Not a day goes by without a new event being announced in which academics and commentators gather to discuss the war in Ukraine and its global implications.  Not surprisingly, the questions they respond to are posed in terms of familiar abstractions and sweeping generalizations, or the psychology of individual men and national collectives - all grand analytic frameworks, many of which are inherited from the Cold War.

Anthropologists are often absent from such meetings because the value of our method and analysis lies precisely in our resistance to such abstraction, generalization, and psychologization. This session seeks to seize upon anthropology’s strengths - those which lie in our discipline's capacity to see the large in the small, to linger on detail in order to give definition to the abstract, and to focus on the concrete and its implications at different scales. In this panel discussion, four anthropologists will do so by considering “the geopolitics of small things” - an exploration that starts with single objects (or phrases, signs, feelings, etc.) as dense sites for the contemplation, interpretation, evocation, and immanent understanding of our disorienting present.

Date: Tuesday, 3 May
Time: 18:15 - 20:00. Note that this is an online event.
Registration: Please email xiaolingprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de to register.
Event Language: English