Conference: ‘Ten years of crisis: The ethnography of austerity’

Professor João de Pina-Cabral is co-organising a prestigious conference on the economic crisis and in Southern Europe and the austerity policies that were created in reaction to it. It will be held at the University Institute of Lisbon (IUL), Portugal between the 10th and 12th January 2018.

“Ten years after the official onset of ‘crisis’ in Southern Europe, this meeting aims to bring together and contrast analytically the ethnographic material gathered by three large anthropological projects and compare it with evidence from Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. We seek to demonstrate that the anthropological conceptual toolkit is essential to understand what is happening on the ground in the world of ‘austerity’. Our comparative debate will go beyond the already familiar claims of increased socioeconomic inequality by confronting it with such classic anthropological topics as household economics, intergenerational relations, gender differentiation, approaches to the meaning of work, family and kinship networks, forms of socio-cultural belonging, regimes of indebtedness, and modes of personhood. We aim to achieve a broadly comparative outlook of national responses to austerity and to generate new methodological, conceptual and theoretical frameworks.

The projects:

  • “Care as sustainability in crisis situations”, IUL, FCT.
  • “Household survival in crisis: austerity and relatedness in Greece and Portugal”, University of Kent, ESRC.
  • “Grassroots Economics: Meaning, Project and Practice in the Pursuit of Livelihood [GRECO]”, University of Barcelona, ERC.”

The conference is financed by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Photo credit: Ana Luísa Micaelo, August 2015.

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