Outraged by the brutality of the Russian government’s military invasion of Ukraine, this panel will assemble anthropologists to reflect about ways and approaches to react to this war with the means of our discipline. It will provide a space to share our observations and indignations, to engage with first careful attempts of sense-making and to debate about possible public action. The panelists will focus especially on the following aspects:
- What do we know about the current situation on the ground? How does the war affect the conditions of everyday and communal life, the social fabric and sociopolitical forms in Ukraine? How can we contribute to document these consequences of organized violence?
- To which extent can we draw on already elaborated perspectives of an anthropology of political violence to address and examine this ongoing war?
- How does the war and its geopolitical repercussions challenge our understandings of Europe and Europeanization as anthropological research fields?
- What steps could we take to create networks of support and solidarity for Ukrainian colleagues?
Participants:
Volodymyr Artiukh (University of Oxford), Elizabeth C. Dunn (Indiana University Bloomington), Taras Fedirko (University of St Andrews), Dafna Rachok (Indiana University Bloomington), Andrey Vozyanov (European Humanities University Vilnius), Catherine Wanner (Pennsylvania State University)
Convenors:
Jens Adam (University of Bremen), Čarna Brković (University of Göttingen), Sabine Hess (University of Göttingen), DGEKW-Kommission “Europäisierung_Globalisierung: Ethnografien des Politischen“, U Bremen Excellence Chair Research Group „Soft Authoritarianisms
