Read the PDF version Newsletter archive Newsletter 80 Table of Contents
1. EASA President’s Letter
New year wishes from the EASA President.
Dear EASA members and friends,
Happy 2022: may it be light and lucky, bright and beautiful.
The next newsletter is now out. It has been an intensive time for EASA.
Our Belfast panel call has closed and over 200 panel proposals have arrived. The Sci Com, composed of Evropi Chatzipanagiotidou (Queen’s University Belfast, QUB), Dominic Bryan (QUB), Fiona Murphy (QUB), Mariya Ivancheva (University of Strathclyde), Chandana Mathur (Maynooth University), Jonas Tinius (Humboldt University), Abayomi Ogunsanya (Independent scholar), Nevena Škrbić Alempijević (University of Zagreb), Thomas Kirsch (University of Konstanz) is now confirmed. Thanks to those who joined us in it. Its members have been peer reviewing your applications. We realise it has been difficult to plan ahead in times of extended uncertainty of travel and back-to-"normal" life, and we are even more grateful for your submissions. Thanks to their survey feedback, NomadIT's deeply professional work, contingency planning and amazing work with and for EASA, and the enthusiastic and caring work of the local committee in Belfast, we are working toward a truly hybrid conference, reflecting these precarious times.
Speaking of precarity, we received a great number of high quality applications and have now appointed a consultant for the precarity job: Dr Heather McKnight has already started working on the database of anti-precarity initiatives. We will be circulating a short scoping survey to map the field but please do get in touch with her on precarity(at)magneticideals.org if you think you have an initiative in your context we should know about. She will also be working toward promoting the Report The Anthropological Career in Europe, the video of the launch of which is out. Fiona Murphy and Cris Shore continue overseeing this piece of work and advancing our anti-precarity initiatives.
We wanted to say a particular thank you to Dr Laia Soto for all her work as editor-in-chief of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (SA/AS) over the last three years. Laia, your dedication has been hugely appreciated. We also want to thank Dr Lukas Ley for stepping up from his role as Assistant Editor to join Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov as chief editor until the end of July. At that point, they will both be stepping down too. So we are also seeking to recruit two new SA/AS editors: please see the call in this newsletter. Please consider applying, our journal is what you make of it. The deadline for applications is 14th February. Sharon McDonald and Cris Shore, together with our treasurer David Mills, are working with Berghahn to support this exciting period for the journal as it transitions to Open Access publishing with Berghahn. We need your help to make this a success by encouraging your institution to subscribe.
We have now posted the videos of the webinar series we carried out through the last year: thanks especially to the dedication of David Mills, Monica Heintz, Chandana Mathur and Chowra Makaremi and our members and representatives of lobby groups we work with. We have covered a number of topics critical for the discipline and social sciences: the Initiative Science- Europe lobby group’s open science policy paper, global trajectories of open access, open data and the paradoxes of policy impact of EU funding. We hope you find them useful and share them with your colleagues and students to continue the discussions across different institutional scales.
Finally, we continue working toward solutions for our ever more proliferating networks, and for deepening our political agenda on issues around scholars at risk and environmental sustainability. We carry on following cases across and beyond Europe where individual scholars such as Fariba Adelkakh's renewed and Ahmed Samir's ongoing arrest, the Doxa student journal editors house arrest in Russia, as well as critical disciplines as a whole, have been exposed to grave injustice. Chandana Mathur, Chowra Makaremi and Sharon McDonald continue their work on this.
Writing this while the temperatures in the Southeast of Europe have fallen dramatically and many migrants are stuck in abhorrent conditions, and while the escalation on the Eastern borders have brought new threats of war and displacement gives us very little calm. It makes for the need of continuing the struggle to make anthropology a discipline that does not just describe injustice but actively fights for structural change inside and outside academia. Your membership and feedback is vital to us making further decisive steps in that direction.
As always, do share with us any ideas about where you find EASA can make a meaningful intervention - email monica.heintz(at)gmail.com - or where you think anthropologists or EASA exec are getting it wrong, email ethics(at)easaonline.org.
Mariya Ivancheva
January 2022
