Call for Abstracts:

Doing and Undoing the Anthropology of Place in an Increasingly Digitalized World [Media Anthropology Network]
A panel at EASA 2024, the 18th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists
Barcelona, Spain
July 23-26, 2024
https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easa2024/p/14648
https://easaonline.org/conferences/easa2024/programme#14648

Submission deadline: January 22, 2024

Dear friends and colleagues,

We warmly invite you to submit a paper to the EASA Panel “Doing and Undoing the Anthropology of Place in an Increasingly Digitalized World” [Media Anthropology Network] at the EASA conference in Barcelona (July 23-26, 2024). Please submit your proposal here (deadline January 22):
https://easaonline.org/conferences/easa2024/programme#14648

Convenors:

Monika Palmberger (University of Vienna; monika.palmberger@univie.ac.at)
Katrien Pype (KU Leuven University)

Short Abstract:

Researching the digitalization of everyday life brings us back to the query of how to define the ethnographic field and how to conceptualise place and its relation to culture. This panel invites empirical and theoretical contributions that (re-)address concepts of place, culture and the digital.

Long Abstract:

Since the late 1980s, anthropologists have questioned the concepts of “culture” and “the ethnographic field” as bounded entities and gradually have shifted their focus from entities to relations. Research into the digitalization of everyday life brings us back to the query of how to define the “ethnographic place” (Pink et al. 2016), and how to conceptualise place and placemaking and its relation to culture more broadly. Due to the ubiquitous proliferation of digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, machine learning and new communication media, anthropologists encounter place and placemaking increasingly as a relational practice in virtual and physical proximity (Kaufmann and Palmberger 2022). Concepts such as “virtual culture”, “online culture” or “cyberculture” are too narrow. While people build social relations, negotiate identities and claim space beyond territorially defined places, physical place remains important for the experience of being in the world, including the experience of inequalities (Udupa and Dattatreyan 2023). Concepts such as “ethnographic co-presence” (Chua 2015), “field events” (Ahlin and Li 2019), and smartphones as “domestic spaces” (Miller et al. 2021) have been proposed to address the complex entanglements of place in ethnographies of the digital, however there is little engagement with the notion of culture in the digital environment and digitalized society. Yet, culture can be conceptualized and theorized in different ways, especially when attending to its relationship to place.

This panel seeks to re-evaluate place, culture and their interconnections and invites contributions that (re-)address conceptual questions of place, culture and the digital, empirically and theoretically.

Best wishes,

Monika and Katrien