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**Apologies for cross-posting** Dear all, We kindly invite you to submit a paper for our PhD and early-career symposium “When Things don’t Hold: Anthropologies of Failure, Breakdown, and Dysfunction” The University of Manchester, 27-28 February 2020 The way things hold together is a prolific object of anthropological research. Instead of taking continuity as a point of departure, ethnographers have long framed social and cultural phenomena as achievements that require laborious maintenance, attention, and care. This holds for symbols, ideas, and subjectivities, as well as for organisations, technologies, and environments. Whereas this approach was present already in The Manchester School founder Max Gluckman’s (1963) notion of rituals as mechanisms to reaffirm social order, questions about how things hold continue to inform more contemporary research on a range of topics. Not least on infrastructure (Harvey and Knox 2015), the State (Sharma and Gupta 2006), global assemblages (Ong and Collier 2004), and scale-making more generally (Tsing 2012). When “holding” becomes fragile and contested, “[s]ocial theorists suddenly wonder how it works” (Gan and Tsing 2018: 142). Concomitantly, this steers ethnographic attention to situations in which things do not hold. Hence, for anthropologists of infrastructure and technology breakdown has turned out to be a fruitful object of study, as it may foreground otherwise hidden relations and silent work both to the ethnographer (Bowker 1995) and to interlocutors themselves (Morita 2014, 2016). This PhD and early-career symposium draws inspiration from the latter focus on breakdown but broadens its scope to encompass also failure and dysfunction as additional modalities through which holding becomes contested: what happens when dysfunction becomes the very fabric of everyday life, and how does this impinge upon hopes and expectations? What does failure do, and how do people make sense of and deal with such conditions? How can moments of breakdown operate as productive events with unanticipated effects? In short, what happens when things don’t hold? Preference will be given to papers that draw on ethnographic research. The themes of interest include, but are not limited to: -Dysfunction as an everyday condition -The productive aspects of dysfunction in relation to organisations and institutions -Breakdown as a surprising event with unanticipated consequences -When more-than-human entanglements fail to hold together -Life plans, hopes and anticipation of failure Keynote speakers: Hannah Knox, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University College London Madeleine Reeves, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Manchester There will be no registration fee. Meals and refreshments during the symposium will be provided free of charge. Please submit an abstract of 250 words to [log in to unmask], with paper title, your name, surname and academic affiliation by 15 December 2019. Selected participants will be notified by the end of December 2019. The organising team, Rozafa Berisha, PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, University of Manchester Laura Mafizzoli, PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, University of Manchester Chakad Ojani, PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, University of Manchester ************************************************************* * Anthropology-Matters Mailing List * http://www.anthropologymatters.com * * A postgraduate project comprising online journal, * * online discussions, teaching and research resources * * and international contacts directory. * * To join this list or to look at the archived previous * * messages visit: * * https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/Anthropology-Matters * * If you have ALREADY subscribed: to send a message to all * * those currently subscribed to the list,just send mail to: * * [log in to unmask] * * * * Enjoyed the mailing list? Why not join the new * * CONTACTS SECTION @ www.anthropologymatters.com * * an international directory of anthropology researchers * To unsubscribe please click here: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=ANTHROPOLOGY-MATTERS&A=1 ***************************************************************