easa

Mariya Ivancheva (University of Strathclyde/PrecAnthro)
Role within Exec: President

I was elected as EASA exec member on a platform prioritising 1) authorship, exploitation, and teaching-only contracts in big projects 2) recruitment practices of anthropological departments 3) decolonisation of the discipline. Since my election, I was involved in several initiatives with marvellous colleagues working toward these goals. With Martin Fotta (PrecAnthro) and Raluca Pernes we published the EASA Careers Report exposing deepening precarity and divisions in anthropology. Our Brussels AGM2019 on the politics of knowledge production, initiated a dialogue with lobby groups and ERC on the need to rethink authorship, ethics, and hiring politics in the social sciences. With our EASA2020 exec plenary, co-organised with Prem Kumar Rajaram, decolonising and the rise of authoritarianism and new solidarities took center stage in our conference. Continuing my mandate I aim to strengthen EASA’s work on these topics vis-à-vis impending climate and labour crises, and the promises and perils of COVID-19’s ‘digital turn’.

Chandana Mathur (University of Maynooth)
Role within Exec: Vice-President

I was educated at the University of Delhi and the New School for Social Research, New York, and have worked since 2003 at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Committed both to advocating for anthropology and interrogating its hierarchies, I was the Chair (2016-18) of the World Council of Anthropological Associations when the WCAA came together with the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) to create a single bicameral global body, the World Anthropological Union (WAU). My role in the unification process was recognised with the IUAES’ Distinguished Service Award and the American Anthropological Association’s Presidential Award. My writings draw on anthropological political economy and political ecology – see here for details regarding my work and an interview in American Anthropologist exploring my trajectory. I have served on EASA’s Code of Conduct working group (2018-20) and remain convinced of the need for EASA’s critical voice in these difficult times for our discipline and our world.

Cris Shore (Goldsmiths University, London)
I have been a member of EASA since its inception and keen supporter its activities, including as panel organiser and member of its recent Code-of-Conduct Advisory Group. Until recently my nomadic life prevented me from playing an active role in the association. After graduating from Sussex University, I worked at the European Parliament, Perugia University, Oxford Brookes, and Goldsmiths University where I was professor and Head of Department. In 2003 I moved to Auckland University where I was HoD and founding director of the Europe Institute before returning to London in 2019. As a political anthropologist, I am committed to an engaged, public anthropology that addresses questions of power, policy and exploitation. As an Executive member I would aim to enhance EASA’s standing as a professional association, make it more responsive to grassroots developments throughout Europe, and ensure that its activities reflect and support its members’ needs and interests.

Sharon Macdonald (Humboldt University, Berlin)
As an anthropologist working on Europe, its politics and institutions, especially in relation to memory and difficult heritage, I see Europe and anthropological insights – and the work of EASA in speaking and acting for the discipline – as more vital than ever. Having worked for many years in the UK, I am now Professor of Social Anthropology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (www.carmah.berlin). This, together with working with colleagues across Europe, has made me very aware of the various systems and predicaments faced. I have extensive experience of many aspects of academic work, including in devising new programmes and protocols (e.g. ethics, publishing, climate responsibility), and have held a variety of leadership roles, as well as contributing to team efforts. I am committed to supporting early-career scholars, diversification, building flourishing research environments, improving working conditions and anthropology having a public voice. I am keen to support EASA however I can.

Fiona Murphy (Queen's University Belfast)
I am a long-standing member of EASA and co-co-ordinator of the PACSA network (peace and conflict studies network). As an anthropologist of displacement based in Queen’s University Belfast, I work closely on asylum seeker and refugee issues and Indigenous Australian politics with a thematic focus on conflict, loss and reparation. I am programme director for a large conflict transformation and social justice master’s programme in QUB. I have a particular passion for public and applied anthropology. Having worked for a number of years in business school and marketing settings, I am active in the development of pedagogical opportunities in the spaces of business, design and policy anthropology. If elected to the EASA executive board, I would work towards further expanding the public visibility of anthropology in new and experimental forms. I see the role of social media formats as playing a key role here. Much of my interest in expanding the role of anthropology, in rethinking collaboration and application, stems from my personal experience of precarity. As such, I would see my role on the executive committee as embracing of creativities and expansion whilst always working in solidarity with attempts to address the urgent issue of precarity.

Monica Heintz (University of Paris Nanterre)
Role within Exec: Secretary, Code of Conduct Group Liaison Officer, Ethics Issues

Monica Heintz is Associate Professor (Maître de conférence) at the University of Paris Nanterre, and from January 2019 will be the co-director of the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative in Nanterre. Her main research focuses on moralities and temporalities and her field sites are located in Eastern Europe and France. In recent years she has been extending her methodological research on morality to include naturalistic approaches. Also, in the frame of several joint projects, she is focusing on ethical questions around cultural representations in museums, performances or documentary films. She has authored the books “Be European, recycle yourself”: changing work ethic in Romania (LIT, 2006) and Etica muncii la romanii de azi (Curtea Veche, 2005), edited the volumes The Anthropology of Moralities (Berghahn, 2009) and Weak state, uncertain citizenship: Moldova (Peter Lang, 2008), and co-edited European Anthropologies (Berghahn, 2017), Transitions historiques (Ed de Boccard, 2016), Morale et cognition à l’épreuve du terrain (in press, Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre).

David Mills (University of Oxford)
Role within Exec: Treasurer, Ethics Issues, Publications Liaison, Lifetime Awards and Early Career Achievement Awards

David Mills is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford and also Director of an ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) doctoral training partnership between Oxford, Open University and Brunel. His PhD in Anthropology at SOAS drew on fieldwork at both Makerere and a rural Ugandan secondary school, and sparked his ethnographic curiosity about the anthropology of education and the education of anthropologists. He is currently developing a new research project on the politics of doctoral education in Africa.

Chowra Makaremi (CNRS/EHESS)
Role within Exec: Emerging issues, Scholars at Risk

The EASA executive committee members appointed Chowra Makaremi, a researcher at IRIS (CNRS/EHESS), at the beginning of their term. A specialist of Iran, working on issues of state, violence and migration, Chowra will particularly devote her mandate to EASA’s support to scholars at risk.

The new executive at their first meeting in Zoom in March 2021.