The panel is Salvaging Hope and Seeking Survival is organized by Dr. Younes Saramifar (VU Amsterdam) and Dr Sana Chavoshian (ZMO) for the European Association of Social Anthropology 2022 Belfast. We invite those interested to submit their proposals. We hope that you join the panel for lively discussions and future collaboration. Submission must be via EASA portal however, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us for any inquiries.
The panel's abstract:
Is hope a matter of the present or does it orient social actors toward the future? How do hope and survival function in former warzones where splintered affectivity frames the landscape of feelings? Former warzones and borderlands are fertile grounds of remembrance, infrastructural claims, securitization, extraction and abandonment of military waste and they host broken socialities and ecologies. They are claimed by states as security sensitive and commercially viable borderlands, appropriated by veterans as sites of remembrance and reclaimed by locals as everyday spaces in need of development. Hence, this panel thinks through former warzones in broad terms to follow interlinkages of politics of hoping, hope, survival and transformation.
The panel follows hope in postwar conditions and reconstructions when hope is co-opted by increased governmentality, regimes of death, conflicts' wreckages and survival revolves around morality and precarity. We look at the intersection of spatial and emotional belonging, infrastructural breakdown and scarcity of resources (water, soil) to find how hope is salvaged in communal debates on security, solidarity and conflict. The panel unpacks constituting components of hope and survival and how the flow of power relationships amongst them shapes the future. We aim to traverse hope as a sense of resilience and sustenance that delays/triggers solidarity and promotes in/actions. We seek dialogue on how hope is the emergent quality of local conditions. The panel focuses on three themes, first, how future-forward postwar reconstruction is shaped by past; second, ecology and survival in former warzones; third veteran justice and belonging.
The submission link (EASA website)
Contact panel convenor: Younes Saramifar y.saramifar@vu.nl
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