...Einblicke in die bewegungsbasierte ethnografische Sozial(staats)regimeanalyse. Die Nachwuchsgruppe "Contestations of 'the Social''" untersucht Sozial(staats)regime ethnografisch und in enger Kooperation mit mehrsprachig arbeitenden Basisinitiativen erwerbsloser und prekär beschäftigter Personen in krisengeschüttelten Städten des Globalen Nordens. Ausgehend von einer Vorstellung ihres kollaborativen Forschungsansatzes, wird Lisa Riedner Konflikten um den Stellenwert von Lohnarbeit nachspüren: Während Teilnehmende der 2. Mai-Demo zum Kampftag der Arbeitslosen "Urlaub für alle, und zwar sofort" fordern, treten migrantische Initiativen für das Recht auf Arbeit ein, Jobcenter sollen Arbeitslose in den Arbeitsmarkt integrieren oder ihre "Kund:innen" manchmal auch "jenseits von Arbeit" ganzheitlich betreuen, und der Zoll verfolgt "Scheinarbeit".
Termine
Unfortunately, this lecture has to be cancelled. Criminalization of queer solidarity in Eastern Europe. Lunch Lecture Series "Engaged Anthropology" with Sarian Jarosz from the Migrant Consortium. He will discuss the criminalization of queer solidarity in Poland, and methods to investigate it. Examples of both queer and border queer solidarity will take center stage in his lecture and he will give us an insight into his own border work with queer refugees.
...Emancipation, Participation and Activism. Potentials and Limits of Engaged Research in Southeast Asia. How does engaged research enhance the situation and solidarity of female workers in the textile industry in Cambodia? How to support transnational worker’s movements in the palm oil industry in Indonesia and Thailand? How to strengthen villagers in their endeavour to secure land rights in mining conflicts in Indonesia? By drawing on our research experiences in different countries of Southeast Asia, we present approaches, methods, potentials and limits of engaged research. We also discuss questions about conflicting interests, persistent hierarchies and our role as researchers.
...The Influence of Intersectional Identities, Gendered Challenges and ‘Tropes of Hardship’ on Ethnographic Research. Institutional training seldom prepares early-career researchers and students sufficiently for the challenges ethnographers may face during empirical research. Too little attention is paid to the significance of the researchers’ and the interlocutors’ intersectional identities and the impact they have on the research process. Therefore, in this talk I focus on the specific challenges of ethnographic research as a gendered and embodied practice. I address the dynamic power relations between ethnographers, interlocutors and gatekeepers during anthropological fieldwork and ethnographic interviews. I illustrate how gendered, racialized and nationalized bodies and identities influence fieldwork experience, relationships and the collection and interpretation of research data.
...Reflections on piecing up Fifteen Colonial Thefts. The volume Fifteen Colonial Thefts is the product of combined energies, namely those of 22 scholars, 12 artists, 8 curators, three activists, two collections managers, one filmmaker and one gonje. As its title suggests and despite this vast array of people involved, the volume does not pretend to tackle all cases of looting of African cultural heritage. We would need at least twenty-five volumes for that. What is proposes, however, is to relate and visualise the history of colonial plunder through a patchwork of voices and positionings from Africa, Europe, the US and in-between. By examining passages from the book and reflecting on the whole endeavour, the editors will here present the challenges and value of working across media and disciplines to unearth and tell histories of colonial violence.
...writing European futures. Disappointment is arguably one of the key affective dynamics of our historical moment, fueling ‘angry politics’ and contributing to a political shift to the right. This political-affective structure has something to do with how socialist pasts have (or have not) been written about. Actors from socialist countries played an important role in shaping international arenas between 1945 and 1989, although their contributions have often been overlooked. By reconstructing the ways in which socialist actors contributed to the international Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, this talk poses the question of whether rewriting international histories can help envision European futures beyond disappointment. It also suggests that rediscovering forgotten socialist internationalisms follows the aim of empirical CS/EE to conceptually shift from focusing on ‘difference’ to studying ‘diversity’, thus overcoming the binary between ‘self’ and ‘Other’.
...Lessons learned from feminist and queer anthropology. We live in dark times - and it seems that we have not yet reached the point where the night is at its deepest and thus the day at its closest, as a song by the band Ton, Steine, Scherben hopefully puts it. These dark times present a challenge for ethnographic research. Starting from Sherry Ortner's lucid analysis of anthropological theory production (Strathern: Dark Anthropology), I will follow two lines of reasoning: First, I will follow the desire for another possible world that is so deeply embedded in feminist gender and queer studies, and think about the possibilities of doing engaged anthropology in terms of a utopian longing for the better. Secondly, I will ask how critique is possible in times of crisis and in the face of a polarised public debate. In my talk, I will take up the ongoing discourse in anthropology on the possibilities of critique while looking at feminist and queer research done in anthropology.
...Arbeiter*innen in der ethnografischen Forschung. Lunch Lecture Series "Engaged Anthropology" with Olga Reznikova (Universität Innsbruck). Part 12: more information to be announced/ in progress. Thank you for your patience!
...a call to action. Building on the 2021 book Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism, this talk considers the praxes of academics working within, and against, their institutions in pursuit of anti-racist social justice. To do so, it draws upon data from interviews with antiracist ‘scholar-activists’ in British universities. The presentation explores key themes from that research and offers key principles that may be taken to define antiracist scholar-activism. In so doing, it considers the challenges and contradictions that arise from working in neoliberal-imperial-institutionally-racist universities, whilst also suggesting that there remain pockets of possibility to subvert the institution and work in service to communities of resistance. whilst inviting attendees to reflect on their own contexts and forms of praxis, the talk calls for scholars to take up the cause of antiracist social justice.