Dear all,

I am sharing this on behalf of the EASA executive committee.
Please share widely, and hope to see some of you in Brussels.
Best wishes,

Mariya

Dr Mariya Ivancheva
Lecturer in Higher Education Studies, University of Liverpool
http://liverpool.academia.edu/mariyaivancheva
@mivanche


--

The next EASA AGM and Seminar will take place on 28th and 29th October in
Brussels at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie
des Mondes Contemporains.

The seminar will focus on the Anthropology of Bureaucracy/Policy and it
will be an opportunity to reflect and discuss from an anthropological point
of view the dynamics and processes that take place within European
institutions in Brussels. Angela Liberatore, head of ERC Social Sciences
will participate in the the seminar and share her experiences with us.
There is a call for contributions (Deadline 8th September 2019)

The 2019 EASA AGM invites papers from all current or potential EASA members
on any aspect of the governance and knowledge politics of the EU and other
European research, and/or its implications both for anthropological
knowledge production and for the future of Social Anthropology across
Europe and beyond.

As part of the upcoming 30th anniversary of our association in 2020, the
main aim of the 2019 EASA workshop is to initiate a conversation to
critically assess how European Union (EU) institutions have intervened in,
and helped to shape, both research practices and research results in Europe
within the last thirty years. Drawing on anthropological approaches, the
workshop will take advantage of being held in Brussels in order to bring
policy makers of the European Commission and funding agencies implied in
the EU policy on research to the table. The intention is to provide a
two-way street: presentations by anthropologists on their understanding of
the EU’s research agenda and its implementation, and commentaries from
policy makers about what they were hoping to achieve. This will be an
opportunity for anthropologists to engage with the institutions that have
provided both much of the funding and the policies that have shaped
academic research in Europe, for good or for bad.
Background

The €94 billion budget for Horizon Europe agreed in April 2019 is the
latest step in the European Union’s ambitious vision to shape the
governance of global science. The EU’s research and development framework
programmes began in the early 1980s, and have grown steadily in complexity,
reshaping disciplinary research agendas by promoting large-scale
international collaborations and interdisciplinary research networks. The
European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), founded in 1989, has
sought to promote anthropology in Europe within this research governance
landscape. Thirty years on, the EU’s cosmopolitan vision for Open Science
continues, turning the Commission from a funder into a key policy actor,
driving open access policies with Plan S and building research frameworks
through the European Research Council (ERC).

Of course, the EU is a political entity by definition, and so it is not a
neutral actor. The policies informing research funding have attracted
considerable criticism, as have the EU’s research themes, which many regard
as being overly EU-/Euro-centric. In addition, EU funding schemes have been
widely criticised for creating hierarchies between old and new member
states, and between the natural sciences (highly favoured) and social
sciences/humanities (much less favoured). More recently, EU project culture
has also been identified as being one mechanism that has led to the
casualisation of academic work.

Against this background, this workshop will explore both the positive and
negative implications of EU-ropean knowledge politics, both for the kinds
of knowledge generated, and for the future of anthropology and the critical
social sciences.

This theme continues the 2017 Bern EASA seminar that focused on Politics
and Precarities in Academia. In that meeting, the focus was squarely on the
way that academic precarity was generated, which examined both the internal
and external elements involved in that process, as well as its historical
and geographical contingencies. This meeting will bring together
researchers (including ERC grantees), officers from the Unit of Social
Sciences and Humanities at the European Research Council Executive Agency,
and from the Directorate General Research for Research and Innovation, in
the European Commission.

We call for papers that will address topics of one out of three of our
workshops:


*1) Bordering Europe through funding*European funding schemes have
increasingly shaped anthropology in Europe. This workshop will focus on how
research funding for anthropology in EU-rope both shapes and works to
redefine both new and old borders and the hierarchies between the
differences that the borders represent.


*2) Cooperation of anthropologists with EU institutions and bureaucracies*How
do anthropologists and social scientists cooperate with EU and nation-level
bureaucracies when it comes to funding - where does the power lie, is there
a real dialogue, what are the difficulties? The workshop addresses two
topics at once: both how anthropology can shed light on this process, and
whether anthropological voices are heard in the shaping of EU
administration.


*3) EASA: (re)making anthropology in Europe, 30 years on*We wish to use
this session to recognise/celebrate/reflect on the way that EASA itself has
remade anthropology in Europe (including the positives of creating a shared
community, the challenge this has presented to older models of ethnology,
and the internal disciplinary politics of language and theoretical capital,
i.e. which panels get included in conferences, the critique of
anglocentricism etc.

*Applicants should email a title and 200-word abstract (of your proposed
contribution) to agm(at)easaonline.org <http://easaonline.org> no later
than 8th September 2019.*

EASA members are especially encouraged to apply. Applicants whose papers
have been accepted and who do not have sufficient means to attend will be
provided with support, subject to funding availability.

We're looking forward to meeting you in Brussels.

-- 
M.

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