EASA2022: Transformation, Hope and the Commons

The 17th European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA2022) biennial conference on Transformation, Hope and the Commons was hosted by the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics (HAPP) at Queen’s University Belfast. The conference was attended by 1720 delegates, both face to face and online. The 17^th EASA Biennial Conference offered participants a hybrid experience for the first time after the pandemic and focused on the entanglements of transformation, hope and the commons. The global Covid19 pandemic, and societal responses to it, have transformed the societies in which we live and work. Media and political discourses deploy a rhetoric of rupture, facilitating shifts in governance and bio-politics that mask and widen existing inequalities. Instead of the ‘crisis-thinking’ that abstracts current events from broader and historical continuities, the conference invited anthropologists to make connections through sustained ethnographic and anthropological inquiry.

These and further issues were explored in a diverse range of panels (181 in total), 3 plenaries and the keynote delivered by Professor Athena Athanasiou, Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Athens, Greece). Professor Athanasiou’s work in gender studies, contemporary critical theory, politics of memory, vulnerability and resistance, theories of performativity, and decolonial critique offered powerful insights into the main themes. In her keynote entitled ‘The unfoundedness of hope: Engaging the contingencies of the im-possible for critical presents’, Professor Athanasiou highlighted: “Lingering on precarious articulations of unevenly distributed despair and hope, this lecture addresses how counter-public performativity in light of racialized, gendered, and classed exhaustion involves the inappropriate/d situated knowledges of vulnerability -as a shared uncommon in all its multiplicities and partialities- but also the potential of re-embodying conditions of impossibility as conditions of transformative possibility.”

Beyond the traditional academic format of panels, the conference also hosted 26 labs, in which participants presented anthropological research through creative practice and reflection. Contributions included theatrical performances, poetic recitations, visual installations and digital art. A full programme of films was screened as part of the conference, at the university’s own cinema, the Queen’s Film Theatre (QFT) that has been screening diverse local and international films for almost 50 years.

Belfast offered participants a distinct site to debate the main conference themes critically, whilst getting a taste of how these are manifested and articulated in the city landscape.

Local Committee: Evi Chatzipanagiotidou (Convenor of EASA2022, Senior lecturer in Anthropology), Fiona Murphy (Convenor of EASA2022, Senior lecturer in Anthropology) Dominic Bryan (Professor in Anthropology), Chrysi Kyratsou (PhD candidate in Anthropology), Fiona Magowan (Professor in Anthropology), Niamh Small (PhD candidate in Anthropology), Maruška Svašek (Professor in Anthropology), Ioannis Tsioulakis (Senior lecturer in Anthropology), Dr Michael Brown (Lecturer in Film Studies), Dr Raluca Roman (Lecturer in Anthropology)

Scientific Committee: Evropi Chatzipanagiotidou (Queen’s University Belfast), Dominic Bryan (Queen’s University Belfast), Fiona Murphy (Queen’s University Belfast), Mariya Ivancheva (The University of Strathclyde), Chandana Mathur (National University of Ireland, Maynooth), Jonas Tinius (Saarland University), Abayomi Ogunsanya (Independent scholar), Nevena Škrbić Alempijević (University of Zagreb), Thomas Kirsch (University of Konstanz)