Call for Papers – 2nd Conference SKAE, 24-26/5/2024

Anthropology, Ethnography in/for uncertain times

2nd Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists Greece (SKAE)

Thessaloniki, May 24-26, 2024

 

Jointly organized with the Division of Modern and Contemporary History, Folklore, and Social Anthropology in the Department of History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the Culture-Βorders-GenderLab in the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies at the University of Macedonia, the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival (Ethnofest), and TWIXTlab.

 

Call for papers to be submitted to the conference panels

*** UPDATE: New deadline for proposal submission Friday, December 29, 2023 (24.00) ***

Interested applicants are invited to submit proposals for presenting papers in the conference panels announced below by 21 December 2023 (24:00) to the email addresses of the organizers listed in each panel. Εach proposal should include your name and affiliation, title and abstract (300 words), and short bios (200 words). The e-mail subject should be “2nd SKAE Conference”.

The 2nd Conference of SKAE will be held in person with the possibility of a limited number of digital panels. The working languages of the Conference will be Greek and English, with the panels/workshops coordinators defining the language per session. Participation in the conference amounts to 50.00€ for non-SKAE members, 40.00€ for SKAE members, and 20.00€ for those not employed. Participants attending in person will also have the opportunity to register with SKAE during the Conference should they wish to do so. Finally, undergraduate students will participate free of charge.

See below the conference open panels in detail or download the call in a pdf file from here >> 2nd.Conference.SKAE.CALL FOR PAPERS (EN)

For any questions or clarifications you can contact us at: info@anthroassociation.gr

Panel #1.
Post-pandemic institutional ethnography: redefining the physical, communal, and temporal in uncertain times

Coordinators:
Dr. Ellen Stewart
Chancellor’s Fellow & Senior Lecturer, University of Strathclyde

Dr. Francesca Vaghi, francesca.vaghi@strath.ac.uk
Research Associate, University of Strathclyde

Language: English

Abstract
What does doing an institutional ethnography mean in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic? With the advent of remote working and the expansion of online engagement with members of the public, institutions have acquired an increasingly diffuse – less ‘physical’ – quality. Anthropologists (and other social scientists) have long explored the rationales and mechanisms that uphold institutions (e.g. Smith 2005; Ybema et al. 2009; Billo and Mountz 2016). Many institutions, however, are now no longer restricted to the confines of a physical space, comprised of communities that are bounded only by in-person interactions, or regulated by well-defined schedules and routines. Many opportunities have emerged with these changes, but so have uncertainties – from a blurrier understanding of where institutions begin and end, to the ambiguous future that some institutions themselves are facing.

This panel invites contributions from anthropologists and other social scientists interested in exploring the shifting definitions of institutions in the ‘post-pandemic’ world, new institutional tactics, the changing approaches to studying them ethnographically, and the uncertainties that led to these transformations happening – as well as how uncertainties are trying to be addressed and managed by institutions. We welcome papers that engage with past and present theoretical debates about institutional / organisational ethnography, discuss novel methodological approaches developed during and after the COVID-19 emergency, and which cover a range of institutional and international contexts. We invite authors to assess what are the implications of radical changes resulting from the pandemic for institutions that have traditionally been situated within the confines of buildings, in-person work, and more defined temporal routines. Through an exploration of the guiding question of this panel (‘What does doing an institutional ethnography mean in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic?’), authors are encouraged to explore why “we need institutional ethnography to understand the social ramifications of the pandemic” (Luken 2021, 3), both to grapple with and navigate its legacy of uncertainty.

References:
Billo, Emily, and Alison Mountz. 2016. ‘For Institutional Ethnography: Geographical Approaches to Institutions and the Everyday’. Progress in Human Geography 40 (2): 199–220. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515572269.

Luken, Paul C. 2021. ‘Institutional Ethnography: Sociology for Today’. In The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography, edited by Paul C. Luken and Suzanne Vaughan, 1–8. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54222-1_1.

Smith, Dorothy E. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Rowman Altamira.

Ybema, Sierk, Dvora Yanow, Harry Wels, and Frans Kamsteeg. 2009. Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life. London. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446278925.

Panel #2.
Livelihoods in the Arts: Intersections of (out-of-the-)ordinary uncertainties

Coordinators:
Dr. Ruxandra Ana,
PhD, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

Dr. Hannah Wadle, hannah.wadle@amu.edu.pl
PhD, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

Language: English

Abstract
In this panel, we address the experiences of individuals whose professional lives are involved in the broadly defined field of “the arts”. Acknowledging the multiplicity of possible experiences of being an artistic practitioner, we assume nevertheless that there are some central commonalities as to the paradigms of uncertainty that individuals in the arts have to deal with and position themselves within. These concern questions around markets, institutions, mobility regimes, cultural hegemonies, gender, the body, creative practice, affect.

The goal of this panel is to ethnographically gauge the intersection of regimes of uncertainty for art practitioners. Broadly understood artistic practices are thus the starting point for questioning issues related to uncertainties, with a particular focus on the question of mobility/immobility. What can artistic practices reveal about responses/coping strategies/mitigations of uncertainty in times of multiple, overlapping crises? We aim to gain a better understanding of moments, in which artistic practitioners perceive uncertainty as “out of-the-ordinary” and existential, thus when conventional ways of dealing with everyday uncertainties inherent in the profession collapse or also re-normalise.

We invite ethnographically grounded contributions looking at the intersections of regimes of uncertainty that affect artistic communities, and arts professionals and practitioners. We are particularly interested in papers that touch upon the following subthemes:

• Arts and migratory contexts: going beyond reading their intersections as either cultural loss or cultural gain
• The relationship between artistic mobilities, policies of cultural institutions, and migratory regimes
• Artistic practices as zones of merging (of hopes, desires, imaginaries, affects, embodiments)
• Artistic practices and precarious labor: migration and the reconfiguration of professional trajectories
• Redefining success, recognition, and prestige as artistic trajectories unfold in migratory contexts
• Modes of ethnographic knowledge: collaborative practices when academic knowledge meets activism

Panel #3.
Ethnographing the emerging ecological sensitivities in the era of energy transition and climate crisis

Coordinators:
Andreas Vavvos
PhD student, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Saint Andrews, & Department of Psychology, University of Crete

Manolis Tzanakis, tzanakism@uoc.gr
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Crete

Language: Greek

Abstract
The climate crisis and proposed policy measures for mitigating its impacts have catalyzed debates in anthropology regarding human-technology interactions, relationships with non-human entities, and environmental connections. These discussions also delve into non-anthropocentric views of the social and natural realms. A critical point in social sciences debates is the belief in human separateness and superiority, asserting dominion over social and natural worlds. However, innovative critical perspectives have spawned new research domains, yielding significant theoretical, empirical, and epistemological advancements. Concepts like “new materialism,” “ontological turn,” “non-representational theory,” “multispecies” and “transspecies” theories, “post-humanism,” “Anthropocene,” and “Capitalocene,” among others, are shaping a burgeoning lexicon.

In this thematic panel, we investigate the ramifications on human-nature relationships emanating from this redefinition of humanity. We will discuss political efforts by environmentally-minded social movements, unions, and collectives, the resistance of local communities against natural resource privatization like water, and the rise of new ecological awareness that problematizes the environment, making it a focal point of contention and ambiguity. Our focus centers on anthropological research exploring human interactions with nature, especially how human activities impact “natural resources” such as energy and water. The primary aim is to critically examine the epistemological, methodological, theoretical, and political inquiries emerging from the nascent field of ecologically oriented anthropology.

Panel #4.
Cyprus as ‘familiar other’: Identity and alterity in-between nation and state

Coordinators:
Dr. Pafsanias Karathanasis, pafsaniask@gmail.com
PhD, Πανεπιστήμιο Αιγαίου

Theodoros Rakopoulos, trakopoulos@gmail.com
Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

Language: Greek

Cyprus is a “familiar other” to the eyes of the Greeks of the so-called “motherland” Greece. In other words, while Cypriots have a twinned relationship with the ’siblings’ the Greeks, at the same time the mutual relations show a strong ambivalence. Greeks in Greece often treat Cypriots as ‘faulty Greeks’, to use the words of a young Cypriot interlocutor who lives and works in Greece. Similarly, it is quite common in Cyprus to accuse Greeks “from Greece” – whom Cypriots refer to, often pejoratively, as “kalamarades” or “kalamaroudes” – as arrogant people who behave “as if they own the place”, looking down on Cypriots. The above highlights, albeit schematically, how the relations between these two states and their citizens straddle the line between identity and alterity. But what does this ‘familiar’ otherness consist of? Or, in other words, what are the limits of ‘national intimacy’ or ‘cultural otherness’ between Greece and Cyprus?

With the proposed panel we want to highlight an issue that, while evident in the social reality of the two countries, seems to not have yet received the attention it deserves in the social sciences and, specifically, in Greek-speaking social anthropology and ethnography. Our aim is to open a debate on the difference and otherness of Cypriot ‘Greekness’, but also to contribute to the understanding and further exploration of the multiple political and cultural differences and convergences that make up this ambivalent relationship. The opening of this debate is the result of recent changes and transformations in Greek and Cypriot society, reflecting wider European or even global socio-political changes of recent years.

Panel #5.
Extractivisms and Infrastructures as Contested Realms

Coordinators:
Dimitris Dalakoglou, d.dalakoglou@vu.nl
Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, VU Amsterdam

Dr. Leonidas Oikonomakis, l.oikonomakis@vu.nl
Marie Curie Postdoc Fellow, VU Amsterdam

Language: English

Abstract
The two phenomena: extraction or resources, and infrastructures and their flows, have been formidable for modern world and the ways we perceive contemporary world. From extraction and flow of natural gas from Inner Asia to the extraction and transport of building materials for constructing the post 1990 infrastructural boom, the material culture of contemporary world is very much based on infrastructures and extraction. In this panel we wish to gather anthropological and cross-disciplinary approaches on the contestation of the two phenomena and their inter-connections.

Extractivism and Infrastructural capacities have often been linked with an imaginary of development, both in the Global North and in the Global South. However, both development and infrastructural capacities are contested realms that generate equally contested politics, while extractivism can be extended to include processes of various kinds that also generate social conflict over both their utilization and political economy. This panel intends to explore processes that link extractivism and/or infrastructures and development and analyse the contested politics and cosmopolitics these processes often generate.
In this session we welcome:

• Theoretical contributions around the contested concepts of extractivism, development, and infrastructures.
• Methodological contributions on how to study such contested processes in contested environments.
• Empirically based reflections that blend the general theoretical contributions and the specific case-oriented studies.
• Audio-visual and multimodal submissions are also welcome.

We welcome paper proposals from various disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, political science, and political economy.

Panel #6.
Public Anthropology and Critical Ethnography in a fluid present

Coordinators:
Fotini Tsibiridou, ft@uom.edu.gr
Professor Dept. of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia
Director of the Culture-Borders-Gender/LAB

Ioannis Manos, imanos@uom.edu.gr
Associate Prof. Dept. of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia
Deputy Director of the Culture-Borders-Gender/LAB

Eleni Sideri, elasideri@uom.edu.gr
Assist Professor Dept. of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia

Dr. Chrisitna Grammatikopoulou, christinagrammatikopoulou@gmail.com
Research Associate at the Culture – Gender – Borders/ LAB,
Dept. of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia

Language: Greek & English

Abstract
Recently, there has been a shift towards a more public, critical, and engaged anthropology, which tries to adapt and respond to emergent and ongoing economic, political, and environmental crises. At other times, anthropology takes on a more experimental and critical character, shifting to forms of a more critical, collaborative, and experimental ethnography. In response to widening class and racial inequalities and discrimination, anthropology engages with social movements, art, and, in a broader sense, cultural studies. At the same time, social anthropology tried to become inscribed in the so-called digital democratization of knowledge and information, making accessibility to public discourse easier through the proliferation of various publics. Nevertheless, these publics often pursue and support neoliberal-inspired versions of post-truth.

The Research Lab/ Culture, Borders and Gender since 2021 and the launching of the seminar series entitled “Ethnografein”, explores how anthropological research finds its way into public space and discourse critically, in practice and with a decolonial take. Following this agenda, this call addresses, but is not limited to, ethnographic projects, methodologies, approaches, and questions such as:

• in what ways (dialogue, narrative, use of digital technologies, artifacts, performance, etc.) does ethnographic research critically strengthen the public character of anthropology?
• how do the anthropological attitude in search of a more public profile, but also the sense of urgency shape the concept of social responsibility for the researcher, revising the dominant epistemological traditions of ethics and understanding but also the production of culture, more broadly speaking for the social sciences, humanities and cultural studies?
• how is this public character of anthropology formed, which is in conversation not only with critical social theory cultural and post-colonial criticism but with the very social actors who use it (see social, anti-colonial, feminist, etc. movements)?

Panel #7.
Conducting doctoral research in Greece today: From which uncertainties, through which vulnerabilities, to which collectivities?

Coordinators:
This proposal is presented by the PhD candidates’ collective “How will you deliver that thesis, babes?”:

Paraskevi Zotali
PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University.

Nefeli Roumelioti,
PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University.

Bessy Polykarpou
PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University.

Natalia Botonaki
PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities: Philosophy, Language and Literature, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Effie Mastrodimou
PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University.

Panagiotis Antoniadis, panant88@hotmail.gr
PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University.

Language: Greek & English

Abstract:
This panel aspires to serve as the starting point for a conversation on the lived experience of carrying out doctoral research in contemporary Greece as well as on the conditions in which such research takes place. While there is a special focus on the field of Social Anthropology, the scope of the said conversation includes the broader area of the Social Sciences. We depart from the realization that the observed tensions between the academic production of anthropological knowledge and the labour market as a field of ‘practicing’ anthropology (Angelidou, Balandina and Kolovos 2021) traverse doctoral studies as well. Nonetheless -we observe that- researchers’ collectives, critical epistemologies, reflective methodologies, and the studying of previously ‘invisible’ topics and subjects emerge and serve as barricades against these ‘uncertain’ times. We address our call to doctoral candidates trying to carry out their research from and against a place of intersecting ‘vulnerabilities’ and interlocking ‘crises’ (Brekke, Dalakoglou, Filippidis and Vradis 2014) affecting both anthropologists and the subjects of research. As suggested by the following questions, we are particularly interested in contributions which take a reflective approach and critically engage in ethnographising the situated positionalities of being a PhD researcher. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list, but rather serves as an indicator of the direction in which we hope to move:

• In what ways have the ethnographic methodologies, anthropological epistemologies and research ethics been transformed by the experiences and conceptualizations of these ‘uncertain’ times? In what ways have ‘crises’ transformed, closed off, or opened up the ethnographic field itself?
• “Should I stay or should I go? Things are simply better abroad.” The intersubjective experience of researchers as seen through borders. Writing from within/outside Greece, and the academic alterity of an always “exemplary West’’. Who is the “Other” within the Greek university?
• What alternative forms of collective ways of anthropological knowledge production and collaborative ethnographic methodologies, which question the self-centered monad that is the PhD researcher, emerge in this institutional, financial, social and political framework? In search for an ethnographic imaginary as a heterotopia or utopia.
• What kind of counter-publics and informal collectivities emerge from below in an attempt to resist -in solidarity and through practices of care- repeated institutional disappointments, emotional exhaustion, financial precarity and the general undermining of Anthropology, and the Social Sciences more broadly in Greece?

The panel will be conducted in-person and in Greek, without excluding submissions in English. We strongly encourage the participation of collectives and the submission of multimodal contributions.

Panel #8.
Labour precariousness in uncertain times: workers in the cultural and creative industries (CCI)

Coordinators:
Christina Karakioulafi
Assistant Profesor, Department of Sociology, University of Crete

Dr. Antigoni Papageorgiou
Post-doctoral Researcher, Department of Economic and Regional Development, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

Aspasia (Sissie) Theodosiou, theodosiou@uoi.gr
Assistant Profesor, Deparment of Music Studies, University of Ioannina

Language: Greek & English

Work in CCI is characterised by excessive flexibility, as self-employment, freelancing, part time work, intermittent work, intentional or enforced multi-employment (in other artistic/creative or non-artistic activities) are the dominant forms of its organisation. These forms of flexible employment entail the uncertainty and precariousness of working conditions in CCIs, which are further exacerbated in periods of successive crises, such as the most recent ones.

Using the case of the artistic and creative work, which is considered as archetypal of processes happening in the realm of work more generally in contemporary capitalism, the panel aspires to open up a field of research that remains extremely limited in the Greek context: the critical investigation of the experience and practice of labour uncertainty and precariousness in CCI in its multiplicity. At the same time, it aspires to highlight issues related to the broader transformations of work in the highly unregulated work environments of the neoliberal reality, their consequences on social practices, habits and relationships, as well as the potential of workers in the CCIs for collective protection, action and representation.

In this light, we invite scholars, who utilize anthropological thinking and/or ethnography – in combination with qualitative research methods from related fields – to: a) investigate employment conditions in the CCIs as shaped by recent successive crises, b) focus on relevant policies and modes of governance, c) analyze the ways in which different characteristics (gender, class, gender, race, etc. etc.) shape workers’ conditions and affect their vulnerability. At the same time, the panel aspires to document and highlight new interconnections and modes of resistance, individual and collective practices adopted by workers and workers’ representatives in the face of challenges (e.g. platformisation) and inequalities encountered in the field, as well as potential new forms of political participation and governance emerging on this horizon of uncertainty.

Panel #9.
Algorithms, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence: Ethnographic Explorations

Coordinator:
Petros Petridis, petros.petridis@gmail.com
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

The ever-increasing engagement of social subjects with algorithmic systems, big data sets, and artificial intelligence (AI) results in significant transformations in a wide range of cultural and social processes. These transformations run across the domains of education and learning, labor and value production, communication and entertainment, love and desire, health and well-being, mourning and death, war, infrastructure and the environment, political decision-making, and the perception of reality. Anthropological and ethnographic approaches provide significant resources and highlight diverse perspectives for exploring the complex interactions between these technologies and human societies since they are based on a critical investigation of experiences, practices, and narratives of social subjects.
This panel is addressed to researchers from the field of anthropology and other disciplines who approach ethnographic issues that fall within the following – indicative but not exclusive – topics:

• Methodological approaches and challenges of digital ethnography
• Algorithms, AI and labor: digital labor, sharing economies, platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism.
• AI and education
• AI, big data, and ethics
• Lived experiences of people affected by algorithmic decision-making (class, gender, and racial inequalities/stereotypes in algorithmic systems and AI programs, value judgments, and ideological connotations)
• Sociopolitical aspects of data collection and digital surveillance
• Wearable devices and quantified self (body, health, well-being, beauty, aging)
• Memory, mourning, death, and AI
• Destabilizing reality: fake news, conspiracy theories, deepfake, AI and science fiction

Panel #10.
Smartness at the margins: ethnographies of de-centrered smart cities

Coordinators:
Anna Giulia Della Puppa, annagiulia.dellapuppa@uniroma1.it
PhD candidate in Urban Anthropology, Department of Civil, Constructional and Environmental Engineering, La Sapienza University of Rome;

Caterina Ciarleglio
PhD candidate in Human Geography, Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning, Polytechnic University of Turin

Language: English

Abstract
In the contemporary world, we are witnessing an increasingly pervasive influence of digital technologies and the devices that make them accessible. It is not just the individual choices and inclinations of people that mediate their relationships, of whatever nature, through such devices and technologies. However, this trend facilitates and is inherent in the one we are discussing. Indeed, it is also the fact that a growing number of cities, local administrators, planners, as well as visionary entrepreneurs owning means and plots of land are adopting or intending to adopt technological solutions, the avant-garde of which they magnify, in order to improve the performance of their services and infrastructures, often betting on the supposed sustainability of these “intelligent” choices.

The debate on smart cities is indeed an open one and involves a plethora of social phenomena such as tourism, financialisation, enclavation, logistics, migration, labour and gentrification. As the anthropologist Katryen Pype has shown in her work on Kinshasa (2017), the processes of smartification that take place outside the hegemonic centres of the Global North do not merely repeat what happens elsewhere, but have their own dimension from below, deeply embedded in the sense and history of the places and animated by specific intentions, as specific as the spatial injustices they determine.

The need to grasp the dynamics of urban transformations taking place on the margins of the hegemonic centres and discourses of the so-called Global North has been emphasised by urban scholars such as Oren Yftachel, who has stressed the importance of acquiring a “Southeastern” perspective (2020), but also by Mary Lawhon et al. (2017) and Jonathan Silver (2019).

Our panel would like to give space to contributions that ethnographically explore the relationships with and through pervasive technologies and the frictions and conflicts they bring about in marginal cities and contexts.

References
Pype, K., 2017, “Smartness form below: Variation on Technology and Creativity in Contemporary Kinshasa”, in Clapperton Chakenetsa, M., What Do Science, Technology and Innovation mean for Africa?, Cambridge-Londo, The MIT press, pp. 97-116.

Lawhon, M. et al., 2018, Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations, Urban Studies journal, pp. 1–13.
Silver, J., MacFarlane, C., 2019, “Social infrastructure, citizenship and life on the margins in popular neighbourhoods”, in Lemanski, C., Citizenship and Infrastructure. Practices and Identities of Citizens and the State, Routledge, London-New York.

Panel #11.
Consuming Volatile Culture in Uncertain Times: Ethnographies of Food, Music, and Leisure

Coordinators:
Nir Avieli, avieli@bgu.ac.il
Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University

Vassiliki Yiakoumaki, yiakoumaki@uth.gr
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly

Language: Greek & English

Abstract:
Certain cultural domains, productions, and artefacts perhaps exhibit a heightened degree of unpredictability and “instability,” a condition which may be further exacerbated during times of turmoil and radical social change such as ours. In this panel we ask: How do individuals and communities negotiate their identities and navigate the complexities of social upheaval and change within specific volatile cultural contexts? We endeavor to explore the intricate relations between culture and instability within three such dynamic arenas: the culinary sphere, the music scene, and the realm of leisure. (We do not imply these domains are exhaustive; their choice, however, is not meant to appear arbitrary, as it draws on extensive field experiences).

The culinary sphere, and especially “traditional” or “local” foodways, often stand for stability and “time-honored” practices and continuities. This, however, contradicts the very essence of culinary artefacts, which are processed, cooked, served, eaten, digested, defecated, disposed of, or go bad, within a few hours. The panel invites contributions that delve into the complex interplay between the notion of cultural stability in food and the fleeting nature of its materiality, seeking to understand how individuals and communities construct their identities through food practices, particularly in uncertain times.
Music poses different challenges to stability: often experienced as fleeting, listening to music is hard to capture and describe in words, as language itself is at odds when it comes to conceptualizing such experiences. The panel aims to examine the ways in which people engage with and find meaning in music-related experiences in the context of rapidly changing cultural landscapes.

Leisure practices are often relegated to the periphery of our cultural lives and are considered secondary to “important” issues such as work or errands. However, these practices refuse to fall into stable categories, thus posing a constant threat to the social order by virtue of their significance – particularly within the contemporary context of uncertainty and neoliberal consumerism.

This panel welcomes papers that aim to offer a comprehensive exploration of these specific “unstable” cultural realms, and to provide fresh insights into the dynamic interplay between culture, “volatility,” and identity in uncertain times.

Panel #12.
In memoriam of Vasiliki Galani- Moutafi
Local starting points, global destinations. The multifaceted “locality” in the ethnography of 21st century Greece

Coordinators:
Eleftheria Deltsou, eldelt@uth.gr
Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Department of History, Archeology and Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly

Venetia Kantsa, vkantsa@sa.aegean.gr
Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory of Family and Kinship in the Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean

Alexandra Bakalaki, abak@hist.auth.gr
Associate Professor, retired, Department of History and Archaeology of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Dr. Despina Nazou, dnazou@sa.aegean.gr
Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Crete

Eleni Papagaroufali, epapag@panteion.gr, elpapgar@yahoo.gr
Professor, retired, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteio University of Social and Political Sciences

Language: Greek & English

Abstract:
The proposed panel is dedicated tο the memory of Vasiliki Galani-Moutafi, an anthropologist whose pioneer work has served as key reference point in the study of recent and current cultural and economic transformations in Greece and beyond.

Galani Moutafi’s ethnographic research focused on particular aspects of the notion of “locality” that emerged in the Aegean islands through the spread of tourist development and the market economy, as well as through new forms of gendered entrepreneurial practice. Her research contributed substantially to reflection around the hybrid transformations that index the international and global trajectories of local societies. The panel aims to contribute to further ethnographic investigation of issues addressed in her work. Indicatively, we invite papers engaging with the following topics.

• Tourism as a driver of social transformation brought about by the marketing / branding of local cultural and environmental resources in urban and rural, continental and island areas that promote distinct cultural and environmental resources
• Globalized localities and redefinitions of national belonging through the tourism experience and the (re)inventing of locality as a cultural difference. Tourism, globalized localities, national belonging, and the spacing of cultural difference
• Islandness as a prism for reconceptualizing the local, the national and the transnational.
• Transformations of rural space and rurality through new productive practices and patterns of local product consumption of tourism development through new forms of entrepreneurship. Economic practices inflected by gender, kinship, friendship, religion, class and ethnicity within the market and beyond.

Panel #13.
“Crisis”

Coordinators:
Konstantinos Kalantzis, kkalantzis@googlemail.com
Assistant Professor, Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries, University of Thessaly

Alexandra Bakalaki, abak@hist.auth.gr
Associate Professor, retired, Department of History and Archaeology of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Theodoros Rakopoulos, trakopoulos@gmail.com
Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

Language: Greek & English

Abstract:
Since 2010, the concept of crisis has risen to prominence in the context of both public and academic anthropological discourse. The crisis has been focal point of extensive ethnographic research that has generated an extensive literature that includes different approaches and it indexes the multiplicity of the conditions in relation to which the concept has been deployed. Meanwhile, in the light of the new unprecedented circumstances in the form of infrastructure collapse, extreme weather phenomena and pandemics, the concept’s field of reference keeps widening. In Greece, ethnographic interest was monopolized by the financial and the refugee crisis to such an extent that the Greek social experience has been tied to crises-related struggles and anxieties. This panel’s departing assumption is that it is time to turn the multiple uses and evocations of “crisis” into an object of investigation. Thus, we invite reflection on the ethnographic and analytical pursuits the concept has facilitated as well as those that it has perhaps inhibited.

More specifically, we will explore different meanings that the term crisis acquires as it is used as an anthropological tool and as a modality (the crisis as representation, the crisis as political critique, the crisis as a historical epoch and so on). We intend to ponder the relationship between these definitions as well as understand their potentials and their limitations. Further, the panel invites contributions that explore the conference’s main theme, given that both Koselleck and much of the anthropological conversation defines the crisis as uncertainty and kairos. How and to what extend does crisis disrupt the relation between certainty and uncertainty and in what ways does it produce new constellations among them?

Other indicative questions addressed by the panel: What does crisis mean in different social contexts? What kind of engagements of social and political experience does the anthropological study of the crisis include, and what kind of subjects and relationships does it highlight? What ethnographic methods and tools are useful in approaching the concept of crisis? What is the contribution of ethnographic approaches of the crisis to the problematic around the spatial and temporal dimension of social relations and vice versa? The curators of the panel in question, in their own work, have dealt with various dimensions, from semiotic to political-economic, of the crisis reality but also have raised doubts about the development of a crisis “identity” in the reflection of the Greek experience in the 21st century and thus invite an anthropological investigation with, through, and despite the concept of crisis.

Panel #14.
Ethnographic loci: displacements, articulations

Coordinators:
Dimitra Kofti, dimitra.kofti@yahoo.com
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

Katerina Rozakou, krozakou@yahoo.com
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

Language: Greek

Abstract
How do we describe, define and imagine ethnographic loci today? The problematization of the concepts of a bounded field-site and locality, and the introduction of analytical categories such as globality, globalization and the local-global intertwinements, have turned anthropological explorations towards understandings of place as constantly shifting and changing. In this context, the concepts of de-territorialization, fluidity and multi-locality have emphasized, each with different ways and gravity, the multiple encounters that take place in a given place and the contemporary multi-local connections. Ethnographic pursuits in recent decades have often emphasized the notion of place as a relationship and have suggested the conduct of multi-sited studies or research that, while conducted in one place, takes into account the multiple encounters of local and global relations.

In light of these conceptual shifts in the ethnographic field, in this session we would like to discuss a number of broader questions. How is the ethnographic field constituted in our research? What challenges do we face in trying to delineate or expand the geographical and theoretical boundaries of our field? What are the political processes that these epistemological and methodological concerns are linked to? In other words, how do the loci of anthropological research, the articulation of the local-global or even the transgression of such dualisms, resonate and relate to contemporary conditions and experiences of mobility and borderlands, capitalist production, new forms of technology and digitality, intense political, economic, ecological transformations and multiple crises?

Panel #15.
Ethnographic research with Roma subjects: Racialization and ambivalent visibility in conditions of structural uncertainty

Coordinators:
Aspasia (Sissie) Theodosiou, theodosiou@uoi.gr
Assistant Profesor, Deparment of Music Studies, University of Ioannina

Dr. Cynthia Helen Malakasis, cynthia.malakasis@gmail.com
Post-doctoral Researcher, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteio University of Social and Political Sciences

Roma in Europe live in a regime of distorted or ambiguous visibility, as they seem to occupy contradictory positions in the European imaginary: “troublesome” beggars dependent on the welfare state, marginalized outsiders, “vulnerable” but also “dangerous”, subject to regimes of racial romanticization and exoticization, at the same time as their cultural difference and the protection of their particularity already since the 1990s, in the context of various (European and national) integration policies seem to have done little to reduce their poverty, while at the same time contributing to their governmentality and enhancing their ambiguous visibility.

The recent explosive visualization of Roma subjects in the Greek public sphere, at a level of public discourse but mainly at a level of thanatopolitics, combined with the clear deterioration (material and symbolic) of their conditions of existence especially after austerity took hold in Greece – at the same time that the Roma population in our country is the most numerous ethno-cultural group to which other groups such as e.g. the Balkan Roma have been added – makes it imperative to explore new manifestations of this ambiguous visibility.

From this perspective, we invite field studies that utilize anthropological thinking and/or ethnography in combination with other research methods, and that come to trigger re-thinking of key issues in relation to the overall subjectivity of Roma subjects in Greek society – the deeper causes of exclusion, discrimination and violence against them – but also in relation to what their paradigm comes to illuminate regarding the dominant “white” Greek identity.

With an emphasis on materialities, forms of governmentality, the political economy of their conditions of existence and the dynamics of representations concerning them, this panel aims to focus on the processes of racialization that sustain and regulate in various ways the present condition of the Roma as subaltern subjects. At the same time, the panel aims to document and highlight new connections and resistances, individual and collective practices adopted by Roma subjects and communities, as well as potential new forms of political participation and activism that emerge on this horizon of uncertainty.

Panel #16.
Strange Weather: Εcologies of Resistance and Repair

Coordinator:
Penelope Papailias, pcpapailias@gmail.com
Associate Professor, Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly & Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities

Language: Greek & English

Abstract
Makrinitsa, where Pelion Summer Lab is based, received the highest monthly precipitation ever recorded in Europe in September 2023. Uncanningly, in July, we had held a symposium on “Strange Weather: Ecologies of Resistance and Repair.” This panel proposes returning to the frameworks forwarded in the past two Pelion Summer Labs on “After/lives” (2022) and “Ec/o/ntologies” (2023) to address the recent cataclysmic flood events in Volos, Pelion and the rest of the Thessaly region in September 2023 (“Daniel” & “Elias”).

The weather has been so very strange. Extreme weather events ranging from relentless flooding, acidifying oceans, to desertification, and uncontainable forest fires are disabusing us of any delusions of exceptionalism or escape from the climate crisis now englobing us all. This weather is neither “incidental, nor accidental; it is an intra-active, naturalcultural phenomenon”; it is “the external conditions that structure … quotidian existence”, “existence felt in and as our [porous] bodies” (Neimaris). We must now learn to live with these more-than-human traumas. This strange weather has a way of catching up with us all.

In the wake of the devastation caused by the ‘strange weather’ that befell Thessaly, there has been a rush to restore things as they were: infrastructure, landscapes, economic routines, with an emphasis on technological solutions. This panel will seek papers that address 1) the socio-historical context of the ‘strange weather’, the grip of racism, colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism on the water, the air, the land, the unequal geographies of ruination; 2) struggles for racial, historical, political, and environmental justice and social movements of aid and solidarity predating or emerging in the context of the ‘strange weather’, practices of skill sharing 3) speculative futures emerging after the floods and the imagining of a more-than-human world that is ‘repaired’ to become (more) habitable and inclusive, the planetary ethic of ‘survivance’.

This panel, drawing on this summer’s Pelion Summer Lab on Ec/o/ntologies, will center debates, methods, and epistemologies informing the emergent interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities. Our contention is that this theoretical toolkit combined with ethnographic research might help us confront and retool collective responses to the dire planetary exigencies of the mounting climate crisis. The ongoing collapse of human-planetary relations has made the bracketing of natural history from human history, the distinction between life and nonlife, nature and culture, increasingly untenable politically, intellectually and on the level of everyday existence.

This approach centers the enmeshment of the biological, geological and meteorological, as well as the intersections of bio/necropolitics and ecocide, which anthropocentrism -the privileging of the human perspective and human existence, at all and any cost- systematically ignores and masks. As unsettled historical legacies of settler colonialism, racism, speciesism, and imperialism become overlayed by contemporary capitalist practices and technologies of resource extraction, privatization, and ecocide, it becomes imperative to learn to live otherwise with the compounding and everyday fallout of climate chaos, mass extinction events, zoonotic pandemics, and biospheric disasters that together delimit the ecological conditions of human habitability in a more-than-human world.

In Volos during the flood events, all of this became more than real, no longer the subject of a science fiction film. Anthropology must prove that rebuilding bridges and roads is not the adequate response to what has transpired; yet, at the same time anthropology must demonstrate what it is that the discipline can offer. A first step must be to ground questions of environmental, historical, and racial justice in feminist, anticolonial, indigenous, and black activist genealogies of thought and practice regarding the ethics of inheritance, stewardship, commoning and repair. Needless to say, this means that anthropology itself will be itself transformed through this field of engagement.

Panel #17.
Precarious mobilities and violent borders: Ethnographies of risk and invisibility in the Mediterranean

Coordinators:
Giorgos Tsimouris
Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University

Pantelis Probonas, pprobonas@gmail.com
PhD Candidate on Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly

Effie Doussi
Lawyer, MSc Social Anthopology, Panteion University

Language: Greek & English

Abstract
In the last twenty years the precariousness of mobility in the Mediterranean has intensified not only due to geopolitical developments and wars in the wider region but also due to the tightening of the control regime and the security of Europe’s borders. According to the official figures recorded by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Mediterranean has turned into a graveyard for thousands of people. The risk of life and/or death of migrants/refugees during the precarious journey to Europe, the modern “ghost that wanders” over borders, is a result of the securitization and militarization of border policies. At the same time, these border necropolitics are producing headlines in the news, materialities, testimonies that cannot and should not be silenced and accepted without critical reflection. This phenomenon also raises the critical ethical and political issue of governance that concerns the accountability of the Western democracies that are actively involved in these events. At the same time, it is important to discuss the production of public discourse about the deaths at the border but also to highlight solidarity actions and activism related to border necropolitics. The ethnographic research of the precarious migrant experience and the multi-fatal shipwrecks in the Mediterranean in recent years has sparked a fruitful and multifaceted debate, which contributes to the reflection of the ethical and political responsibility of the ethnographer and the practice of ethnography. So what are the limits of the intersubjective relationship between the ethnographer and the subject in conditions of risk, how is the act of ethnography re-framed and revised in a constantly changing context characterized by the “state of emergency”, how do we, as ethnographers, deal with our encounter and eventual involvement with mechanisms of power and state security services, how we “conversate” with the ethics of responsibility, and how the ethnographic practice can interact with public discourse and discourses about migration? The panel aims to contribute to this debate by bringing together current research projects on precarious voyages and high-fatality shipwrecks of refugees/migrants in the Mediterranean, and by posing questions about not only the experience of precarious subjects on the move but also how the hegemonic, white, colonial, Christian “old continent”, produces, provokes, frames and gives meaning to this precariousness.

Panel #18.
Politics of Listening and the Ethics of Witnessing

Coordinators:
Athena Athanasiou
Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

Nelli Kampouri, ekampouri@eie.gr
Researcher, ERC Consolidator Grant, Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Sound, and the Ethics of Witnessing (MUTE), Institute of Historical Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation

Anna Papaeti
Principal Investigator, ERC Consolidator Grant, Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Sound, and the Ethics of Witnessing (MUTE), Institute of Historical Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation

Language: Greek

Abstract
The panel focuses on processes of listening to (hi)stories and situations of violence (including racist, anti-migrant, gender, colonial and war violence). In exploring the ways in which we listen to trauma testimony as well as the sounds and silences (be they imposed or not), connected with experiences of structural violence, it poses the following questions: How do we listen to the sounds, silences and contradictions often entailed in such testimonies, as well as to that which resists symbolization and/or audibility? How do we listen to the voices that have been silenced, or to those that have opted for silence and their “disappearance” from public space? How can listening create communities and networks of care and support, turning into a practice through which various struggles and claims can intersect? And how can it undermine the dominant distribution of what is (publicly) audible, creating the conditions for a redistribution of who can talk and who can listen? Criticizing methodologies that narcissistically claim to “give voice to those who don’t have one” and arguing for a (re)politicization of ethics, the panel will discuss the ethico-political aspects of listening, responsibility and responsiveness in contexts of systemic violence and intersectional discrimination. This discussion will take place from the perspective of intersectional methodology, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial and decolonial critique as well as disability and sound studies.

Short CVs of conference panels’ organizers

Panel #1.
Dr Ellen Stewart is a social scientist working at the intersection of medical sociology, health policy and public administration. Her research explores how health systems accommodate and negotiate different forms of ‘lay’ and ‘expert’ knowledge, including demands for public engagement and for evidence-based policy. In 2023, her latest book How Britain Loves the NHS: practices of care and contestation, was published by Policy Press. Ellen is one of four grant holders on a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award exploring charity and voluntarism in the UK NHS, leading a work package focusing on the contemporary role of NHS Charities in fundraising and supplementing statutory spend on healthcare. She is also a co-Investigator on the UKPRP Consortium SIPHER. Ellen’s past projects explored everyday practices of public involvement in the local NHS, new governance arrangements for Scottish Health Boards, how health policymakers use research evidence, and hospital closures as an example of contentious healthcare transformation. Her research has been funded by the ESRC, MRC, Wellcome Trust, Chief Scientist Office Scotland and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Ellen is an elected member of the Social Policy Association’s Executive Committee (2018-2024) and serves on the Wellcome Trust’s Early Career Advisory Group for Medical Humanities (2021-2024). Since 2023 she is also Co-Director of the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Health Policy.

Dr Francesca Vaghi is an anthropologist and Research Associate at the School of Social Work & Social Policy. With Dr Ellen Stewart, she conducts research on the work of contemporary NHS charities as part of the Wellcome Trust Funded Border Crossings project. Francesca is interested in medical anthropology, the anthropology of policy, and childhood studies. She completed her PhD in 2019 at SOAS, University of London, titled: ‘Food, Policy and Practice in Early Years Education and Care: children, practitioners and parents in a London nursery’. For her doctoral research, Francesca conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a state-maintained nursery in London over a 12-month period, developing a child-centred methodological approach to meaningfully involve children in research. Aside from investigating how children create self and peer identities through food and eating practices, her work explores how children’s food policy fits into family intervention policies in the context of Britain’s mixed economy of welfare, and how notions of ‘good food’ and ‘good parenting’ (particularly mothering) are interlinked. Francesca is interested in advancing critical approaches in public health, specifically looking at how dominant policy discourses (re)create and seek to address ‘problems’ that have particular implications for working class and ethnic minority families, particularly in matters related to food insecurity, childhood poverty, and childcare policy.

Panel #2.
Ruxandra Ana is a Romanian-born, Polish-trained, Italy-based anthropologist whose research focuses on cultural heritage in relation to entrepreneurship and social change in Cuba. Her doctoral dissertation (2021, University of Warsaw, Poland) is an ethnography of dance-related practices as part of alternative networks of economic and emotional exchange that emerge in touristic spaces in Havana. Currently a postdoctoral researcher at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, she is working on a research project that analyzes dance labor in migratory contexts, focusing on Cuban migrants in Italy and Germany. She has been a research fellow at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin and is the recipient of the Foro Europa-Cuba Early Career Researcher Award (2020). Her doctoral and postdoctoral projects were funded by the Polish National Science Center. Her articles appeared, among others, in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Leisure Studies, Ethnologie Française, Ethnologia Europaea.

Hannah Wadle obtained her PhD from the University of Manchester. She is assistant professor of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology at Adam-Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Her research and publications concern tourism and heritage in Post-Cold War Europe, esp. post-Prussian Poland, the anthropology of longing and places of longing, cultural and film production on the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, most recently, new anthropological approaches to risk and uncertainty. Her essay (with A. Lis-Plesińska) From a Hegemony of Risk to Pedagogies of Uncertainty: An Anthropological Proposition won the Intergenerational Justice Award 2023.

Panel #3.
Andreas Vavvos is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Saint Andrews, and the Department of Psychology, University of Crete. Andreas’ project investigates how the critical realist notion of explanatory critique might be broadened through the use of collaborative methodologies like collaborative ethnography. More specifically, Andreas attempts to place explanation at the core of the social sciences in contrast to interpretation or thick description. Andreas conducts extensive anthropological fieldwork in Greece. With the primary objective of causally explaining the phenomenon of opposition to the energy transition in Greece and critiquing other explanations of this phenomenon, he is collaborating with energy collectives. Andreas has been awarded a state scholarship by the Foundation-IKY in association with Fulbright Greece. He will study for his third year at Rice University in Houston, Texas, from November 1, 2023, to April 30, 2024, under the guidance of Dr. Cymene Howe. Andreas finished his master’s degree in sociology at the University of Crete and his bachelor’s degree in psychology there.

Manolis Tzanakis has studied journalism and sociology, and is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Crete. His scientific interests focus on issues of sociology of mental health and leisure sports, which he approaches using qualitative methods. He has published numerous articles in Greek, French and English. He has edited, together with Antonis Liodakis and Vicky Tsourtou, the edited volume “Art and Psychiatry”, EPEKEINA/Focus on Health, 2007; together with Sevasti Troubeta and Lida Papastefanaki, the edited volume “Exploring social relations in terms of health and illness”, University of Crete, 2013; and together with Aigli Hatzouli and George Alexia, the edited volume “Body under surveillance: Ethical and political connotations of medical technology and social care”, Pedio, 2014. He is the author of “Community Psychiatry and the Question of the Subject”, Athens, Synapses, 2008; “Mental Illness and Contemporary Practices of the Self: A Life Testimony”, Pedio, 2012 and “Scuba Diving Practices in Greece. An Historical Ethnography of Technology, Self, Body and Nature”, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

Panel #4.
Pafsanias Karathanasis is a Social Anthropologist (PhD) working on urban settings in eastern Mediterranean. He is interested in political anthropology, visual culture, urban cultures, public space, graffiti/street art, and contested landscapes and borderscapes. His main research fields include the divided Nicosia (Cyprus), Athens, and Mytilene (Lesvos), where he has worked with youth groups, political and cultural activists, and artists. He has published articles in Greek and in English in collected volumes and academic journals and he is the author of two books on graffiti and street art in Athens. He has been a lecturer at Univ. of Macedonia (2023), a post-doctoral researcher at the Univ. of the Aegean in Mytilene (2021-2022), and at Panteion Univ. Athens (2020-2022). He has been the Academic Project Manager of the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival-Ethnofest (2017-2022), he has collaborated with the Onassis Cultural Foundation as a researcher of the Fast Forward Festival (2017-2019), he was the coordinator of the Observatory of the Refugee and Migrant Crisis in the Aegean (2017-2018), and he is at the board of the Association of Social Anthropologists Greece (SKAE) since 2020.

Theodoros Rakopoulos is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His publications focus on issues such as land management and cooperative labour, silence and betrayal, moral boundaries and legal alterity, conspiracy theory and fascism, masculinity and violence, citizenship and its marketisation. He is currently writing on issues of sovereignty and property in Cyprus, while also exploring decolonizing debates. He is author of the ethnographic monographs From clans to co-ops: Confiscated mafia land in Sicily (2017, Οξφόρδη: Berghahn, ιταλική μετάφραση 2022, Μιλάνο: Meltemi) and Passport Island: The market for EU citizenship in Cyprus (2023, Μάντσεστερ: Manchester University Press), as well as editor of the volumes The global life of austerity (2018, Berghahn) and Towards an anthropology of wealth (2019, Routledge).

Panel #5.
Leonidas Oikonomakis holds a Ph.d in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI). He currently holds a postdoctoral Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is also affiliated with the Center on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) at the Scuola Normale Superiore. In the past he has held research and teaching positions at the the Department of Anthropology , Durham University (COFUND Marie Curie Junior Research Fellow), the Department of Sociology, University of Crete (Adj. Lecturer) and the Hellenic Open University (lecturer at MA program “Social and Solidarity Economy) .

Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, he is researching Albania, Greece and the Balkans since 2004. He ran two large research projects in Greece, infra-demos.net (NWO, 2017-2022) studying infrastructures and democracy in Greece and crisis-scapes (ESRC, 2012-2014) studying public spaces, crisis and collective actions in Athens. Currently he runs the project LOREC-pilot on an anthropology of energy communities in Europe.

Panel #6.
Fotini Tsibiridou is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies (University of Macedonia/Thessaloniki) and Director of the Culture-Borders-Gender/LAB. BA in French Literature (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), MA and Dr. of Anthropology-Ethnology EHESS-Paris. She has done ethnographic fieldwork in Greece, Turkey and the Middle East. She writes and publishes on minority, gender, culture, politics and activism issues. Member of the collective dëcoloиıze hellάş. Her recent publications include: «Το μοιρολόι της Ευθαλίας. Το προσφυγικό ως μεταποικιακό, πολιτισμικό και μειονοτικό αρχείο, πριν και μετά το 1922: Μια σύντομη εθνο-τοπο-βιο-γραφία. ΤΕΥΧΟΣ #14·1922-23: ΣΕ ΠΟΙΑ ΠΕΤΡΑ, ΣΕ ΠΟΙΟ ΧΩΜΑ. Marginalia. Σημειώσεις στο περιθώριο. https://marginalia.gr/arthro/to-moiroloi-tis-eythalias/ Tsibiridou, F., 2022. «On Honor and Palimpsest Patriarchal Coloniality in Greece, the Western Balkans, and the Caucasus. Anthropological Comparative Accounts from a Post-Ottoman Decolonial Perspective», Genealogy 6, σ. 73. doi:10.3390/genealogy6030073, Τσιμπιρίδου, Φ. 2020. «Σκότωσα τη Σεχραζάτ»: Παράδοξες οικειότητες, εθνογραφία και καθημερινότητα Μετά την «καθ’ημάς Ανατολή» στο Τσιμπιρίδου, Φ. (επιμ.) Εθνογραφία και καθημερινότητα στην ‘καθ’ημάς Ανατολή’. Αθήνα Κριτική 2020.

Ioannis Manos is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology of the Balkans at the Department of Balkan, Slavic, and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece. He studied History and Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Social Anthropology in Hamburg, Germany, and Sussex, Great Britain. He holds a Certificate in Social Research Methods from the Graduate School of Social Sciences of the University of Sussex. He is the Europe regional editor of the journal Teaching Anthropology (Royal Anthropological Institute, London). His research interests focus on SE Europe and include borders and border regions, dance and music as performative aspects of culture, nationalism and ethnicity, migration, human and minority rights, educational structures and processes, the teaching of anthropology, and the epistemology and methodology of research. His publications include chapters and articles in Greek and English edited volumes, journals and conference proceedings, and co-editing of Greek and English edited volumes.

Eleni Sideri completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at SOAS/University of London. She did extensive field research in the Caucasus, the former Yugoslavia and Greece. She taught social anthropology in various departments and has published in several languages. Her academic interests include: ethnographies of the Black Sea and the Caucasus, transnational migration and diasporas, politics of culture in cinema. In 2023, she published the monograph of Coproducing Europe. An Ethnography of Film Markets, Identity and Creativity (Berghahn Publishers).

Chrisitna Grammatikopoulou is an Art Historian and Art Theorist (PhD, University of Barcelona). Her post-doctoral research at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies of the University of Macedonia, supervised by Prof. Fotini Tsibiridou, focused on the aesthetics of feminist resistance. Her teaching (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Western Macedonia, University of Macedonia) has centred on digital humanities, gender studies, and cultural studies. As a member of the artistic / research group #purplenoise, she has explored the topics of feminism and technology by means of artistic practice. Currently she is working as a fellow at the Culture – Gender – Borders / LAB, at the University of Macedonia.

Panel #7.
Antoniadis Panagiotis is a Ph.D. candidate at the department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. His doctoral research, titled ‘Sex as an ethicopolitical encounter: psycho-biopolitics of intimacy and the pedagogy of desire in the post-HIV/AIDS Greek queerscapes’, is an ethnographic study of sexual intimacy as an ethicopolitical and biosocial encounter supervised by Prof. Athena Athanasiou. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law and a Master’s degree in Gender and Sexuality Studies, while he currently works as a researcher and trainer for the EU-funded CERV project Free All – Inclusive services for All LGBTIQ people. He is a member of the doctoral student collective ‘How will you deliver that thesis, babes?’.

Effie Mastorodimou is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University, Athens, Greece. Her research focuses on issues of housing precarity and affective economy within the biopolitics of crisis. She holds a bachelor’s degree in the Department of History Archaeology and Social Anthropology and an MSc in Interdisciplinary Approaches in Historical, Archaeological, and Anthropological Studies, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece. In previous ethnographic research, she explored topics related to the anthropology of health and the senses, with a particular emphasis on the medicalization of the female body. She examined discourses surrounding breast cancer and delved into affective “routines” and alternative practices during pregnancy and childbirth. Her professional experience includes research work in the ELMEGO program (University of Thessaly) which was honored with the European Union’s 2012 European Language Label Award. She also served as a research assistant for Andreas Streinzer’s dissertation project, investigating the impact of crisis and alternative economic practices within households in Magnesia. This research received the Sowi.doc Award in 2019 for the best dissertation at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna. Effie Mastorodimou has published her research findings through presentations and papers at national and international conferences, as well as through publications in refereed journals and edited books. Since 2006, she has actively participated in funded projects that adress to individuals from vulnerable backgrounds, such as roma, refugees, migrants, and prisoners. She has also served as a facilitator in seminars focusing on the body, the senses, affects, expression, and movement. Furthermore, she has contributed to interdisciplinary and artistic projects, engaging in activities such as text composition, video directing/editing, choreography, performance, and costume design. She is a member of the collective “How will you deliver that thesis, babes?”. Her work is based in a multimodal and multisensory methodology, drawing from the theory of affect, feminist and cultural theory and critique.

Paraskevi (Voula) Zotali is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology, quality consultant and chemistry teacher. Her research interests evolve around science and technology, gender and sexuality, alternative states of consciousness and subversive methodologies for knowledge production. She studied Social Anthropology (BA) at Panteion University and Chemical Engineering (BA) and Materials Science & Engineering (MSc) at the National Technical University of Athens. Her PhD research explores indigenous initiatives that appropriate the production/design of digital technologies creating new cosmotechnologies. She aspires to manifest her values through her life and work: originality, unity, humor, equality and learning. She is currently a member of the ASAG (ΣΚΑΕ) Board (2022-2024) and has been participating in the Collective ‘How will you deliver that thesis, babes?’ since June 2023.

Nefeli Roumelioti is a PhD candidate at the department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology (University of Crete) and has concluded her postgraduate studies in Social Psychiatry (Democritus University of Thrace) and Social Anthropology (Panteion University). She has been working as a psychologist for many years, in multiple refugee support structures. Her research interests are focused on topics that lay at the intersection of the disciplines of social anthropology and psychology and/or psychoanalysis. In her doctoral thesis titled “Οn the limits of politics of life and necropolitics. Performing vulnerability in the context of “refugee crises” in Greece” she examines the intersections of the politics of vulnerability and the production of psy discourses and practices in the context of political asylum in Greece. Her ethnographic research focuses on the intersubjective encounters between mental health workers and refugees and on the performativity of psychic pain within clinical mental health structures in Athens. She is a founding member of the collective ‘How will you deliver that thesis, babes?’ which is, to her, a constant source of inspiration and reinforcement.

Natalia Botonaki is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities (area of Philosophy, Language and Literature) at the Carlos III University of Madrid, where she also studied a master’s (MA) in Cultural Theory and Criticism. She holds a Bachelors in Drama and Theatre Arts from Trinity College Dublin; her BA thesis was on drama and theatre in education. The provisional title of her doctoral dissertation is “Constellations of contemporary protest: violence, performativity and aestheticization”. It is a theoretical and critical study of social and political mobilization in the 21st century, with a particular emphasis on Greece, aiming to identify aspects which differentiate them qualitatively from those which marked the 20th century, with the three concepts appearing in the title being the axes her critique revolves around. She has worked as a foreign language teacher and continues to teach a variety of courses in the broader field of humanities as a contracted predoctoral investigator in training. What connects her academic and professional interests is a quest for collective and interdisciplinary places of learning and modes of knowledge production (alongside an attempt to question and expand the boundaries of what constitutes “knowledge”). During an academic stay at the Social Anthropology department of Panteion University, she met fellow PhD candidates with whom she shared interests and experiences; this encounter led to the formation of the collective ‘How will you deliver that thesis, babes?’ which has since become a source of inspiration and support.

Bessy Polykarpou is a PhD candidate in the department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University. She completed her undergraduate studies in Philosophy and History of Science and her postgraduate studies in Political Science and Sociology, at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (EKPA). She/they completed three semesters as an Erasmus exchange student at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier III and at the Sorbonne University Paris Nord, in the departments of Philosophy and Anthropology respectively. Their doctoral thesis entitled “Political coalitions for possible better worlds: violence, solidarity and gender resistance in contemporary Athens” explores the intersections of lived experience and attempts to bridge political demands and practices within Athenian feminist spaces. Excerpts of her work on political violence, ethnography and feminist studies have been presented at conferences, events and published texts. She has worked in various positions in the private sector. The collective “How will you deliver that thesis, babes” encourages her to continue researching.

Panel #8.
Christina Karakioulafi is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Crete. She has graduated from me Department of Social Policy and Social Anthropology (Panteion University) and completed her postgraduate and doctoral studies in France (Conservatoire NaAonal des Arts et des MéAers and Université Paris 1 – Panthéon – Sorbonne). She also teaches at the Hellenic Open University (since 2005) and is a coordinator of the unit ” CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES IN EUROPEAN SOCIETIES” (EPO42). Her scientific publications concern: work precariousness, unemployment, sociology of professions (with emphasis on arAsAc professions), psychosocial risks in the workplace, industrial relations and trade unionism (with emphasis on developments during the economic crisis). She is the author of the monographs, The Art Workers. The profession of the actor in Greece in times of crisis (Papazisis, 2023) and Labour Relations: Theoretical approaches and empirical issues (Papazisis, 2012) and co-author of the monograph Unemployment and Labour Precarity. Dimensions and impacts in 4mes of crisis (INE-GSEE, 2014). She has as co-edited (with M. Spyridakis) the collective volumes Labour and Society (Dionikos, 2010) and Unemployment, Society and Social Reproduc4on (Gutenberg; 2017). She is currently investigating the effects of the pandemic on labour relations and the collective action of artists, focusing on the profession of the actor. She is the Principal Investigator in the research program Labour Precarity and Social Cohesion: The Case of the Cultural & Crea4ve Industries (LaPreSC) funded by HFRI (No. 16313) (Host Institution: University of Crete (KA-11454)].

Antigoni Papageorgiou is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economic and Regional Development of Panteion University. She completed her PhD at the University of Leeds (AHRC scholarship) and has been involved in research projects related to collaborative workplaces, gender aspects of work in PDPs, youth employability, and policy evaluation. She has taught at the Department of Communication, Media and Culture “Introduction to Cultural Management” and “Cultural Creative Industries” and is Associate Teaching Staff at the Hellenic Open University in the MA Module “Gender and Culture”.

Aspasia (Sissie) Theodosiou is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Department of Music Studies of the University of Ioannina. She obtained her MA and PhD from the Dept of in Social Anthropology (University of Manchester). She was a member of MC of the international research network “Remaking eastern borders in Europe” and she participated in the “Crosslocations” project of the University of Helsinki. She has also participated in various research and evaluation projects and she is a member of the Decolonize Hellas initiative. Her research experience includes long term fieldwork with Gypsy/Gypsy musicians in Epirus (Greek-Albanian border) and more recently with Mizrahi populations and the policies and practices related to “Greek” music in Israel. Her scholarly interests revolve around the anthropology of music, issues of nationalism and territory, borders and ethnic groups, and the politics of culture and affect around popular music, among others. More recently, she has been interested in the issue of artistic labor, fan cultures, cultural racism, and legacies of ethnic purity and white supremacy in the Greek context. Her current ethnographic projects focus on the politics and practices associated with Greek popular music in contemporary Israel and the artistic work of popular women musicians/singers, as well as the case of artistic labour in migratory contexts. Finally, she is currently co-writing an ethnography on Glykeria’s artistic career in Israel since the 1990s.

Panel #9.
Petros Petridis is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. He has studied Social Policy and Social Anthropology at Panteion University (BA and M.Sc.) and holds a PhD from the Department of Social Anthropology. His doctoral thesis, entitled “Digital Archives and Exchange Practices: An Anthropological Approach to Peer-to-Peer Networks” (2011), combines theories of social anthropology and new media studies to explore digital piracy. More specifically, it seeks to illuminate the popular perceptions regarding intellectual property, the exchange practices of digital archives in the context of Peer-to-Peer networks, and the processes of constructing online communities concerning digital piracy of music, movies, digital games, and software. His research interests focus on digital anthropology and ethnography, the use of digital media in the educational process and the teaching of social anthropology, digital games, and gamification techniques, new forms of digital labor and digital surveillance, algorithmic cultures, and musical cultures of the internet. He has conducted postdoctoral research entitled “Digital Labor, Theorycraft and Databases in the Context of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games” (2016) at the Research Centre for the Humanities. He has participated in many research projects in collaboration with universities and research institutions, researching the relationship between social media, time and education, the educational dimensions of digital games, the creation of educational material in digital formats (video, podcast), and the relationship of the far-right with digital media.

Panel #10
Anna Giulia Della Puppa (She/her), After graduating from the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology and Ethnolinguistics at Ca’Foscari University in Venice with a thesis in urban anthropology, I did a research experience at the VU University in Amsterdam and attended two postgraduate courses in museum and art anthropology and urban anthropology, both at the University of Milan Bicocca, while working as a facilitator of participatory processes for social cooperation and child education. I am part of the public anthropology research group “Montagne in Movimento” (Mountains in Movement), based in Italy, and I have collaborated with several museum organisations in the city of Parma, particularly on projects focusing on the resemantization of material and immaterial heritage. I am currently a PhD student in Urban Anthropology at the Department of Civil, Constructional and Environmental Engineering at La Sapienza University of Rome and a visiting junior scholar at the Department of Geography at Harokopio University of Athens. My privileged field of research is the city of Athens, where I live part of the year and where I have dealt in the past with the urban transformations of the neighbourhood of Exarchia during the years of the economic crisis, applying a strongly Demartinian perspective of disaster anthropology, and with the conjuncture between urban space, national(ist) education and public discourse. To date, my research interest is in the processes of tourisfication affecting the neighbourhood of Exarchia, which I observe through the lens of logistics and in the intersection between physical and digital infrastructures, analysing their spatial, socio-technical and relational effects.

Caterina Ciarleglio. I have a double background in philosophy and geography. I got two Master’s degrees at the University of Bologna, the first one with a thesis on theoretical continental philosophy, which I developed during my first period abroad at the Sorbonne University (Paris). I got the second one in geography with a thesis about tourism and biopolitics, aimed at studying the phenomenon of Covid-free islands in Italy as tourist immune enclave, conceiving them as a “spatial laboratory” devoted to the preservation of pre-pandemic tourism practices. This research led to a contributed chapter in a book about tourism and biopolitics during the Covid pandemic edited by Minca and Roelofsen, in press with Springer. My strong interest in critical theory applied to social problems allows me to combine philosophy and geography to study spatial transformation, with particularly attention to spatial segregation and territorial violence due to tourism dynamics. I’m currently holding a position as a PhD student in Human Geography at the Polytechnic of Turin. My PhD project at the Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning intends to critically study the new urban regeneration project near Athens called The Ellinikon, focusing on the biopolitical and enclavic dimension of this new smart city. As I believe that knowledge is something that arise from a collective context and flourish thanks to connections, interactions and discussions, I’m part of the permanent assembly of young Italian geographers ‘Smarginando’, an informal and convivial space to deepen our research topics and interests.

Panel #11.
Nir Avieli is a Professor of Anthropology at Ben Gurion University (Israel), Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and former president of the Israeli Anthropological Association (2016 – 2019). He studies food, tourism, gender, heritage, and leisure, and has pursued fieldwork in Vietnam, Israel, India, Thailand, Singapore, Zanzibar, and Greece. His books include: Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town (2012, Indiana University Press), Food and Power: A Culinary Ethnography of Israel (2018, University of California Press), and Eating Religiously: Food and Faith in the 21st Century (Routledge 2023). He has published articles on diverse topics, ranging from the politics of UNESCO World Heritage Sites to the role of veganism in forging identity within the African Hebrew Israelite community. Currently he is writing a book on “Food and Freedom: Culinary Redemption in the Israeli Periphery,” and is engaged in a new research project on “leisure” in Greece.

Vassiliki Yiakoumaki is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at the Department of History-Archaeology-Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly, Greece. Her research focuses on ethnic groups and minorities, multiculturalist politics, Jewish cultures in Greece and Europe, religion and the public sphere, and practices of contemporary religiosity. She has also worked in the field of anthropology of food, exploring relations of food cultures and national / ethnic identities. Currently she is working on contemporary Israeli society and the broader “Middle East,” exploring issues of: “Greek-Jewish” identities in Israel, i.e., contemporary perceptions of Greek identity in present-day “Greek”-Israelis; politics and religion in contemporary Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds in Israeli and neighboring cultural contexts; the politics of appropriation of “Greekness” in music cultures of Israel, and genealogies of “kinship” through music. She is co-editing a book on religion and politics in the Middle East, showcasing new ethnographic fieldwork sites.

Panel #12.
Eleftheria Deltsou is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Department of History, Archeology and Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly, Greece. She has co-edited volumes on urban activism, semiotics and anthropology, and she has published in academic journals and collective volumes in Greece and abroad. Her academic interests cover areas of rural and urban anthropology, the politics of culture, urban activism, tourism, development, consumption, the European Union, modernity/postmodernity and neoliberalism, nationalism, the production of space.
(http://ha.uth.gr/index.php?page=faculty.display&a=eldelt)

Venetia Kantsa is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory of Family and Kinship in the Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean, Greece. Her research focuses on lesbian (in)visibility, same-sex families, new forms of parenthood, kinship in the context of assisted reproduction, interrelations among kinship, medical technology, law and religion, relations between human and non-human entities. She has also published extensively on kinship theory, gender epistemology and methodology, politics of sexuality and conceptualizations of citizenship.
(https://www.sah.aegean.gr/en/faculty/kantsa-venetia/)

Alexandra Bakalaki retired from the Department of History and Archaeology of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki as associate professor of social anthropology and folklore in 2020. She edited the volume Anthropology, Women and Gender (1994) and in collaboration with Eleni Elegmitou wrote the book Homemaking Education and Feminine Duties. From the Establishment of the Greek State until the Education Reform of 1929 (1987). She has also contributed articles and chapters to Greek and international journals and edited volumes. Her main research interests concern the anthropology of gender and the body, economic anthropology, teaching anthropology and Greek ethnography.

Despina Nazou is a social anthropologist, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Crete. She has conducted two funded postdoctoral researches focusing on local identities of the Aegean, tourism, entrepreneurship and gender. She has recently completed her postdoctoral research on ” Archaeology, Tourism and Local Communities: reception, recruitment and appropriation of the archaeological reserve in insular Greece 2017-2021). She has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University of the Aegean and has published texts and articles in collective volumes and scientific journals.

Eleni Papagaroufali is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Panteion University, Athens, Greece. She is the author of two books in Greek: Papagaroufali, E. 2012 [2002]. Gifts of Life after Death. Cultural Experiences. Athens, Patakis Publications, and Papagaroufali, E. 2013, Soft diplomacy. Transnational twinnings and pacifist practices in contemporary Greece. Athens, Alexandreia Publications. She has also written numerous articles and chapters in Greek and foreign peer-reviewed journals and collected volumes. Her research interests include: anthropological theory, anthropology of gender and gender-based violence, anthropology of body and health, transnational practices implemented by the EU and the UN. She is currently doing research on the newly initiated practice of cremation in Greece.

Panel #13.
Konstantinos Kalantzis is Assistant Professor of Anthropology is a sociocultural anthropologist (PhD, UCL) working on the intersections of visual culture and political imagination. He is author of Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power, and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete (IUP, 2019), co-editor of the volume Citizens of Photography (Duke University Press, 2022) and director of the ethnographic films Dowsing the Past (2014) and the Impossible Narration (2021). He has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in rural and urban Greece since 2006. He has taught as a lecturer at Panteion (2014), San Francisco State University (2016), at UCL (2019, 2020) and at the university of Bern (2017). He has worked as a researcher at Princeton University (Mary Seeger O’Boyle Fellow), at UCL (PhotoDemos), at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Therasia project) and he was a 2021-2022 Fellow in Comparative Cultural Studies at the Center of Hellenic Studies, Harvard University. His publications appear in refereed journals, such as American Ethnologist (2014) and Current Anthropology (2023) and he has edited the special issue of Visual Anthropology Review “Uncertain Visions” (2016). He has organized various conferences and photo-exhibitions (e.g., “Imagi(ni)ng Crisis», BSA), “Uneasy Photography,” (Panteion 2017) and “The Sfakian Screen” (2018). He is a recipient of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2019 JB Donne Essay Prize on the Anthropology of Art. He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the department of Culture and Creative Media and Industries, University of Thessaly, and an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL (Anthropology).

Alexandra Bakalaki retired from the Department of History and Archaeology of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki as associate professor of social anthropology and folklore in 2020. She edited the volume Anthropology, Women and Gender (1994) and in collaboration with Eleni Elegmitou wrote the book Homemaking Education and Feminine Duties. From the Establishment of the Greek State until the Education Reform of 1929 (1987). She has also contributed articles and chapters to Greek and international journals and edited volumes. Her main research interests concern the anthropology of gender and the body, economic anthropology, teaching anthropology and Greek ethnography.

Theodoros Rakopoulos is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His publications focus on issues such as land management and cooperative labour, silence and betrayal, moral boundaries and legal alterity, conspiracy theory and fascism, masculinity and violence, citizenship and its marketisation. He is currently writing on issues of sovereignty and property in Cyprus, while also exploring decolonizing debates. He is author of the ethnographic monographs From clans to co-ops: Confiscated mafia land in Sicily (2017, Οξφόρδη: Berghahn, ιταλική μετάφραση 2022, Μιλάνο: Meltemi) and Passport Island: The market for EU citizenship in Cyprus (2023, Μάντσεστερ: Manchester University Press), as well as editor of the volumes The global life of austerity (2018, Berghahn) and Towards an anthropology of wealth (2019, Routledge).

Panel #14.
Katerina Rozakou is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. Her research interests include political anthropology, humanitarianism, solidarity, migration, civil society, non-governmental organizations, bureaucracy and the state. She has studied Social Anthropology at the University of the Aegean and University College London, and she has worked in research projects at the University of the Aegean and the University of Crete. She has held post-doctoral positions at the Seeger Centre Program of Hellenic Studies at Princeton University and the University of Amsterdam where she also taught. She is author of the book Out of ‘Love’ and ‘Solidarity’: Voluntary Work with Refugees in early 21st Century Athens (Alexandria 2018) and she has co-edited (with Eleni Gara) the collective volume Greek Paradoxes: Patronage, Civil Society and Violence (Alexandria 2013). Her articles have been published in edited volumes and in Greek and international scientific journals. Since September 2022 she has been conducting research on the procedures for acquiring Greek citizenship. Since October 2023, she is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Bureaucratic naturalization: investigating citizenship acquisition procedures in Greece” (2023-2025).

Dimitra Kofti is an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. Her research interests include anthropological theory, historical anthropology, economic anthropology, anthropology of work, and ethnographic film. She has conducted research on the transformations of work in Bulgaria and on debt and financialization in Greece. After the completion of her PhD at University College London (2012), she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (2012-2018). Her published work includes the “Broken Glass, Broken Class. Transformations of Work in Bulgaria” (Berghahn, 2023) and the film “Cracks” (2018). She is currently a co-editor of the journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.

Panel #15.
Aspasia (Sissie) Theodosiou is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Department of Music Studies of the University of Ioannina. She obtained her MA and PhD from the Dept of in Social Anthropology (University of Manchester). She was a member of MC of the international research network “Remaking eastern borders in Europe” and she participated in the “Crosslocations” project of the University of Helsinki. She has also participated in various research and evaluation projects and she is a member of the Decolonize Hellas initiative. Her research experience includes long term fieldwork with Gypsy/Gypsy musicians in Epirus (Greek-Albanian border) and more recently with Mizrahi populations and the policies and practices related to “Greek” music in Israel. Her scholarly interests revolve around the anthropology of music, issues of nationalism and territory, borders and ethnic groups, and the politics of culture and affect around popular music, among others. More recently, she has been interested in the issue of artistic labor, fan cultures, cultural racism, and legacies of ethnic purity and white supremacy in the Greek context. Her current ethnographic projects focus on the politics and practices associated with Greek popular music in contemporary Israel and the artistic work of popular women musicians/singers, as well as the case of artistic labour in migratory contexts. Finally, she is currently co-writing an ethnography on Glykeria’s artistic career in Israel since the 1990s.

Cynthia Helen Malakasis is a cultural anthropologist interested in nationalism, ethnicity, race, post-colonial dynamics with an emphasis on intra-European hierarchies, reproductive care, citizenship, and Greece. Her doctoral project, at Florida International University, examined whether and how post-1989, mass immigration to Greece challenged the country’s nationalist norms of collective belonging. From 2016 to 2020, she has conducted ERC-funded, post-doctoral research at the European University Institute on the maternity care of migrants and refugees in Athens. From 2021 to 2023, she conducted post-doctoral research on the institutional handling of gender-based violence in Athens during Covid, as part of the “Cov-Care” project, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) and hosted at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University. In March 2023, she began research, as the P.I. of a four-member team, on the reproductive care of Roma women in the Greek public-health system. Her project is also funded by the H.F.R.I. and hosted at Panteion’s Department of Social Anthropology.

Panel #16.
Penelope Papailias is an associate professor of social anthropology at the University of Thessaly where she directs the Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities. Her ethnographic research concerns the politics of memory and historical culture in Greece, with an emphasis on colonial afterlives and technologies of mediation. She is a founding member of the initiative dëcoloиıze hellάş and associate editor of World Anthropologies for the journal American Anthropologist.

Panel #17.
George Tsimouris studied Political Science at Panteion University from where he graduated in 1980. He studied Sociology at the University of Essex, UK (MA 1994), and Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK (PhD. 1998). For his doctoral thesis, he conducted research among the refugee-origin residents of Agios Dimitrios in Lemnos and among other populations originating from Asia Minor. He has published in Greek and international scientific journals on issues concerning refugees, immigrants, intercultural
education, borders, fascism and the modern crisis. His research concerning the displacement of the Greek community of Imvrou and was published in the book: “Imvrioi: Fugitives from our country, hostages in the homeland”, 2007 – Ed. Ellinika Grammata and 2012 – Ed. DaVinci (in Greek). His latest research concerns the life of sailors on ships and was published in the book, “We sailors, docked and disembarked” ( «Εμείς οι ναυτικοί, μπαρκαρισμένοι και ξέμπαρκοι»), 2021 Ed. DaVinci (in Greek).

Pantelis Probonas studied Social Anthropology, History and Cultural Geography at the Democritus University, NTUA and the University of Thessaly. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, Archeology and Social Anthropology and as a fellow of the State Scholarship Foundation, he is completing his thesis on “’Unclaimed Bodies’: Politics of Death Management at the Border of Europe”. He is a member of the Pelion Summer Lab organizational team and a scientific collaborator in the Global/Local Project implemented by the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network in collaboration with the University of Thessaly. His research interests concern the body, the politics of life and death, borders and borderlands as well as ethnographic considerations of the state and bureaucracy.

Effie Doussi studied Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with postgraduate studies in Criminology /Department of Sociology and Social and Cultural Anthropology at Panteion University. As a legal advisor she has been systematically involved since 2014 in the issues of litigation in the refugee protection and human rights advocacy, participating in various research activities and interventions. Her theoretical interests include political anthropology, border anthropology, humanisms, humanitarian action, gender studies, body technologies, theories of subjectivity and responsibility, biopolitics, politics of memory and research activism.

Panel #18.
Athena Athanasiou is Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Athens, Greece). She is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Among her publications are the books: Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (with Judith Butler, Polity Press, 2013); Crisis as a ‘State of Exception’ (Athens, 2012); Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body and Biopolitics (Athens, 2007); Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘the Greeks’ (co-ed. with Elena Tzelepis, SUNY Press, 2010); Deconstructing the Empire: Theory and Politics of Postcolonial Studies (Athens, 2016); Feminist Theory and Cultural Critique (Athens, 2006); Biosocialities (Athens, 2011). She is a member of the editorial advisory board of several journals (Critical Times, Feminist Formations, Philosophy, Politics and Critique, Journal of Greek Media and Culture, and others).

Nelli Kampouri (PhD, LSE) was elected assistant professor at the Department of Social Anthropology of Panteion University in 2023. In parallel, she is conducting research on sound and migration in the MUTE project and she has designed and is teaching the course “Feminist methodologies and intersectionality” at the Hellenic Open University. In the past, she has worked in research projects at the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Panteion University’s Centre for Gender Studies, the Foundation for Research and Technology, and the University of Hertfordshire. She has been a scientific consultant for the International Labor Organization and the General Secretariat for Gender Equality. Her research interests focus mainly on gender, migration, labour, methodology, science and technology and her publications include relevant books, articles, and reports in Greek and English.

Anna Papaeti (PhD, King’s College London) is Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant, Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Sound, and the Ethics of Witnessing (MUTE) at the Institute of Historical Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation. She writes about the nexus of music, sound and trauma, as well as the intersections of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. She held two Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowships at the University of Goettingen (2011–2014, FP7) and at Panteion University, Athens (2017–2019, Horizon 2020) respectively. Her research has also been supported by DAAD, Onassis Foundation, and the Centre for Research for the Humanities, Athens. She co-edited two special issues on music torture and music in detention. Her monograph When Music Meets History. Representations of Trauma, from Auschwitz to the Financial Crisis is forthcoming (Assini, Athens). She is also a research-based-art practitioner, working in sound and textual forms. Her works include the installation in/audibility (2022) and the podcast The Undoing of Music (2019, Museo Reina Sofia).