Institute of Social Anthropology

Anthropology Talks with Susana Narotzky, Patricia Matos and Antonio Maria Pusceddu

Grassroots Economics

Lecture and Workshops, 23 and 24 Mai 2019

The Institute was able to win Prof. Susana Narotzky and two of her co-workers; Antonio Maria Pusceddu, PhD and Patrícia Matos, PHD. Link to their Projekt: "Grassroots economics: Meaning, project and practice in the pursuit of livelihood [GRECO]"

Program
 When What  Where
Thursday, 23 May 2019, 10:00 to 12:00 Workshop 1: "Grassroots ecologies of value: Environmental conflicts and social reproduction"


The workshop addresses the relevance of a social reproduction framework for approaching the contemporary socio-ecological crisis. Based on research conducted in southern Italy, it will examine the reproductive struggles, livelihood dilemmas and valuation practices that underlie environmental conflicts in the context of heavy industrialization.


* Opened for Master students and PhD as well as guests. Registration is requested on CTS (KSL) or E-Mail (only for guests)

 Room F-106, Unitobler, Lerchenweg 36
Thursday, 23 May 2019, 10:00 to 12:00
Keynote Lecture: "Valuations of Worth: Privilege, Dignity, and the sense of a Future in Southern Europe under Austerity"

The talk will explore some concepts and logical connections that underwrite the practices that working, precarious and unemployed people use to make sense of austerity and to act so as to remediate or oppose it. The analysis of the ethnographic material gathered during the Grassroots Economics project, provides a view of the complex processes that contribute to produce people’s worth and their social positionalities both in material and symbolic terms.  It shows how people, individually and collectively, will negotiate and struggle around the categories of valuation that affect them and the criteria for evaluation in order to transform them and claim legitimacy for their acts. In a context where the sense of a future is uncertain and volatile, revaluation processes may appear as an active form of political engagement. This talk will present an initial analysis of these issues.

*Everybody is welcome
  Room A003, UniS, Schanzeneckstrasse 1
Friday, 24 May 2019, 09:00 to 11:00 Workshop 2: "Embodying austerity in southern Europe: gendered dispossession, agency and struggles for worth"


This workshop will address the articulation between the body, (re) emergent forms of gendered dispossession and agency in the austerity conjuncture. It will focus on how austerity is experienced and perceived with and through the body; the role of historical and cultural embodied dispositions as livelihood coping strategies in conditions of social reproductive crisis, and, how human agency is conditioned (or enabled) by bodily narratives used as models to justify and legitimate needs, claims and entitlements.


*Opened for Master students and PhD as well as guests. Registration is requested on CTS (KSL) or E-Mail (only for guests).

 Room F -121, Unitobler, Lerchenweg 36

Susana Narotzky

Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Spain

Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Spain. She was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant to study the effects of austerity on Southern European livelihoods (Grassroots Economics [GRECO]). Her work is inspired by theories of critical political economy, moral economies, feminist economics, and value regimes. She has been a member of the Advisory Council of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (New York), President of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) and has served as Secretary of the American Anthropological Association. Recent writing addresses the themes of making a living in futures without employment, political mobilization, social reproduction, and class. Her most recent publications include “Austerity lives in Southern Europe: Experience, knowledge, evidence and social facts”, in Jillian Cavanaugh & Karen Ho (eds.) Vital Topics Forum: What happened to social facts? American Anthropologist, 2019; “Rethinking the concept of labour”, JRAI, 2018; “On Waging the Ideological War: Against the Hegemony of Form” Anthropological Theory, 2016; and “Between inequality and injustice: dignity as a motive for mobilization during the crisis” History and Anthropology, 2016.

Patrícia Matos

Post-doctoral researcher at ISCTE – Institute University of Lisbon and invited fellow at the University of Barcelona

Patrícia Matos is an economic anthropologist trained in Lisbon and London. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at ISCTE – Institute University of Lisbon and invited fellow at the University of Barcelona. As a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC project “Grassroots Economics” her research explored the grounded economic responses and regimes of meaning, value and morality mobilized by households and individuals confronting the austerity crisis, as they struggled to establish a grassroots economy of welfare. Her research interests include: neoliberalism, precarity and labour; gender, body politics and social reproduction; welfare, needs and moralities of distribution. She is completing a monograph on precarity, generational dispossession and call centre labour in Portugal, under contract with Manchester University Press.

Antonio Maria Pusceddu, PhD

Invited researcher at the University of Barcelona

Antonio Maria Pusceddu, PhD, is invited researcher at the University of Barcelona. His work has dealt with marginality and dependence in the north-west Greek highlands, where he investigated livestock farming and socio-spatial change in the framework of European agricultural policies. Studying the impact of Albanian migration on the new division of labour in the Greek countryside, he broadened his focus to include borders, ethnicity and transnational mobility. More recently, he worked on deindustrialization, environmental issues and post-industrial transformations in southern Italy. His latest research within the ‘Grassroots Economics’ project looked at the interrelations between livelihoods, strategies of social reproduction and common sense understandings of crisis, economy and the state. He is currently writing on these topics. He is the author of various publications, which include two edited books, journal articles and book chapters.