50th Anniversary of Finnish Anthropological Association

15 June 2025

Tartu Conference of East European Studies

10 June 2025

Madrid Tour

15 May 2025

Overview

Writing with ruins: embodied encounters & creative narratives
Dates: 21-23 May 2025
Organisers: Pablo Arboleda and Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez
Department of Anthropology / Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
Venue: Matadero Centre for Contemporary Creation

Guardar cosas en la oscuridad. Los sótanos como máquinas sociales
Lunes 19 a las 12:30
Sala María Moliner 1F
Seminario «Rastros y rostros de la violencia»
Dpto. de Antropología
Instituto Superior de Investigaciones Científicas

Arts of Opacity: A Public Panel

9 May 2025

Overview

Blocking, breaking, masking, uncovering—many ways of resisting surveillance have been documented (Marx 2003). This panel brings together anthropologists and art practitioners to explore these acts, not as confrontation, but as venues for cultural creation.

The value of non-surveillance is often framed with recourse to privacy. But what about those counter-surveillance moves that make no reference to privacy, and are oriented towards different desires and ideals? Turning towards opacity—of rendering things unseeable—obviates privacy’s logics of possession, to consider the transformative space that is opened up by not seeing.

Drawing on ethnographic and artistic work, the panel assembles a variety of arts of opacity, exploring what is generated through each process. In societies increasingly saturated by digital surveillance, it invites deeper questions about the value of non-surveillance as a method of imagining alternative futures.

Chair:
Vita Peacock (KCL)

Speakers:
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (CEU)
Rafael Schachter (UCL)
Francisco Martinez (University of Murcia)
Cecilia Salinas (University of Oslo)
Stephen Wilson (Chelsea College of Art / The Ruskin )

2pm – 6pm: Panel Discussion followed by a drinks reception in the Old Committee Room

Portuguese tour

12 February 2025

Online Workshop: Theorising Temporalities/Theorising Futures

18 December 2024

Infrastructures of (De)Occupation

21 November 2024

Overview

This panel series is comprised of two parts: A) Infrastructures of Occupation; B) Infrastructures of Liberation.

Part A
Infrastructures of occupation: apparatuses of russian (re)coloniality

I: SPATIALITIES & ECONOMIES
Thu, November 21, 12:00 to 1:45pm

Ecem Saricayir, Cornell University
From migrants to settlers: A study of russian rural development at the borderlands

Aleksandra Simonova, UC Berkeley
Chersonesos: Governing the “russian world” through reconstruction and blagoustroistvo

Vera Smirnova, Kansas State University
russia’s property regimes as a spatial technology of occupation

Michał Murawski, University College London
Dark reconstruction, or russian worlding: architecture-after-urbicide in Ukraine, Chechnya and Syria

Chair: Da Hyung Jeong, Princeton University
Discussant: Nikolay Erofeev, University of Kassel

II: IDEOLOGIES & ECOLOGIES
Thu, November 21, 2:00 to 3:45pm

Makar Tereshin, University College London
Dark skies: the political ecology of the Baikonur Cosmodrome

Da Hyung Jeong, Princeton University
Langston Hughes in Chirchiq, a Model Soviet Town in Socialist Uzbekistan

Francisco Martinez, Tampere University
New Hideouts for an Old Fear. Energy and Military Infrastructures in Estonia’s Siberia

Chair: Michał Murawski, University College London
Discussant: Victoria Donovan, University of St Andrews

III: RESIDUES & CONTESTATIONS
Thu, November 21, 4:00 to 5:45pm

Malgorzata Łukianow, University of Warsaw/University of Michigan
Splendid Isolation: the (invisibility of) russian imperial heritage in Poland

Oliver Banatvala, University College London
Wartime malleability: peace and war within the everyday urban realm

Zayra Badillo-Castro, Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean
Soviet infrastructural legacies and ‘collapses’ in Havana and Tashkent

Natalia Tchermalykh, Université de Genève
Performative Curating: the Ukrainian Decolonial Agenda in Western Museums since 2014

Chair: Ada Wordsworth, University College London
Discussant: Adam Przywara, Universität Fribourg

Part B
Infrastructures of Liberation: resistance, reconstruction and de- occupation in the Ukrainian commons

I: SPATIALITIES & ECONOMIES
Fri, November 22, 10:00 to 11:45am

Emily Channell-Justice, Harvard University
Self-organisation as liberation

Ada Wordsworth, University College London
Accidentally decentralised reconstruction in Ukraine: the benefits and perils of the grassroots approach

Yuliya Yurchenko, Greenwich University
Transnational polycentricity and political prefiguration of Ukraine’s social resistance

Daria Anosova, University College London
The Big Flat Construction Site: Contemporary Art Practice and Organization in Ukraine Under the Full-Scale Invasion

Chair: Ada Wordsworth, University Sofia Dyak, Center for Urban History, Lviv
Discussant: Adam Przywara, Adriana Petryna, University of Pennsylvania

II: RESIDUES & AMBIVALENCES
Fri, November 22, 1:30 to 3:15pm

Darya Tsymbalyuk, University of Chicago (tsymbalyuk@uchicago.edu)
The many returns; to over-exist

Svitlana Biedarieva, Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México & Kyiv School of Economics
Ambicoloniality and the Decolonization of Ukrainian Culture

Victoria Donovan, University of St Andrews
De-occupying the archive: Art as liberatory practice

Olexii Kuchanskyy, Bauhaus University Weimar
Colonial Remnants in the Infrastructure of Archives

Chair/Discussant: Samuel Veremchuk, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Unsettling Experimentation in Anthropology: Introducing a Network of Problems

11 November 2024

Overview

Experimentation is becoming increasingly common in anthropology. Sometimes it unsettles traditional observational practices, opens the way for radical novel forms of representation or challenges the fixation of anthropology with a restricted notion of anthropos.

In this encounter, we want to think, reflect and speculate together how experimentation can challenge common instantiations and concerns within anthropology. Although experimentation unsettles some of our disciplinary foundations, we think this reorientation is worth pursuing for it opens a relevant network of problems for our discipline.

The workshop is organised in in two parts: First, the new convening team and two invited speakers reflect upon possibilities and challenges of mobilising ‘the experimental’ in different research context. Then we shall discuss pathways for the network’s future trajectories with the general public and the host laboratories at the Institute for European Ethnology.

Convenors: Adolfo Estalella, Elisabeth Luggauer, Maka Suarez, and Jonas Tinius

Talks

Francisco Martínez, Mutual Redefinitions: Anthropology as a Practice and as a Discipline

This paper provides a new take on the possibilities – and limits – of experimental collaborations for ethnographic research and how they might lead to shifts back in the disciplinary core. By showing how exhibitions can be used for knowledge-making, it expands the notion of field and fieldwork. The series of ethnographic experiments outlined here help us rethink and, eventually, unlearn our own tools and protocols of relevance in anthropology. Unlearning, however, is not what researchers are supposed to do in the field. Too-often boundary-work removes what gives rise to wonder in order to secure what counts as valid knowledge and by whom. A more inclusive take on fieldwork could benefit practitioners and the discipline itself, as anthropologists are seeking to reach wider publics and navigate the contemporary complexities of authority and representation.

Kiven Strohm, (I want to live on an) Experimental Plane: Diffracting art and anthropology collaborations

When two practices or disciplines come together, whether formally or informally, too often one is subordinated to the other, or worse, they are asked to produce a bastard transdisciplinary child that blurs the boundaries between their different skills and modes of thought. For some years, those of us working in art/anthropology collaborations have sought to counter this tendency, proposing different approaches, such as “of/with/and” (Clarke). Working through these efforts, what I wish to share with all of you is an experiment. I want to further explore art/anthropology collaborations through two angles. First, I wish to elaborate on these collaborations by way of a diffractive “method” (Haraway, Barad) to consider the interference patterns that emerge when reading these different practices through each other. My plan is to maintain and heighten the distinct skills and modes of thought in these practices, and, in so doing, consider how this might produce new forms of inquiry that engenders creative and unexpected outcomes. Second, I want to then consider how this might inform an art/anthropology research practice as a ‘plane of experimentation’ for what art and anthropology can do, together/apart. It will be a bit of adventure, and, I hope, the opening of a new terrain.

Schedule

Redesigning the Social through Ethnographic Experimentation

5 October 2024

Overview

This seminar is an appeal to sketching out experimental ethnographic interventions, while aiming to work out what constitutes, both by extension and comprehension, the concept of the social. Through a series of open-format presentations, we’ll reflect on how field research can potentially enact, perform, or stage inventive ways of composing the world, expanding in turn the role of social research in the contemporary.

Schedule