easa

About easa

EASA is a professional association open to all social anthropologists either qualified in, or else working in, Europe. It is a society of scholarship, founded on January 14th, 1989 at the "Inaugural General Assembly" in Castelgandolfo/Italy of twenty-one founder members from thirteen European countries and one from the US, supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. This meeting drafted the Constitution and elected the Association's first Executive Committee (1989-90), chaired by Prof. Adam Kuper, Brunel University.

The Association seeks to advance anthropology in Europe by organizing biennial conferences, by editing its academic journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, its Newsletter and the two publication series. The Association further encourages and supports thematic networks.

EASA is a self-governing democratic body. It is both registered with Companies House and with the Charity Commission. As such it is bound by its constitution, relevant laws and EASA adheres to guidance on proper governance. No member may be elected to office more than twice in succession; the only exception are up to two members co-opted by the elected Executive so as to ensure the continuity of EASA's administrative and publishing functions. The composition of the successive Executive Committees shows the pan-European character of EASA.

Executive Committee 2017 and 2018

Valeria Siniscalchi Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Marseille, President

I am Associate Professor at the EHESS and member of the Research Centre Norbert Elias. I co-direct the PhD program in Social Sciences (EHESS-Marseille) and the "Comparative research in anthropology, history and sociology" Master. I obtained my PhD in Social Anthropology at the University "La Sapienza" (Rome, Italy) in 1996. My teaching activities and research focus on “anthropology of economic spaces”. My research subjects include economic anthropology, the politics of nature, industrial work and districts, food activism and the relationship between food, social movements and politics. I have done extensive research in the North and in the South of Italy, in the French Alps and inside the Slow Food movement. I coordinate an interdisciplinary project on food production and consumption and short chains of distribution. My publications include Antropologia culturale. Un’introduzione (2001, 2009, 2012 Roma, Carocci) and the edited volumes Frammenti di economie. Ricerche di antropologia economica in Italia (Cosenza, 2002) and Food Activism. Agency, Democracy and Economy (2014, London, Bloomsbury, with Carole Counihan). I am working on a new book on the Slow Food Movement. In the previous Executive, I have been in charge of the EASA networks (2015-2016) and part of the scientific committee of the Milan conference.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen University of Oslo, Vice-President

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and PI of the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘Overheating: The Three Crises of Globalisation’ (2012–2017). He is the author of many books including the widely used and translated ‘Small places, large issues’, ‘Ethnicity and Nationalism’, and ‘Globalization: The Key Concepts’. His research has largely been focused on the politics of culture and identity, globalisation and the history of anthropology. Fieldwork in Mauritius, Trinidad, Norway and Australia. His current research project ‘Overheating’ is a comparative endeavour aiming to develop an understanding of local responses to accelerated change in the realms of economy/finance, climate/environment, and culture/identity. He is an active public anthropologist and has a strong interest in the teaching of anthropology, not only at university departments, but also to diverse audiences.

His latest books are “Overheating: An anthropology of accelerated change” and, edited with Elisabeth Schober, “Identities Destabilised: Living in an Overheated World” (both published in 2016).

Marcus Banks (University of Oxford), Network liaison

I am a social anthropologist teaching and researching at the University of Oxford; I work on topics ranging from ethnicity and nationalism, to the use of visual methods. I was honoured to be elected to the Executive Committee and to be able to give something back to an organization from which I have benefited enormously. Following the Brexit vote in the UK, and the outcome of the US Presidential election, it is vital that anthropologists continue to network and share their ideas as widely as possible with each other, and with the public at large. I am therefore delighted to be the responsible for Network liaison and I look forward to working with many of our members in the coming year.

Alberto Corsin Jimenez Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Secretary

I am Reader in Social Anthropology in the Department of the History of Science at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. My main areas of research and writing are the anthropology of science and the anthropology of cities. In particular I am interested in informal, guerrilla and frontier urban processes in Latin America and Europe. I have also a larger interest in the anthropology of knowledge, with particular attention to certain undercurrents or “traps” in the representation of modernity, such as baroque aesthetics and sensibilities. For the past five years I have been studying the work of “free culture” urban activists in Madrid. I am interested in how such expressions of “free urbanism” compare with other accounts of informality in the city (auto-construction, makeshift urbanism, slum urbanism, etc.), as well as in the socio-technical assemblages through which such free and open-source projects problematize anew the forms of urban complexity. I am the author of An Anthropological Trompe L'Oiel for a Common World (Berghahn 2013) and editor of Prototyping Cultures: Art, Science and Politics in Beta (Routledge 2017), Culture and Well-Being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics (Pluto 2008) and The Anthropology of Organisations (Ashgate 2007).

Rachael Gooberman-Hill University of Bristol, Treasurer

Rachael’s PhD (1999, Edinburgh) and MA (1991, St Andrews) were both in Social Anthropology. She now works in a Faculty of Health Sciences within multidisciplinary projects and from August 2017 is the Director of the University of Bristol's Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research, which focuses on bridging research communities and disciplines. Rachael brings to EASA her experience of planning, managing and delivering budgets for research programmes that involve multiple stakeholders. Rachael is particularly interested in how social anthropology can work within multidisciplinary contexts and how it can provide great value to policy and practice outside the academy. Previously, Rachael has been Networks Officer of the Association of the Social Anthropologists and a member of Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Sarah Green (University of Helsinki), Journal editor

Sarah is professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki, and previously worked at the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge. She specialises in the anthropology of space, place and location, particularly in the Balkans and the Mediterranean regions. After a period focusing on fresh ways to think about how borders and border dynamics could be understood, her current research includes an ERC Advanced Grant project entitled “Crosslocations in the Mediterranean: rethinking the socio-cultural dynamics of relative positioning”; and an Academy of Finland project entitled, “Transit, Trade and Travel,” which also focuses on the Mediterranean region. These projects aim to provide better ways to understand the relations and separations between different parts of the Mediterranean. She has previously worked on urban spaces, looking both at gender and sexuality and at the spatial effects of the introduction of the Internet and mobile telephony; and on shifting conceptions of the environment. She is currently actively working on two issues: the further development of what she is calling ‘geometrical anthropology’ and an ethnographic study of animal quarantine, and the surveillance and movement of live animals across borders in the Mediterranean region.

Georgeta Stoica (French Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD France)), PrecAnthro liaison & lobbying

EASA has come to represent one of the major anthropological associations in which I recognize myself as a young researcher in motion. Having a fieldwork experience in Europe (Romania), Indian Ocean (Madagascar, Mayotte and Reunion Island) and a teaching experience as a Visiting Lecturer in Estonia and Italy, I integrated different multidisciplinary research teams in Europe and Indian Ocean Region. Since my nomination as a Secretary and Treasurer of the Italian Association of Anthropologists in 2012, I have been actively involved in activities concerning the future of anthropology and the importance of research networking. I am working to promote the following long-term goals: Strengthening the presence of young anthropologists inside academia and in the public domain; Making anthropology more relevant to European decisional and funding institutions; Recognising the teaching of anthropology at the level of secondary education.

Sabine Strasser (University of Bern), PrecAnthro liaison

As a member of the EASA since 1993 I am delighted to work for the executive committee. I was a member of the local committee of the EASA conference in Vienna (2004) and since then have attended many conferences, presented papers and chaired panels. My fields of scholarly interest include the tensions between right wing populism and transnational political activism in Austria in the early 2000s, issues of autonomy, equality and diversity in the context of transnational marriages and EU border regimes, as well as political transformation, migration and humanitarian interventions in Turkey. As a member of the executive committee I will place particular emphasis on the integration and visibility of young scholars. This is also a major focus of my work at the University of Bern, where I am based. I am moreover interested in our organisation’s public engagement and commitment to supporting colleagues at risk.

From left to right, Rachael Gooberman-Hill, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Georgeta Stoica, Sabine Strasser, Alberto Corsin Jimenez, Sarah Green, Valeria Sinascalchi, Marcus Banks

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Newsletters
Read the latest EASA newsletter and access the archive of PDFs.

Accounts
A summary of EASA's accounts can be downloaded: 2016 , 2015 , 2014
To view EASA's accounts in detail please visit our pages on the Charity Commission's website.

AGM minutes
Previous AGM minutes are available for download: 2017 , 2016 , 2015 , 2014 , 2013 , 2012