Research projects

Basic Research-Cycle H’, Research Commitee University of Macedonia, 2023-2024

Eleni Sideri Principal Investigator
Three generations of women-creators of Georgian cinema belonging to the same family will form the basis for this research which aims to highlight the concept of memory and history through lived experiences and artistic creation as well as their conceptualization through the category of genealogy. Second, by priming a female genealogy, from grandmother to granddaughter, in an area of patriarchal social organization such as the Caucasus, research will shed light on the ways in which genealogy can be produced over or in addition to substantive and biological constraints and reasons, through imaginative ways of artistic creation in conversation with other European currents and networks despite the ideological anchorings of the Cold War or the regional inequalities resulting from post-socialist Europeanization. Thirdly, the research will explore the concept of the auteur which, since the 1960s, has been identified with a transnational film production, ‘European cinema’, which penetrated the ideological wall of the Cold War, but had clear gender and class characteristics. It will also examine how these three female creators enrich and expand the concept of the creator as gendered historical and artistic subjects producing new social and cultural interpretations. Finally combining, through multimodality, different research methods (bibliographic research, interviews, film analysis, autobiographical texts etc.) the limits of ethnography will be explored in relation to a story that penetrates the past of ideological walls to talk about the present of Europeanization and Europeanness. The research will seek answers indicatively to the following:

1. In what mnemonic/material/emotional ways are female genealogies reproduced?

2. In what ways do these genealogies produce the concept of territory that is often used to frame a framework for analyzing historical experiences and cultural memory?

3. How does multimodal ethnography that combines discourse, film footage, and lived experiences weave between fiction and ethnographic narrative and how can it bring to the surface discourses, memories, and feelings that have been marginalized from national memory and history?

The members of the Culture-Borders-Gender Laboratory, associate professor in Social Anthropology Dr Ioannis Manos and Dr Georgia Rina, participate in the HORIZON project titled “CHALLENGES AND INNOVATIVE CHANGES IN RESEARCH ETHICS REVIEWS [CHANGER].” This cutting-edge project started in January 2024 and will finish in December 2027, it has no sibling projects and is set to transform the landscape of research ethics fundamentally. CHANGER is designed to promote innovative changes in research ethics reviews, enhancing the ability of researchers and Research Ethics Committees (RECs) to navigate the ethical dimensions of new technologies and research practices. The overarching objective is to:
– Strengthen researchers’ capacities in ethical decision-making; 
– Support RECs in addressing emerging challenges; 
-Train ethics experts; 
-Inform policy decisions to ensure research aligns with ethical standards.
We collaborate with a diverse team of specialists comprising social, biomedical, and natural sciences ethics experts. Our partners are or have been RECs members in both EU and non-EU countries, members of National Ethics Councils/Committees worldwide, and external ethics experts for the European Commission.  

Public Anthropology and Critical Ethnography. Folk Rituals in the province of Drama and the challenges of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, run by the  Culture-Borders-Gender/LAB in collaboration with the Educational Cultural Association of Kalambaki-Drama (Pr. Athanasia Theodoridou). Research team: F. Tsibiridou (Scientificly Responsible), D.Kataiftsis, N. Manola, A. Mitropanou

This research examines the economic networks of the Greek post-soviet migrants in Thessaloniki and the various ways they affect (and are affected by) mobility and migration practices, as well as the formations and deformations of previous and newer diasporic communities.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union more than 150.000 Greek natives migrated to Greece (or “returned” according to the official narrative),  in an effort to rebuild their lives from zero in the “homeland of their ancestors”. From 1990’s until the beginning of the new millennium, These migrants were involved in various commercial activities (mainly inside informal economic zones and thanx to loose state control) often implicating transnational mobility. The fur market, the tourist industry, the construction sector, and the open-popular markets become a privileged field of employment and business activity, on which Russophone post-soviet Greeks find a place through hard work and the appropriate kinship or diasporic networks. Despitethe fact that, among them, Greece was considered as the “final patria”, transnational practices never stopped to take placein both collective and individual levels; Germany, UK, Cyprus, proved to be favorable destinations who welcomed, at least temporarily, several post-soviet populations including Greeks.The Greek crisis of 2010, followed by the worsening of living conditions, increased (re)migration tendencies to western Europe along with return practices to southern Russia.

The objective of this research, based on semi-directed interviews and extended fieldwork in acompany owned by post-soviet entrepreneurs, was to explore the interaction between migration strategies, economic networks and diasporic communities, and the same time, to put into scrutiny several stereotypes around “Greekness” or “Ponticness” based on the myth of the “final” and “eternal”patria.Finally, the quest for the linkages between the “rise and fall” of specific economic sectors over time, and the post-soviet mobility, through the Greek example, reveals various economic and migrating practices embedded into the social and cultural norms of the diasporic communities.

The research was accomplished by the post doc researchers Dimitris Kataiftsis and Anastasios Grigorakis and was supervised by the Professor of the academic department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies Eftihia Voutira.

“This research is co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund-ESF) through the Operational Programme «Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014-2020”

Πληροφορίες ένταξης πράξης ΕΣΠΑ: https://empedu.gov.gr/decision/apo-tis-laikes-agores-stis-oikogeneiakes-epicheiriseis-sta-russian-markets-mia-orizontia-oikonomia-ton-quot-ftochon-quot-os-stratigiki-epiviosis-ton-epanapatristhenton-apo-tin-proin-essd-apo-ta-mesa-t/

The research examines the ritual of Ashura, as it is performed by the Pakistani Shia community in Piraeus. Ashura is the day of mourning for the martyrdom of Imam Husayn: the Prophet’s grandson and 3rd Imam who led a revolt against the Omayyad caliph Yazid A, and was finally beheaded in the battle of Karbala in 680 AD. This battle provides the central narrative around which Shia Muslims construct their political identity as migrants and their religious identification as a minority vis-à-vis Sunni Muslims in Greece. Ashura is commemorated every year through rituals of lamentation and public processions that include, in some cases, self-flagellation.

A decontextualized focus on the act of self-flagellation, over-accentuated by the mass media, reinforces local stereotypes of the Shia community practices as ‘incompatible’ with Greek cultural values. Social representations of the Shiite as ‘barbaric Others’ are frequently evoked in public debate in order to support Islamophobic and racialised narratives of anti-cosmopolitanism. However, confronted with xenophobia and social estrangement, the Shiite systematically attempt to articulate counter-narratives of ‘cultural intimacy’ (Herzfeld 2005) that stress the similarities between their ritual lament and various embodied performances of faith from the Greek cultural context, such as the Tinos pilgrimage (Dubisch 1996) or the Anastenaria (Danforth 1989).

The proposed research has a threefold purpose. First, it documents the community’s political struggle to promote discursively and practically a multicultural vision of citizenship based on embodied and affective components of subjectivity. Second, it unravels the rich meta-symbolic character the Ashura assumes in a migratory context, becoming an idiom or expressing and negotiating feelings of loss associated with migration trajectories. Third, departing from the case of the Ashura, but also opening-up the research focus through other examples of performances of lament, it examines how the claim to cultural intimacy is re-articulated in contemporary artistic practices, focusing on the performing arts.

More informations: https://www.rchumanities.gr/en/omada-chatziprokopiou-tsibiridou/