Transformation, Hope and the Commons: A Belfast #EASA2022 conference
Fiona Murphy and Evropi Chatzipanagiotidou, Queen’s University Belfast
Figure 1. EASA 2022 logo – the beacon of hope
An elegant female figure, a beacon of hope, composed of steel tubes and cast bronze, spirals upwards into the grey-blue Belfast skies. Her arms extend holding ‘the ring of thanksgiving’. Below her feet sits a globe betokening shared and universal ideals of peace, harmony and thanksgiving. Etched onto this globe are the cities and places where Belfast people and industries migrated and exported to. Belfast locals, well known for their vibrant sense of humour, know this beacon of hope by many other names such as ‘Nuala with the Hula’, the ‘Belle on the Ball,’ or a personal favourite the ‘Thing with the Ring.’ Designed by Andy Scott, a Scottish figurative sculptor, this beacon of hope signposts a new Belfast and a new Northern Ireland. The image of this ‘thing with the ring’ accompanies this year’s #EASA2022 Belfast conference theme on ‘Transformation, Hope and the Commons.’ From her high vantage point, this figure looms over a complex city in flux, a place that is very different from one end to the other, demarcated by intercommunal tensions and division. It is a place of flags and ‘peace walls’, standing for longer than the Berlin wall did. The traces of its violent history and conflict are painted onto many of its walls, with colourful murals evoking different histories, politics, allegiances and efforts at conciliation.
This city, as a post-conflict space, once described by the famous Northern Ireland writer Louis MacNeice as ‘devout, profane and hard’ has worked consistently to recast itself as an energetic, creative place, albeit one beset by recurring political tensions. As a UNESCO City of Music, Belfast has a vibrant, colourful music and arts scene and brilliant nightlife to accompany it. It is also a very pretty city to wander in, with its very own leaning tower – the Albert Memorial Clock, as well as many interesting and engaging museums such as the Ulster Museum and the Titanic Museum.
It is in this spirit of multiplicity, difference and transformation inspired by the complex journey of the city of Belfast and Northern Ireland, that this year’s conference theme was born. Hosted by anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast, well known for our work on ethnomusicology, conflict and peacebuilding, migration, and religion, the conference stems from our broad interests in the entanglements of transformation, hope and the commons (listen also to our recent podcast APOD). These interests are firmly wedded to the broader directions of our discipline, where in this critical moment of protracted and entangled crises, many of us are seeking new scholarly practices and theories to better engage an otherwise very bleak world. As such, we see the #EASA2022 conference as the beginning of a collective anthropological endeavour to map a way out of this world of enclosures in hopeful and artful ways. The diverse array of panels and labs proposed to EASA2022 speak to this anthropological and social will in a broad variety of ways, many proposing radical, creative and humanistic pathways to alternative futures, while others approaching hope critically and with caution. The lens of the commons is an important underpinning to this conference, particularly as it sits within broader decolonising processes. It is, for us, a conduit through which to mobilise new ethico-political ways to navigate the constraints of social, cultural, political and physical distance that many human beings inhabit and enforce (both pre- and post-pandemic). As such, this is about reclaiming and making visible erasures and absences so as to find new ways to dwell together in a more sustainable, hopeful discipline and world.
Professor Athena Athanasiou, the #EASA2022 keynote speaker, frames these discussions through her ongoing work on political performativity, biopolitics and agonistic mourning. The three plenaries develop important theoretical synergies around our core thematics of transformation, hope and the commons. The local committee plenary entitled ‘Shared Space and the Common Good’ invites a comparative discussion in order to explore models and understandings of ‘shared space’ in different contexts, and the extent to which shared space is conducive or an obstacle to the ‘common good’. The Early Career Plenary focuses on the topic of responsibility as core in the relationships we build with our interlocutors and the world, the knowledge we acquire, and in our commitment to the environment, class, human rights, and advocacy. Further, the Executive Committee Plenary revisits the question of ‘urgency’ and speaks to how we should reimagine urgent anthropology, a timely topic for the world we find ourselves in.
Our evening programme provides an array of different events and plenty of opportunity for socialising and discussion! Our opening reception will take place in the historic and very beautiful St George’s Market. Our final party this year breaks with tradition and formality, to provide a space of music, dance and fun in an affordable fashion, so a party for everyone @ Limelight, a venue known for its historic support for alternative music and bands! In between, the conference offers a lot of different events (see programme for details), as some examples – a concert in the beautiful Duncairn, a roundtable on precarity led by Prec-Anthro at the Sunflower Pub, an ethnographic salon at the Brian Friel Theatre at QUB, and an activist roundtable in the American Bar. There will also be the opportunity to take one of our QUB anthropology Professor Dominic Bryan’s mural tours and see a bit of Belfast!
Many of the conference’s proposals maintain a number of common threads between the different conceptual strands of how we might begin to think about transformation, hope and the commons both within the discipline and the wider social world. Critically, the question of building a more sustainable and equal world features large – what sustainability means therein covers the broad spectrum of environmental, cultural and human rights, social justice and equality and decoloniality issues (to name but a few). With these issues being at the forefront of the conference, which is hybrid in form, so too is the ethical question for many of us of the value of travelling to any conference given the very real carbon footprint impact from academia’s culture of conferencing. During the pandemic, many of us grew very (very!) tired of the ‘online event’, with Zoom fatigue being a real factor for many of us in our everyday pandemic burnout. The debate about being physically present at a given event or of making a decision to attend in an online capacity has received renewed attention given our pandemic experiences.
Figure 2. Source: https://www.anh-academy.org/community/news/2020-academy-week-went-virtual-what-effects
For many, the affordances of ‘being there’ can, by no means, be replaced by the virtual; for all of their complexities, conferences often bring inspiration and collective joy, as well as new colleagues and friends. This is something many of us missed deeply during the pandemic, craving the sociality, fun and laughter that accompanies our academic events. As Brkljačić, Fuchsjäger, Beets-Tan, Brady, and Derchi (2020) point out, ‘future conferences will be different from those of yore, and we must learn not to judge them by old standards’. Hybid/blended conferences are here to stay, thus providing flexibility and accessibility in ways different to before, allowing delegates to weigh up the ethical, economic, scholarly and social considerations of physically attending a given event.
Many professional organisations are now providing green travel funding for those who opt to take low carbon travel options to physically attend. EASA is one such professional body. While Belfast is situated at the corner of Europe and is trickier to reach with some of these options, it nonetheless, has very good ferry connections to a number of seaports on the island of Ireland. Anthropologist Gareth Hamilton based at the University of Latvia has written an excellent guide giving low carbon route advice to Belfast for the #EASA2022 conference, and published an auto-ethnography of ground-level travel in AJEC’s latest issue. The guide on the conference page gives a very detailed overview from a seasoned low carbon traveller on how to reach Belfast through a mix of overland and sea options. While Gareth is quick to stress that crossing the Irish sea can be at times an unpleasant one, one of the authors of this piece can also attest to it occasionally being a very pleasant experience! There is something special about the luxury of slow travel, but the unpredictability of rough seas is definitely something to be aware of for those without their sea legs. No matter what travel choices delegates make for #EASA2022, it is certain that the conference will become a platform to debate the future of conferencing and lay out the political and ethical discussions that will define the way in which we gather professionally and socially into the future.
The #EASA2022 conference invites anthropologists to examine all of these urgent issues through the prism of hope, not as a form of paralysis that holds back our responses, nor as a moment of reflective introspection, but as a creative time-space of extrospection and engagement. We, therefore, hope – no pun intended – that #EASA2022 will be a brilliant opportunity for an invigorating get-together and a memorable experience for all delegates connecting across Europe and globally.
And of course, for those who are travelling, let’s all have plenty of fun and laughter at our first face to face conference in a few years! Belfast is a particularly lively place to try this out!
References
European Society of Radiology (ESR). Medical conferences in the post-COVID world: a challenge, and an opportunity. Eur Radiol 30, 5533–5535 (2020). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00330-020-06933-3(accessed June 22nd 2022)
About the authors
Fiona Murphy is an anthropologist based in Queen’s University Belfast. As an anthropologist of displacement, she works with Stolen Generations in Australia and people seeking asylum and refuge in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Turkey. She has a particular passion for creative and public anthropologies and is always interested in experimenting with new forms and genres.
Evropi Chatzipanagiotidou is a political anthropologist at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests lie at the intersections of migration and diaspora, conflict-induced displacement, and the politics of memory and loss. She has conducted fieldwork in Cyprus, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, and has published on topics including the connections between memory and history in the Cypriot conflict, the transnational role of diasporas in peace-building, youth migration and precarity in Southern Europe, and refugees and the politics of representation in Turkey.