The state: What do we know?
The permeance of the state in our everyday lives is undisputed: from law to infrastructure, from bureaucracy to welfare, from policing and violence to border control and Our relationship with the state is gendered, racialized, and economic, as much as the state and legal structures vow to the opposite. Contemporary social anthropology is intensely looking at activism and participation, social and political inequality, immigration and mobility experience, as well as the state and our relation to it. There is a need to know more, and MA ethnographic projects that aim to engage these issues are very welcome.
Citizenship and its discontents
Citizenship is a riddle. On the one hand, it is the one institution that seemingly is a pinnacle of equality: we are all equal before the law. On the other hand, it has become a major aspect of global inequality: people are literally ranked according to the power of their passport. Immigrants find trouble travelling and seeking a better future somewhere else. Citizenship is a fascinating topic to explore ethnographically: it touches on immigrant experience, on activism, on civic participation, on how we understand the state, on the nature of democracy. MA projects that work on the matters above will inevitably look at the problems of this age-old institution that has an anthropological quality, like “culture”: it is invisible, yet all-encompassing. We do not acknowledge it, yet we swim in its waters.
Solidarity or not? Humanitarian concern and refugees in Europe
Solidarity is an idea with a long history in Western thought, but also a practice that has been taking material and political form recently, working as informal welfare towards needing subjects. What does provisioning for others do to “hosts’” notions of selfhood and sociality? How is solidarity geared by and coarticulated with “hospitality?” How do we understand notions of inclusion and exclusion in a Europe that is increasingly inimical to its others? There is a rising discourse accompanied by practices and discourses of solidarity towards the arrivals of people in contemporary Europe, refugees and migrants from the Middle-East, South Asia and Africa. There is also xenophobia and suspicion around these disfranchised people. In a Mediterranean context of financial crisis and people’s forced movement, as well as a Scandinavian context of relative affluence, students are invited to examine the meanings of solidarity, humanitarianism and charity, as well as the affects and feelings that mobilises people towards a praxis that addresses others in an inclusive, provisioning manner.
Democracy in the work place
Cooperatives, cooperation and cooperativism are partly driving the world ‘Economy’ and, most importantly, are organizing principles for the livelihoods of many (according to ICA, one billion people). Coops operate in the agrarian, industrial, consumption and distribution sectors of local, regional and national economies. They mobilise people around sharing assets, co-shaping labour and deciding on their own fates, by virtue of voting in their assemblies. “Cooperative anthropologies” invite students to participate in projects of studying cooperative environments of work and social life. How are the questions and themes of solidarity and direct democracy addressed in the field? How are people managing their cooperating lives with a number of other obligations they have in their private lives? How are coops helping people go about their lives in the current predicament of global capitalist crisis?