices.

Paper Abstract:

Through an ethnography of people practicing non-possession trance states with therapeutic objectives, this poster aims to examine how to ‘doing sensory ethnography’ (Pink) based on the experimentation of these practices. By examining trance experiences and how they are lived by both practitioners and the researcher herself, this work opens a reflection on the embodied exploration of such practices and their "unwriting" analysis.

The first point will address methodological challenges: what methods should be used to capture the emotions, sensations, and affects experienced by individuals during these trances? How can they be ethnographically documented and represented as faithfully as possible? What role should be given to the phenomenological approach in this embodied and intimate knowledge?

The place given to the researcher's lived experiences will be questioned from an ethical standpoint. To what extent should one allow oneself to "se laisser affecter" (be affected, Favret-Saada) by the field? What role should auto-ethnography play in such research?

Finally, what dialogue can emerge between the experience of those who practice and that of the researcher? How can intersubjectivity and empathy lead to a better understanding of each person's experience and contribute to knowledge construction? What transformations in perception and understanding can these experimentations bring about for those who practice and the researcher?

Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography (2nd ed.). London: SAGE Publications

Favret-Saada, I. (1977). Les Mots, la mort, les sorts : La sorcellerie dans le Bocage. Paris : Gallimard

Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation reflects on the unreported aspects of academic life, focusing on my experiences as a mother, migrant, and Russian researcher in Germany while writing my PhD. It explores the intangible — care work, navigating bureaucracy, and the emotions and experiences of living through a war.

Paper Abstract:

This poster presentation explores the potential of drawing as both a method of representation of ethnographic material and a mode of inquiry in the context of an (auto)ethnographic PhD project.

My doctoral work, comprising four articles on themes such as border externalization, subjectivization, migrant resistance, and online misogyny, was developed during a period marked by profound challenges. The process started when my youngest child was 6 months old. The active phase of field data collection coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by the war in Ukraine. These events added layers of complexity to my positionality as a Russian scholar researching, among others, Ukrainian respondents in a German academic context. At the same time, the intersecting demands of motherhood, care work, and migration shaped my scholarly identity in ways that remain largely undocumented in conventional academic discourse.

This poster will seek to visualize and articulate these intersections, drawing on feminist and artistic inspirations, particularly the works of Emma (The Mental Load, 2018) and Nora Krug (Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, 2018; Diaries of War, 2023). By engaging with these personal and professional tensions, the poster will highlight the gaps between the reported and unreported dimensions of academic life, as well as the emotions and experiences of living through a war while grappling with the complex perceptions associated with my national identity.

Paper Short Abstract:

We are interested in powerful and transformative museum experiences that linger in the visitors’ minds, even long after the initial visit. Our poster is a memory call that allows conference participants to share their unforgettable, even transformative, encounters with museums.

Paper Abstract:

Powerful and transformative museum memories: A memory call by the Uncomfortable Museum project

Museums have always been perceived as places of public learning or even change agents capable of modifying societal attitudes, values and norms. We are interested in powerful and transformative museum experiences that linger in the visitors’ minds, even long after the initial visit. Examining this transformative potential is, however, very complex. One of the driving forces behind the Uncomfortable Museum project is the desire to understand the potential different critical exhibitions, artworks, and other engagements mediated through the museum can have in changing societal attitudes and cultural norms. What do museum visitors actually experience in museum environments, what kind of experiences stay or linger in visitors' memories, and how do different experiences transform into changed attitudes or values? What makes some experiences so powerful that visitors keep reflecting back on them?

There are, however, very limited methodologies designed to track changes that will actualise only weeks or even months after the initial visit. Our poster is part of a methodological experiment aiming to address this challenge with a memory call. The poster 1) outlines the methodological and theoretical background of our approach and 2) offers conference participants an opportunity to also share their own memories of unforgettable, even transformative, encounters with art, ethnographical, historical, or natural history museums. Respondents can post their memories either on-site or online.