Research projects, publications and events
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Members and Friends,
Before we all disappear for summer break, it’s time for some good news from our still-productive network.
While I have no events to announce this time, the members of the group have been incredibly successful with publishing and outreach. Below, you’ll find an exciting list of new publications. Also, there are links to podcasts, videos and interviews for those who already have enough to read but still want to be informed about members activities.
Please send any comments and suggestions or announcements you would like to share to cast.ksa@univie.ac.at
I hope to see some of you at the German Anthropological Association convention in Munich and wish you all a relaxing break until the start of the new teaching term.
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Tatjana Thelen |
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Anna Žabicka has been awarded the 2023-2024 Dissertation Grant for Graduate Students - congratulations!
With this support, she will join the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society as a visiting academic for the fall 2023 and continue work on her dissertation project there.
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Tatjana Thelen served as Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professorship at Stanford University from January to June 2023, the first anthropologist to hold this position.
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In: The China Quarterly 254, 310-324.
Examining the “world's largest cash-based social policy” through the lens of care reveals widely shared scalar imaginaries and the productivity of care in constituting scale. In standardizing the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao), officials, applicants and researchers in rural Sichuan cited both “too much” and “not enough” care at the scale of the family in recommending or rejecting state assistance. Different levels of organization (scale1) were not stable bases with specific sizes and qualities (scale2) that enabled or limited care. Dibao-related practices were evaluated as an appropriate (“filial piety”), insufficient (“individualism”) or excessive (“corruption”) amount of family care. Care became an indicator of kinship measurements and a marker of state boundaries. Thus, scale (in both meanings) was enacted in China, as elsewhere, through negotiations of needs and responsibilities, through evaluations of care practices and their outcomes. In this sense, care scales.
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In: The Cultural Politics of Anti-Elitism, edited by M. Ege and J. Springer. Routledge, 172-190.
Since the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, notions of urgency and emergency have dominated the vocabulary of Austrian and German populist politics and media, informing not only political debates but also legislations. These discourses create the impression that the influx of refugees is equivalent to a loss of sovereignty over the national territory and the state. In effect, it is argued that the state cannot fulfil its security promise; it is not sovereign anymore unless extraordinary measures are employed. Against the backdrop of the distinction between the two concepts of the “state of exception” and “urgency”, this chapter contributes to the understanding of anti-elitist populism by linking both to the study of emotion. It argues that invoking and declaring “urgency” to prevent or end the “state of exception” is a performative practice that makes a lasting impression on social actors, with far-reaching effects on democratic political culture.
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In: Anthropology and Responsibility, edited by Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, and Christos Lynteris, 128-146.
This chapter reflects on the ways ethnography – both as a mode of conducting research and a genre of writing – becomes destabilized in moments when race is ever more relevant as a historical fact and system of meaning that informs everyday life and the distribution of resources and power. Based on fieldwork with migrant Haitian women looking for work in Chile – a “white-mestizo” country – and their encounters with Chilean nationals in the city of Santiago, I explore the affordances of racialized positionalities in ethnographic research. By looking at how anthropologists can become implicated in perpetuating systems of oppression, I analyze how the dislocations between the anthropology of race and the effects of white supremacy impact how difference and otherness are thought of as integral to anthropology’s epistemic hierarchies and the ways it can transform ethnographic practice. I consider the challenges imposed by racialized positionalities as part of the responsibility of interrogating anthropology’s involvement in systemic forms of racism and white supremacy. In doing so, I propose racialized positionalities as useful ethnographic devices to navigate highly unequal fieldwork settings and examine white supremacy and racism as heterogeneous and relational objects of study that have profound consequences on people’s lives.
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In: Signs. Journal for Women in Culture and Society 48 (4), 969-990.
For Haitian women who live and work in Santiago, expecting a baby entitled to Chilean nationality involves recognizing their maternal bodies at different institutional levels and transforming who they are and how they care for themselves and others as migrants, workers, and mothers in a new country. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines how the pregnant body’s moral legitimacy generates a form of agency among racialized migrant workers who become mothers. Pregnant migrants’ sense of self as working mothers and migrant workers emerges from their embodiment of institutional discourses of self-responsibility and self-care as they navigate contradictory forms of recognition and belonging to the global economy and the nation’s reproduction. The experience of migrant motherhood exposes the lived contradictions inherent in the gendered politics of reproduction. By grounding the meanings of care and social reproduction in migrant selfhood, this analysis expands on the scholarship of gendered migration, and reproductive and care labor, across unequal registers of migrant and nonmigrant livelihoods.
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In: Louis Pinto (dir.), La construction d’objet en sociologie, Bellecombe-en-Bauges, Croquant, 2021, 127-143.
Public policy is the subject of an abundant literature in the social sciences, but has rarely been subjected to the systematic sociological construction of the research object. On the one hand, many works in the various subfields of sociology apprehend it as a contextual variable rather than take it as their object (as when sociologists of education or migration refer secondarily to school or migration policies). On the other hand, the North American tradition of public policy analysis, in its more-or-less theoretical or applied variations, takes it centrally as its object, but apprehends it with conceptual tools and methods that are often far removed from those of sociology. This chapter proposes an alternative approach, which consists of apprehending public policy from the point of view of “general sociological” as defined by Marcel Mauss, considering it as a central element in the regulation of contemporary societies.
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Le Croquant, 2022.
Comprendre une politique publique, son orientation, son style, ses instruments, implique de reconstituer la structure des relations sociales qui la fondent. Parmi les différents outils permettant de réaliser un tel pro- gramme, la sociologie des champs de Pierre Bourdieu apparaît particulièrement féconde. Ce livre illustre la portée d’une telle analyse, rarement mobilisée en matière d’action publique, en la mettant en œuvre sur des objets très différents (politiques économiques, usages politiques de l’histoire, salubrité alimentaire, gestion de l’eau, politiques de l’Union européenne, etc.). Il rassemble des contributions de chercheurs du monde entier (Argentine, Brésil, Canada, États-Unis, France, Suisse) travaillant sur ces pays et d’autres encore (Chili, Pérou, Pologne, Roumanie). Cette recherche collective renouvelle ce faisant l’analyse des politiques qui affectent la vie des populations et régulent les sociétés contemporaines.
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Fully revised translation, Edward Elgar, forthcoming, 2023.
Laying down the foundations of a critical sociological approach to the interdisciplinary domain of public policy, this insightful book presents the first systematic reflection on the use of Bourdieu’s theory of social fields to analyse policy processes. Engaging with theoretical dimensions, it provides innovative methodological tools, both quantitative and qualitative in nature. Bringing together an array of eminent contributors and case studies from across the globe, it presents theoretical and methodological insights, as well as empirical information on national cases and policy sectors.
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In: Focaal 96, 71-87.
When environmental activists in Serbia encountered decarbonization in the form of predatory hydropower, they launched a massive campaign against an actual degrowth that plagued their depopulating lands. This bridging of environmental and reproductive concerns helped to create a broad ecopopulist alliance that saved the local rivers, and yet it sneaked in another quasi-universalist subject—urban, middle-aged, and male—who assumed a central role in the countryside eco-revival. As they “bring life back” to the “dying” Balkan Mountains, I argue, revivers also erase the ways of life that still thrive in their aging abodes. Such duality reveals emptiness as a problem space that is necropolitical inasmuch as it is vitalist. To direct the further flow of life means to decide who can survive—and who is anyhow destined to expire.
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Berghahn Books, 2023.
The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politics of Making Kinship demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, and from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars place kinship centerstage and reintegrate it with political theory.
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In: Geben, Nehmen, Teilen. Gabenwirtschaft im Horizont der Digitalisierung, edited by Michael Hutter and Birger P. Priddat. Campus Verlag, 65–78.
The gift figures prominently in popular and scientific discourses as critique. This chapter explores how the concept of the gift could develop this political effectiveness, and if under these circumstances it can be still theoretically productive. To do so I trace the origins and different discursive delineations, to show their epistemological pitfalls. In a second step, I demonstrate the flaws of taking classic anthropological texts as (romanticized) alternatives to the capitalist societies. While this has been widely criticized within social anthropology, surprisingly little has changed in contemporary interdisciplinary and popular discourse. Ultimately, I argue that only a new reflexive approach - beyond self-reassurance- can lead to new insights into contemporary processes.
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Letizia Bonanno and Cosmin Popan: Delivering precarity
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In: Otherwise Magazine.
The graphic piece draws on Cosmin Popan's ethnographic material a multi-sited fieldwork, which he undertook as part of his Leverhulme
postdoctoral project Doing gig work: Social implications of platform-based food deliveries. The research focuses on the platform-based gig economy and its reconfiguration of urban spaces, by investigating the management, solidarity and resistance of cycle couriers in three European cities: Manchester (UK), Cluj (RO) and Lyon (FR).
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In: An Ethnographic Inventory. Field devices for anthropological inquiry, edited by Tomás Sánchez and Adolfo Estalella. Routledge, 52-61.
Drawing is a mode of fieldnote taking in ethnography, an experiential and experimental mode of seeing without words; it defines a mode of encoding fieldwork experiences besides and beyond the verbal system. Drawing is a process of making sense that activates sight and memory, cognition and imagination. Drawing is ultimately a perceptive tool and an enabling device whose function and value are mostly contextual to the unfolding of ethnographic encounters. It proves to be an apt practice to capture the minutiae of fieldwork, those that often escape the rigour of academic arguments. Ethnography through drawing is a practice and a method that enables and enhances attentiveness and (self)reflexivity.
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= Special Issue Ethnos.
The special issue shows how infrastructures and practices of infrastructuring shape value of agricultural matter. Ethnographic studies from Australia, China, Moldova, Serbia and Italy examine land’s financialization, terroir wine and its bottles, eco-certification and alternative food networks as well as the interaction between agronomics and cold chains. As material networks, infrastructures facilitate, channel, or hinder circulation—the metamorphoses as well as movement of objects, people, non-human beings and ideas. In doing so, they mediate value: they give actions and their products importance and relevance by materially integrating them into larger wholes. Thereby, this approach brings attention to materiality to David Graeber’s theory of value. The exploration of infrastructures of value thus offers new perspectives for thinking about the production, appropriation and distribution of material wealth.
Video abstract
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Whose crisis is this crisis?
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In: AllegraLab - Anthropology for Radical Optimism
Whose crisis is this crisis? is a short ethno-graphic reflection by Letizia Bonanno on how conflicting, shifting imaginaries of the Greek crisis have shaped the ethnography fieldwork she carried out in Athens between 2015 and 2017.
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Radio France: Entendez-vous l’éco? "Contrôler les assistés"
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The recent announcement by the French government of a new program to fight welfare fraud confirms the analysis presented in Contrôler les assistés: the coercive turn towards welfare recipients is a never-ending story. In this interview, Vincent Dubois comments on this new initiative and sets it in perspective.
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