Luncheon Roundtables at 2009 Philadelphia Meeting
Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Roundtable Luncheon for the 2009 AAA Meeting, Philadelphia
Organizer: Elizabeth L. Krause
The Sae Rountable Luncheon brings anthropologists together in an informal setting to discuss topics that reflect new and emerging directions in the anthropology of Europe. Lunch will be served on Saturday, December 5, at a convenient location in the conference hotel. Each table has a host who typically leads six-seven participants in lively conversation. Unlike the standard AAA session, this format allows face to face interaction among anthropologists at different stages in their research experience and professional trajectories.
Tickets are $45 for faculty/professionals and $15 for students. Registration for each table is online through the AAA conference registration system. If any seats should remain, tickets will be available for purchase on-site at the AAA conference registration booth.
TABLE 1
CARTER, Donald (Hamilton)
Breaking the Visible Barrier: Invisibility, Belonging and the Long March to Humanity
Raplh Ellison once suggested that people be allowed to recognize themselves as themselves despite what others may believe them to be, a vigilant and impassioned call to seek balance amid the countervailing and discursive tensions of social erasure and the integrity and autonomy of an affirming subjectivity. In contemporary Europe many newcomers hope to create a place for themselves in a social world that at times relegates them to invisibility. And yet a new Europe carefully envisioned may offer an equitable cultural space for those thrown together by circumstance, postcolonial conditions and global capitalism. This new convergence of fortunes may present an opportunity for both newcomer and the established to exploit the ambiguity in the process and nature of European self-representation. Europeans old and new may transform established conventions by inhabiting a now potential social ontology. Considering the social invisibility distinctions in an among differential notions of social imagination and belonging. This roundtable explores some of these emergent nodes of cultural identity that we have yet to imagine and what impact they might have on the politics of recognition and the making of newly inclusive social orders. It also examines the role and nature of ethnographic inquiry in shaping or being shaped by these processes.
TABLE 2
HEMMENT, Julie (U. of Massachusetts Amherst)
Forging collaborative ethnography in Europe
At a time when world events push us to ask hard questions about the future and relevance of the discipline, this roundtable rethinks one of its most endagered aspects: the paradigm of the lone ethnographer. Working collaboratively with research subjects in Europe offers a means to overcome the U.S.-centrism of the discipline. It also represents a strategy to tackle some of its methodological and ethical challenges: conducting multi-sited research; working with mobile (diasporic, migrant) publics; achieving a more socially engaged or activist anthropology. My own thinking on this topic is shaped by the two collaborative projects I have conducted thus far: 1) a participatory action research project with Russian feminist activists, 1997-98 and 2) an NSF-funded collaborative research project with Russian social scientists and their undergraduate students, 2008-10. These case studies make for interesting comparison, for crucially they involve the same players: scholars and activists associated with the provincial Russian women’s group Zhenskii Svet. The move from the first to the second project was prompted by both structural forces )political economic change and shifting geopolitical relations) and personal change (shifting professional status), and involved a significant re framing. In this discussion, we will consider both modes and methods of pursuing collaborative ethnographic projects as well as the forces that may propel us to undertake them. Some of the questions we may explore include: How effective might collaborative ethnography as a mid-career strategy be? How can we pitch collaborative ethnography to potential funders? What are proven methodologies and technologies of collaboration? To what extent might collaboration serve as a mode of activists engagement?
TABLE 3
KRAUSS, Werner (U. of Texas at Austin)
Alternative Energy Landscapes in Europe
Sustainable energy supply is one of the most pressing challenges in the contemporary world. Global warming and the resulting necessity of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the depletion of natural resources and dependency on incalculable markets all demand the implementation of alternative energies worldwide. Energy has become a top priority for the European Union, and the European Commission has already established the rules for achieving 20 percent of energy consumption for renewable sources by 2020, alongside the goal of 20 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. European landscapes exemplify the transformative processes that are already underway and that will be our focus in this roundtable. With Denmark, Germany and Spain as the leading producers of wind energy, ever more European countries have begun to invest into this newly emerging energy market. This roundtable seeks to bring together contributions about the emergence of alternative energies, including individual case studies, the tracing of local-global relations, or perspectives from science & technology studies, in order to establish a network on the study of newly emerging energy landscapes. We will address the implementation of alternative energies through the lens of the ethnography of European landscapes and ask: How did alternative energies such as wind energy, biogas or bio-fuel production evolve in specific European landscapes? How do these transformations alter the established networks, and who does profit from this development?
TABLE 4
LEINAWEAVER, Jessaca (Brown U.)
Following Anthropology of Europe: Immigration and Disciplinary Shifts
“Ethnographers work in the developing world or in ethnic enclaves in Europe,” those who click through the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiatives online research ethics training will be told. Europeanists are familiar with this tension between anthropology’s historical purview to study the Other, and the compelling human issues their fieldsites present (as are, for similar reasons, anthropologists working on urban U.S. populations). These issues may be new, however, to scholars who have been working in other fieldsites and are only recently coming to Europe trailing after immigrants from our earlier fieldsites in the “developing world.” This rountable invites the participation of scholars who are following their migrant interlocutors to Europe: Does the research on migrant populations within Western European nations reify or contest traditional area studies categories? How do we define the “area specialty” of a scholar studying, for instance, Ecuadorian migrants performing on a street corner in Madrid or Paris or Berlin, and does such a project tell us more about Andean cultural practices or Western European ones? How do calls to study hybridity, transnationalism, or deterritorialization fit with the area studies foundations of anthropology department curricula, job postings, or funding possibilities? Rather than posit their end, can we argue that the ends of area studies- most prominently, interdisciplinary communication and an effort to de-parochialize developed regions’ interests- remain critically significant? This roundtable anticipates comparative conversations about, on one level, the experiences of migrants to Europe, their connections to their home countries, and the degree to which European nations are incorporating migrants or addressing migrant issues; and on another level, the experiences of their ethnographers who may have shifted fieldsites midstream and who are contemplating the possibilities and limitations that a relocated research project brings.
TABLE 5
MUEHLEBACH, Andrea (U. of Toronto)
The institutions commonly considered paradigmatic of Fordism, such as stable labor regimes, the patriarchal family, and a strong, welfarist state are, even as they appear to be vanishing, actively mourned by many Europeans today. These seemingly bygone institutions and the kinds of affective attachment they continue to bring forth thus retain much social force as people attempt to recapture or at the very least approximate “Fordist” feelings of stability and belonging in theses rapidly changing times. Fordism is thus perhaps less helpfully thought of as a past ear than a locus of nostalgic yearnings and desires that crucially intervene in an impact the neoliberal present-a present all too often conceptualized as a radical break from the past. In Italy, for example, the restructuring of the care sector operates as much through neoliberal processes of rationalization as it marshals institutions (such as unions) and emotions (such as the desire on the part of citizens to achieve stability and social belonging through work) that are often associated with Fordism. This roundtable luncheon provides space for reflections on the social life of Fordist forms and feelings across the Fordist/post-Fordist “divide.” Questions we might discuss are: Where do these yearnings originate, how are they circulated and communicated across social domains, and what is their shape and meaning as they get articulated under fundamentally shifting social, political, and economic conditions? How, for example, does this nostalgia give rise to hybrid forms of statehood and statecraft that are both weak and strong, withdrawing and interventionist? How does mourning for the stable workplace or patriarchal kin arrangements provide the grounds upon which past and present (emotive) practices get amalgamated, reoriented, recontextualized? What cultural and social work do memories of Fordist securities and stabilities do in contemporary Europe?
TABLE 6
SEREMETAKIS, C. Nadia (U. of Peloponnese)
European society is experiencing a “cascade of state and media phraseology on an of “management” as the only effective solution to the multiple crises-economic, social and culture- that characterized “grammar” of social and cultural reparation. This is also evident in the novel academic specialization-such as Cultural Management or Management of Cultural Heritage, among others- that (re)mediate anthropology, for instance in Greece. Which infrastructure, which processes account for the reception and prevalence of this “grammar”? What social theories and pedagogy does this “novel language” resonate and promote? How does “managerial culture” affect everydayness, upon which it is inscribed? This roundtable considers the response of ethnography, as both research method (science) and text (literature) devoted to the quotidian. Can ethnography as performance and/or performance ethnography counter current crises that fracture everyday life experience? Thinking, for instance, of physical disasters in Greece-the private is always the first and ongoing casualty of a disaster- how could a series of public, participator, multimedia ethnographic events reclaim the social, historical and sensorial body, offering thus an alternative to “Cultural Management”? Starting from this point, with a mini “demonstration” of how performing ethnography on an of a specific disaster event engaged and mobilized a whole region, we will discuss the above issues.
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