We are pleased to announce the publication of the sixth issue of EIRINI / Young Scholar Studies on Gender
The new issue brings together a diverse range of perspectives and research approaches, exploring questions of gender, identity, space, and cultural difference. Its pages feature discussions on masculinity and mangia in the world of rebetiko, gendered wandering and the experience of space in the cinema of Agnès Varda, as well as the intersections of masculinity, migration, and otherness in contemporary Greek literature.
The issue also includes two book reviews that broaden the discussion to queer and gender literary criticism, as well as femicide, gender-based violence, and the methodological approaches of Rita Laura Segato. By bringing these perspectives into dialogue, the reviews seek to build bridges between Latin America and contemporary Greek reality.
With each new issue, EIRINI continues to provide a space for publication, dialogue, and exchange, bringing together emerging research voices and encouraging critical conversations around gender, sexuality, space, cultural otherness, and power relations.
We invite you to explore the new issue and discover the diverse perspectives and voices featured in its pages.
Making Coexistence through Time:Practices and Lived Temporalities from the Balkans and the Caucasus, inside and beyond the Mediterranean
Invitation
The Culture-Borders-Gender/Lab of the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, and the Editorial Committee of its annual, open-access electronic journal Culture-Borders-Gender/Studies (https://ojs.lib.uom.gr/index.php/cbgs) invite submissions of original research papers for Volume 5 (2026). This call concerns the main section of the volume (research articles). The special thematic section and the book reviews are handled separately.
1. The Point of Departure: Living Together in Uncertain Times
Across the Balkans, the Caucasus, West Asia/Middle East, and North Africa, people live together amid political uncertainty, shifting borders, displacement, environmental transformation, economic hardship, and fragile institutions. Everyday life rarely pauses while awaiting political settlements or definitive resolutions. Neighbours keep interacting, families sustain relationships across political, ethnic, and religious divides, rituals are performed, markets function, memories are transmitted, and new forms of belonging emerge. Shared life persists, not despite this uncertainty, but through the ordinary practices by which people inhabit it.
2. Temporalities as an analytical lens
Living together is accomplished through temporal practices rather than simply experienced in time: coexistence is better understood as an accomplishment than as a condition, and its analytical significance emerges from the temporal organisation of everyday life. We propose the temporalities of living together as an analytical lens for rethinking coexistence, one in which waiting, for instance, is not the suspension of coexistence but a condition through which it is produced. The question thus shifts from whether people coexist to how they continually organise their living together.
By temporality we mean not the measurable time of the clock or the calendar, but the socially organised rhythms, durations, sequences and orientations through which social life is ordered. Temporality is not a domain apart from the body, affect, power or discourse but an aspect through which these are constituted: embodied in rhythms of work, rest and the life course, affective, as anticipation, impatience or dread give time its shape, positional and gendered, since some wait while others set the terms of waiting, and some rhythms are imposed while others are interrupted, institutional and discursive, as states, bureaucracies, markets, calendars and hegemonic narratives enforce particular times, and biographical and collective, as memories and inheritances, imperial and colonial among them, are reworked in the present. To study temporal organisation is therefore not to exclude bodies, affects, voices or power, but to ask how these are lived and negotiated in time.
These temporalities do not form closed categories but are interconnected dimensions, including waiting and anticipation, patience and endurance, repetition and rhythm, synchronisation and asynchrony, interruption, breakdown and repair, care, memory and inheritance, and expectation and imagined futures, through which coexistence is constituted, negotiated and transformed. They rarely unfold neatly: intimacy can coexist with distrust, hospitality can shade into exclusion, and care can sit alongside friction. Attending to their temporal making lets us describe this without assuming that things must end in reconciliation or breakdown.
3. Why These Regions?
We name the Mediterranean advisedly: not as a bounded cultural area to which these regions belong, but as a relational horizon they touch as much as they exceed. This is why our framing reaches inside and beyond it, from the Balkans and the Caucasus to West Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. The Balkans, the Caucasus, West Asia/Middle East, and North Africa offer especially fertile settings for this conversation, not because they can be reduced to regions of conflict or instability, but because in them the multiple temporalities of living together become unusually visible.
Long histories of mobility, imperial and colonial legacies and their postcolonial afterlives, border-making and displacement, state formation, environmental change, and cultural plurality intersect with daily practices that continually reshape social relations. We approach these regions not as bounded areas but as empirical settings in which the temporal organisation of coexistence is particularly visible. We read them not as spaces of violence but as places where everyday coexistence is made, even as hierarchical orders shape unequal experiences of time. Like coexistence itself, they are not neutral givens but are made and imagined over time through power and hegemony.
4. From Existing Conversations to a Further Analytical Shift
Recent scholarship has increasingly shifted attention from region-as-cultural-entity to the practices through which regions are inhabited and reimagined: remapping the Mediterranean as a relational formation (Ben-Yehoyada, Cabot and Silverstein 2020), everyday life in the Balkans (Montgomery 2019), the postsocialist Mediterranean (Brković 2022), the political in and of Europe (Dzenovska and De Genova 2018), displacement in the Middle East (Volk and Inhorn 2021), and austerity in Southern Europe (Knight and Stewart 2017).
This issue extends that trajectory with a further shift: it proposes the temporalities of living together not as one more topic but as the analytical entry point itself, joining a cross-regional field without presuming a single cultural area, and treating temporality as a relational and political dimension through which bodies, institutions, inequalities and imagined futures become socially visible.
5. Possible themes
We invite contributions from across the social sciences and humanities (anthropology, sociology, history, geography, political science, gender and border studies, and cultural, media and literary studies). We particularly welcome ethnographically grounded, historically informed, comparative, and theoretically innovative contributions. We therefore encourage contributions that examine how temporal practices shape various domains of social life, including but not limited to the following:
cultural practices, rituals, symbols, institutions, and public discourses;
borders, identities, othernesses, and cross-border mobility;
the experiences of minorities, migrants, and refugees;
gender, gendered relations, and the body;
humanitarian, environmental, economic, and political crises;
literature, the arts, language, and translation;
material culture, space, memory, and monuments;
digital technologies and audiovisual cultures;
infrastructures, everyday economies, and more-than-human worlds;
and the methods, positionalities, and politics of studying shared life as an open-ended process.
6. Invitation for contributions
This list is indicative, not exhaustive. We do not offer another framework for studying coexistence, but we invite contributors to rethink coexistence itself. Its central proposition is that living together is neither a stable condition nor an eventual political achievement, but an ongoing social accomplishment whose dynamics become analytically visible through the temporal organisation of everyday life. In doing so, the issue aims to contribute not only to debates on coexistence but also to broader conversations about temporality, everyday life, mobility, borders, political imagination, and the multiple ways in which social worlds are continually made and remade.
Important dates
Full paper submission: 15 October 2026
Peer review and feedback to authors: 15 November 2026
Submission of revised drafts: 15 December 2026
Publication of the issue: February 2027
Instructions for submission
Papers may be written in Greek or English and undergo double-blind peer review.
Length: up to 6,000 words, including footnotes and references.
Submissions must be original, unpublished work.
Each submission is accompanied by a title, an abstract (150 to 250 words) and 4 to 6 keywords, in both Greek and English.
Referencing: Harvard (author-date), following Cite Them Right (Open University quick guide: https://university.open.ac.uk/library/referencing-and-plagiarism/quick-guide-to-harvard-referencing-cite-them-right). For further formatting conventions, see the journal’s “Submissions” page.
Submission and inquiries
Contact person: Ioannis Manos
Submission e-mail: imanos@uom.edu.gr
Editorial team
Fotini Tsibiridou (Director of the LAB), Professor, Department of Balkan, Slavic, and Oriental Studies
Ioannis Manos, Professor, Department of Balkan, Slavic, and Oriental Studies
Eleni Sideri, Assistant Professor, Department of Balkan, Slavic, and Oriental Studies
Aimilia Voulvouli, Assistant Professor, Department of Balkan, Slavic, and Oriental Studies
Indicative references
Ben-Yehoyada, N., Cabot, H. and Silverstein, P.A. (2020) ‘Introduction: remapping Mediterranean anthropology’, History and Anthropology, 31(1), pp. 1–21. doi:10.1080/02757206.2019.1684274.
Brković, Č. (2022) ‘Postsocialist Mediterranean: scalar gaze, moral self, and relational labor of favors in Eastern Europe’, Focaal, 2022(92), pp. 82–97.
Dzenovska, D. and De Genova, N. (2018) ‘Introduction: desire for the political in the aftermath of the Cold War’, Focaal, 2018(80), pp. 1–15. doi:10.3167/fcl.2018.800101.
Knight, D.M. and Stewart, C. (eds) (2017) Ethnographies of austerity: temporality, crisis and affect in Southern Europe. London: Routledge.
Montgomery, D.W. (ed.) (2019) Everyday life in the Balkans. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Volk, L. and Inhorn, M.C. (2021) ‘Introduction: states of displacement: Middle Eastern refugees, internally displaced persons and asylum seekers in global context’, Anthropology of the Middle East, 16(1), pp. 1–8. doi:10.3167/ame.2021.160101.
The Folklore Museum and Archive (Department of History and Archaeology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and the Culture–Borders–Gender/LAB (Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia) are organizing, on Wednesday, May 6, 2026, a lecture by Robert M. Hayden, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.
The title of the lecture is: “Sedimentations and Erosions of Hybrid Heritage of the Ottoman Era in the Balkans”
The event will take place at Amphitheatre B of the new building of the Faculty of Philosophy at AUTH, from 16:00 to 17:30.
The lecture will be delivered in English.
The event is open to the public.
Abstract: Ottoman heritage in SE Europe reflects a history of changing patterns of interactions between people adhering to different forms of Islam and those adhering to different forms of Christianity and Judaism, under governance premised for centuries on the domination of Islam and of Muslims, followed by rule often premised on domination of one or another Christian community. We argue that the Ottoman legacy should therefore be approached not as discrete sites identified as Muslim, Christian or Jewish, but rather as nodes in intersecting religioscapes of those communities as they changed through time. Some such nodes intersected as sites dedicated to the service of one of these communities were claimed by members of another, and physically altered to match such claims. The locations of many sites, and the physical structures created and modified at them, also reflect the dominance of Islam, or of efforts to challenge that dominance. Thus all heritage of the Ottoman period manifests in physical form the changing patterns of social and cultural hybridity of Ottoman and post-Ottoman states and societies and specific sites may comprise architectural palimpsests reflecting changes in these interactions. Examples analyzed are mainly from Bosnia and Croatia but also include some from Bulgaria, Crete and Turkey.
“Romanian as a Foreign Language”on the topic:“Language and culture: entities in continuous harmonization”
University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki School of Economics and Regional Studies Department of Balkan, Slavic & Oriental Studies Culture-Borders-Gender/LAB Romanian Language Institute of Bucharest (ILR) Romanian Language, Literature and Culture Lectureshipwithin the Department of Balkan, Slavic & Oriental Studies
3rd INTERNATIONAL TWO-DAY SYMPOSIUM
“Romanian as a Foreign Language”on the topic:“Language and culture: entities in continuous harmonization”
May 29-30, 2026 Thessaloniki
Dear Colleagues, Dear Students,
We invite you to participate in the 3rd International Two-Day Symposium The Romanian Language as a Foreign Language, which will take place from May 29-30, 2026, at the University of Macedonia, in Thessaloniki. This year’s event, titled Language and Culture: Entities in Continuous Harmonization, is dedicated both to specialists in the field and to those learning the Romanian language, students coming from very different cultural backgrounds. The conference proposes an exchange of experiences between the teachers of the Romanian language and the students, as well as an overview of the process of teaching, learning, and assessing the Romanian language as a foreign language according to the standards of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Submissions are accepted both in person and online.
The organizers
PROPOSED STRUCTURE OF THE EVENT
Friday, May 29: a. Opening of the Two-Day Conference (afternoon hours) b. Students in dialogue Saturday, May 30: a. Experts in dialogue b. Closing of the Two-Day Conference
Language of the Conference: Romanian
PROPOSED TOPICS
• The teaching of the Romanian Language as a foreign / non-native language to homogeneous / heterogeneous target groups: teaching methods, strategies, and modern educational technologies.
• Romanian Language for advanced learners: the teaching of terminologies (biomedical, technical, economic, legal-administrative, humanitarian, etc.) during the Preparatory Year of language learning and at the undergraduate level.
• Romanian Language and Culture courses in institutions in Romania and abroad.
• Extracurricular programs for learning the Romanian Language: functional approaches and strategies.
• The Romanian Language around the world: institutions, policies, approaches.
• Redefining the role of translation / bilingual or multilingual dictionaries / translation techniques in the global environment.
• The function of terminological / interpretative dictionaries in shaping cultural images and approaches.
• The offline – online and distance language course.
• The teaching of languages as foreign in homogeneous / heterogeneous target groups: modern educational methods, strategies, and technologies.
• Literary studies.
• Studies of theoretical and applied Linguistics.
• Languages and terminologies: theoretical approaches.
• Language and media in the new digital environment.
• Language and gender studies. • Romanian History and Culture: theoretical approaches.
• Dialogue and multicultural cooperation.
• Intercultural teaching discourse from the perspective of the teacher-student relationship.
• Students in intercultural dialogue.
• Difficulties of intercultural dialogue (student–teacher, student–student) during the process of transferring the Romanian Language to foreign students (teaching – learning – assessment).
• Linguistic and cultural (re)adjustment of the individual / groups within the context of the migration (educational / economic) phenomenon.
• The need to think in a foreign language: the Interlanguage stage.
• Communication: difficulties within a group / groups.
GENERAL INFORMATION
• Deadline for participation registration and proposed presentation: May 10, 2026
Τα ερευνητικά εργαστήρια του Τμήματος Βαλκανικών Σλαβικών και Ανατολικών Σπουδών
Πολιτισμός-Σύνορα-Φύλο CBG/Labκαι
Περιφερειακής Οικονομικής Ανάλυσης και Πολιτικής REAP/Lab, διοργανώνουν κοινή εκδήλωση
με προσκεκλημένο ομιλητή τον κ. Δημήτριο Ράλλη, Πρέσβη ε.τ. και Αναπληρωτή Γενικό Γραμματέα του Οργανισμού Οικονομικής Συνεργασίας Ευξείνου Πόντου (ΟΟΣΕΠ)
Ο κ. Ράλλης θα αναπτύξει το θέμα: «Η συμβολή του Οργανισμού Οικονομικής Συνεργασίας Ευξείνου Πόντου στη διασύνδεση των χωρών της ευρύτερης περιοχής της Μαύρης Θάλασσας και η σημασία της λειτουργίας του για την Ελλάδα».
Culture, Borders, and Gender:Research Trajectories, Emerging Themes,and Interdisciplinary Dialogues in the Contemporary World
February 27-28, 2026 University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Culture–Borders–Gender Laboratory invites PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers to participate in the 7th International PhD Seminar, to be held in a hybrid format on 27–28 February 2026 at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, with the option to attend in person or online.
The seminar aims to provide an open, supportive space for presenting work-in-progress research, exchanging constructive feedback, and strengthening academic dialogue among early-career researchers from Greece and abroad. With a strong emphasis on critical interdisciplinarity, the seminar encourages approaches that connect social anthropology with cultural studies, border studies, and gender studies, and with contemporary methodological and digital practices.
We welcome both theoretical contributions and ethnographic case studies that illuminate the complexity of the contemporary world, forms of inequality, power relations, and processes of social and cultural transformation. A key requirement for participation is that presentations must be based on ongoing doctoral research (work in progress) that has not yet been completed or formally approved and has not been published as a standalone academic work.
The seminar’s thematic areas highlight the dynamic nature of interdisciplinary research and its importance for interpreting the complexity of the contemporary world. Indicative topics include:
Cultural practices, rituals, symbols, institutions, and discourses
Borders, border regimes, and cross-border mobility
Experiences of minorities, migrants, and refugees
Gender, gender relations, and the body
Crisis/crises: humanitarian, environmental, economic, and others
Literature, arts, language, and translation
Material culture, space, and monuments
Digital technologies and audiovisual culture
What we expect from the presentations
The seminar is conceived as a space for dialogue, reflection, and collective learning, where participants are encouraged to share their research as it unfolds. Presentations should be based on ongoing doctoral research (work in progress) and may focus on different stages or aspects of the research process, including:
the formulation of research questions and initial theoretical orientations
methodological choices, uncertainties, and fieldwork dilemmas
early insights, emerging analytical paths, or tentative interpretations
challenges, difficulties, or open questions that invite discussion and feedback
Public Event with Invited Speakers
Minorities, Borders, and Memory in the Balkans: Lives at the Margins in the Balkans
Friday 27 and Saturday, 28 February University of Macedonia & online streaming via Zoom
The event is organised as a dialogue around the anthropological study of minorities, borders, and memory in the Balkans, drawing on both contemporary ethnographic research and classic works of Balkan ethnology. It brings together two interventions that, from different ethnographic and theoretical starting points, examine issues of violence, survival, and mobility, as well as the experiences and practices of local communities amid historical and geopolitical transformations.
Friday, February 27 University of Macedonia & online streaming via Zoom
“To leave or to stay? The dilemma of the Greeks of Constantinople after the events of September 1955” Dr. Anna Theodorides L’école des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
Saturday, February 28 University of Macedonia & online streaming via Zoom
“Identity of the residents of East Sarajevo” Dr. Bogdan Dražeta Assistant Professor and Senior Research Assistant, Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract submission guidelines
Interested applicants are invited to submit the following materials:
Presentation abstract (up to 350 words) The abstract should outline the doctoral research topic, the current project stage, and the key questions, issues, or challenges the applicant intends to discuss during the seminar.
Short academic biography (up to 200 words), including:
the topic, research focus, and title of the doctoral dissertation
a brief description of the current stage of the research
the institution and doctoral programme
contact details (email address and telephone number)
Presentation duration: up to 15 minutes
Presentation languages:Greek or English
Submission deadline:23 January 2026
Submission of abstracts: Please send all materials to cbg-lab@uom.edu.gr
Certificate of participation: A certificate of participation will be provided to all participants.
Further Information: Anna Moumtzoglou – anna@uom.edu.gr
Applicants will be informed of the acceptance of their proposal no later than Wednesday, January 28.
Publication opportunities
Selected papers, following further revision and in accordance with established academic standards, may be considered for publication in special sections of open-access academic journals supported by the Culture–Borders–Gender Laboratory (cbg-lab.uom.gr):
Since its launch in the spring of 2021, the online seminar series ETHNOGRAFEIN has sought to contribute to a critical and interdisciplinary discussion on the theory and practice of ethnography, the epistemology of research, the significance of embodied experience, as well as the ways in which anthropological knowledge is disseminated to both academic and non-academic audiences. It is a central aim that anthropological study—as a research practice and as a politics of writing—should incorporate critical evaluation, empathy, reflexivity, and self-referentiality, while highlighting the importance of multimodal analysis of the local for understanding the general.
Organization and Coordination: Fotini Tsibiridou – Ioannis Manos – Eleni Sideri Organization and Coordination of the 6th Cycle: Eleni Sideri
The 6th cycle of the ETHNOGRAFEIN online seminar series, beginning in December 2025 and concluding in May 2026, is entitled:
Annual Theme
Ethnographies of Eurasia: Centres, Peripheries, Power and Critical Area Studies
Eurasia has long occupied an ambiguous position in international academic research: a space where continents, empires, and epistemologies intersect, but also a region often portrayed as peripheral in relation to the dominant theoretical currents of the social sciences. The lecture series Ethnographies of Eurasia: Centres, Peripheries, Power and Critical Area Studies seeks to reconsider the region through the lens of contemporary ethnographic research, bringing into dialogue scholars who engage critically with questions of knowledge production, everyday life, and shifting geopolitical landscapes.
What is at stake is not only the representation of Eurasian societies, but also the analytical frameworks through which they are understood. The institutionalization of “area studies” during the Cold War placed Eurasia within particular disciplinary and geopolitical boundaries, often privileging state-centered narratives and strategic concerns over lived experience. Today, amid the revival of imperial discourses, new geopolitical alliances, and expanding transnational networks, the need for more nuanced and locally grounded approaches is pressing. Ethnography—attentive to voices, practices, and materialities—offers a methodological path for deconstructing hegemonically formed categories, while simultaneously foregrounding the actions and voices of communities in both the centres and the peripheries of Eurasia.
The series will highlight research from a wide range of cultural, social, and economic landscapes: from the margins of post-Soviet cities and the environmental crises of Central Asia, to ethnoscapes shaped by increasingly authoritarian regimes of mobility and emergent digital publics. The research presented will explore how power is exercised and contested in spaces where state authority, religious traditions, global markets, and social imaginaries intersect. Particular attention will be paid to the politics of scale: the ways in which “centres” and “peripheries” are relationally constituted, and how ethnographers themselves are implicated in the dynamics of representation and authority.
Beyond in-depth case studies, the lectures will address broader methodological and epistemological questions. How can we reconcile ethnographic particularity with the comparative ambitions involved in the study of different areas? What does it mean to produce knowledge about Eurasia at a moment when disciplinary boundaries are becoming increasingly porous and global hierarchies of scholarship are being reshaped? How might collaborative, decolonial, and multi-sited approaches challenge Eurocentric paradigms, while at the same time acknowledging the uneven flows of resources, languages, and institutional power that shape the field?
The series seeks to cultivate connections among researchers with diverse interests and fields of study, and across different anthropological approaches, interdisciplinary thinking, and the varied geographies that constitute Eurasia. In doing so, it aspires not only to enrich the understanding of the region but also to contribute to wider debates about the politics of knowledge, the future of ethnography, and the possibilities for a more plural and locally grounded social science.
Program
1st Panel 8/12/2025 16:00 – 18:00: “Globalising pro-russian chauvinism: modalities of Russianness in the Greek case”
D. Kataiftsis., Post-Doc Fellow, University of Macedonia
“The Russification of Mariupol after 2022 through the lens of housing and urban Planning Policies”
Guénola Inizan, Postdoctoral researcher, PhD in Geography – Lyon 2 Lumière University
2nd Panel 12/1/2026 16:00 – 18:00: “Azerbaijan’s Left and Emotions Across Borders: Problematzing Self-Reflexive Knowledge Production Amid Detachment, Digitality and Repression”
Veronika Pfeilschifter, Ph.D Candidate, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena
3rd Panel 16/2/2026 16:00 – 18:00:“Dismantled Materiality, Social Shifts, and Nostalgia: How to Make an Ethnography of the Soviet Legacy (the Case of Armenia)”
Yulia Antonyan, Associate Professor, Υerevan State University
Book presentation of Dr. Weronika Zmiejewski, “Georgian Women on the Move: Migration to Greece in Times of Crisis” , 2025, Beghahn
Weronika Zmiejewski, social anthropologist
4th Panel 2/3/2026 16:00 – 18:00: “Ethnographies of Landscape and Care: Gendered Ecologies and Urban Domesticities in Post-Socialist Romania”
Iulia Statica, Lecturer, Mellon Fellow, University of Sheffield, Harvard Institute in Washington, DC
5th Panel 30/3/2026 16:00 – 18:00: “Between a Knife and the Law: Human Rights and Expertise in Migration Bureaucracy in Tajikistan and Russia”.
Malika Bahovadinova, Research Associate, Univ. of Amsterdam
6th Panel 30/3/2026 16:00 – 18:00:“Trembling Light: The World Bank’s PESAC Programme and the Afterlives of Neoliberal Restructuring in a Kyrgyz Industrial Town”
Nikolaos Olma, Assist. Professor, University of the Aegean.
Spatharidou Dimitra, PhD, Dep. of Balkan Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia: Support to the coordination of this panel.
7th Panel 27/4/2026 16:00 – 18:00: “Soundscapes and Memories of Exile: The Radio Programs of the Refugees of the Greek Civil War”
Aliki Angelidou, Associate Professor, Panteion University Alexandra Balandina, Associate Professor, Ionian University Dr. Maria Kokkinou, Post-doc researcher, Univ. of Gallaway Dr. Georgia Sarikoudi, Post-doc researcher, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Vasiloglou Georgios, PhD, Dep. of Balkan Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia: Support to the coordination of this panel.
8th Panel 4/5/2026 16:00 – 18:00:“The Making of an International Struggle: Mário Pinto de Andrade, Eurasian Connections and Angolan Liberation”
Elisa Scaraggi, Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities in Lisbon
“India, Africa and the Politics of Southern Solidarity: How the Third World became the Global South”
Meera Venkatachalam, anthropologist and historian
Short CVs
Dimitris Kataiftsis is a Dr. in Cultural Studies (University of Paris-IV Sorbonne 2014) and external collaborator, teaching anthropology courses at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies of the University of Macedonia. Since 2010, he has been conducting field research in communities of returnees from the former USSR, in Greece and abroad, mostly focusing on gender and economic reproduction. During his last postdoctoral research, he studied transnational networking, ethnic and cultural economies in the context of the Russian-speaking world and return migration, publishing articles in international journals and volumes and participating in international conferences. Finally, he actively participates in the scientific and editorial team of the journal EIRINI/Studies of Young Scholars on Gender, and in numerous activities of the Laboratory/Culture-Border-Gender (cbg-lab.uom.gr), at the University of Macedonia, as a regular member.
Guénola Inizan holds a PhD in Geography from Lyon 2 Lumière University (2024). Her dissertation examined the politicization of housing issues in the context of a major urban renewal project in Moscow. Since defending her thesis and following research fellowships at the Leibniz Institute für Länderkunde and the Faculty of Geography at the University of Łódź, as well as an upcoming residency at the Lviv Center for Urban History, she has been working on urban and housing policies in Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine.
Veronika Pfeilschifter is a social scientist working at the intersection between area studies (focus: South Caucasus) and political sociology. She is a research associate at the Institute for Caucasus Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) and a research affiliate at the Centre for East European and international Studies (ZOiS) Berlin. Her doctoral project „In Quest for Otherwise: Left-Wing Subjects and Political Imagination in the South Caucasus“ analysed what it means for young subjects in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to be left-wing. Her work has been published in Constellations. An International Journal for Critical and Democratic Theory, Europe-Asia Studies and Caucasus Analytical Digest.
Yulia Antonyan is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of History, Yerevan State University (since 2008). Her professional interests are in the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of social structures, with a special focus on the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Her permanent field of research is Armenia, but she has also undertaken several short-term field studies of Armenian communities in Georgia, Syria and Lebanon. Dr. Antonyan has published more than fifty articles in English, Armenian and Russian and has edited several volumes.
Weronika Zmiejewski is a social anthropologist specializing in the Caucasus and Central Asia. She earned her PhD from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena with a dissertation on Georgian migrant women in Greece, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Greece (Thessaloniki) in 2015 and Georgia in 2016. She is currently working on a postdoctoral project focused on World War II recordings from Central Asia at the Phonogrammarchive in Vienna.
Iulia Statica is Mellon Fellow in Democracy and Landscape at Dumbarton Oaks, and assistant professor (lecturer) at the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield, UK. She previously held postdoctoral positions at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and Cornell University. Her research focuses on the legacies of socialist-built environments in Eastern Europe, particularly mass housing, and the gendered experiences of these spaces. Statica uses documentary film in her research; her film My Socialist Home premiered in London in 2021. She is the author of Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production, and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest.
Malika Bahovadinova is a political anthropologist working on state-society relations. In her work, she explores the everyday politics of migration governance, looking at how bureaucratic ordering emerges as a site of unequal postcolonial and geopolitical relations. She also studies the citizens’ engagement with state controls and their agency in asserting a political role in authoritarian contexts. She works at the International Studies Program at Leiden University.
Nikolaos Olma is an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology and History at the University of the Aegean and a participating researcher in the ERC-funded project “Anthropogenic Environments in the Future Tense: Loss, Change, and Hope in Post-Soviet Industrial Landscapes (ANTHEFT)” at the University of Vienna. He earned his PhD from the University of Copenhagen in 2018, with a dissertation that examined the nexus of embodied memory and urban infrastructure in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Currently, he is working on a book project that explores the various processes of (un)knowing that inform life with radioactive uranium tailings in Mailuu-Suu, a former uranium mining town in Kyrgyzstan. His research interests span economic and environmental anthropology, with a focus on socio-economic change, post-socialism, extractivism, the politics of (un)knowing, pollution and toxicity, infrastructure, and informal mobility.
Aliki Angelidou is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University, Athens. Her research concerns both the anthropological readings of globalcapitalism in Greece and the Balkans, and the sensory dimensions of the experience of exile through the study of the Greek speaking radio broadcasts from the ex-socialist block. She is one of the two PIs of the research project “Soundscapes and Memories of Exile: The Radio Broadcasts of the Refugees of the Greek Civil War”.
Alexandra Balandina is an Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology at the Department of Music Studies, Ionian University. Her research areas include performance practice and theory, music creativity, cultural organology, ethnography, embodiment in performance and research, auditory cultures, music censorship, and music and politics. Music genres that she has researched, written and taught about include classical music of the Middle East and Central Asia, and popular music in Greece and the Balkans. Her latest book Ethnographic Research in Ethnomusicology, is open access and can be downloaded here https://repository.kallipos.gr/handle/11419/13733
Dr. Maria Kokkinou is a postdoctoral researcher on the BILQIS ERC project at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway. She studied social anthropology at the University of the Aegean (Mytilene, Greece), then completed her master’s degree and PhD thesis in social anthropology in Paris at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).
Dr. Georgia Sarikoudi is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of History-Archaeology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is currently teaching Greek language and history in secondary education. Her research interests include anthropology of socialism and post-socialism, social memory, economic anthropology and material culture, immigration and refugees’ studies, anthropology of education.
Elisa Scaraggi is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities in Lisbon. She has a background in comparative studies, and her work addresses questions related to the entanglement of personal and collective experiences in personal archives, as well as in autobiographies, memoirs, and other life-writing. She is interested in how colonialism and coloniality shaped the political, social, and cultural context of nations that emerged from the dissolution of the Portuguese empire, with emphasis on Angola and Brazil. Her current research focuses on the personal archive of Angolan nationalist Mário Pinto de Andrade as a key to uncovering new narratives about Angola’s recent past and the relationship between culture and nationalism.
Meera Venkatachalam is an anthropologist and historian. Her work is focused on the circulation of ideas, capital, and people between Africa and South Asia. She is the co-author of ‘Common Threads: Fabrics Made in India for Africa’ (ASCL: 2020); and co-editor of India’s Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa’ (Boydell & Brewer: 2021).
Apart from their geopolitical implications, recent developments in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have ignited intense discussion, particularly within academic and intellectual circles throughout the world. There is a widening gap between opposing interpretive communities, with evident power imbalances: in parts of the West, critiques of Israel’s destruction of Gaza may be conflated with antisemitism, with significant repercussions. In the US in particular, the presidents of Penn and Harvard Universities were compelled to resign over accusations of “tolerating antisemitism,” while in Germany, the traditionally stringent policy regarding public criticisms of Israel has impacted university life, resulting in the termination of contracts for some academics expressing solidarity with Palestinians. At the same time, although all relevant documents by the International Court of Justice and the UN Secretary General highlight the continuous occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel, only non-European countries are vocal in their critiques of Israeli policies, with some even advocating for the suspension of diplomatic relations. In December 2023, South Africa launched a legal campaign to label Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, leading to the opening of an ongoing case at the ICJ. However, amidst these dynamics, genuine antisemitism exploits the context of the conflict: the appearance of the sign ‘Jews not allowed’ in a bookstore in Istanbul in late October 2023 was a worrying sign of these blurring boundaries between solidarity with Palestinian civilians on one hand, and hatred against Jews, on the other.Our international conference aims at comprehensively examining these complexities, with a specific focus on the intellectual and discursive battles over Palestine and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The conference seeks first and foremost to promote and defend the right to critique, and confront practices that endanger academic freedom and critical thinking over power, hegemony, war, civic rights and human dignity.Conference Dates: 4-5 October 2025
