Amarianakis, Stamatis

PhD Candidate

Stamatis Amarianakis is a PhD candidate of Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.

He studied Sociology at the University of Crete and holds an M.A. degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University, Athens.

During his M.A. studies he conducted systematic fieldwork at the weekly bazaar of Piraeus, Athens’ main port, where he examined the various effects that the ongoing economic crisis has on the everyday economic activities of  economically disadvantaged social groups. His research focused on labour relations, consumption practices and their interconnection with household economy and family ties. Special attention was given to the so called “informal” economic activities as well as to the links between the formal and the informal economy.

Stamatis’s current project is entitled “Authoritative Economic Models, Everyday Struggles and Grassroots Responses to the Crisis in a Greek County Town”. It aims to assess the ongoing neoliberalization of the Greek economy on a social basis and to  trace new social and economic dynamics that evolve in the Greek crisis context.

Research interests : informal economy, political economy, disalienation, reciprocity, neo-substantivism,  commodity fetishism, environmental degradation.

Contact samarianakis@gmail.com / amarianakis@ub.edu

Aramburu, Mikel

Profesor Titular

Mikel Aramburu is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona. Participant in the research project “Addressing the Multiple Aspects of Sustainability” within the Grup d’Estudis de Reciprocitat (GER) of the University of Barcelona and member of the research team “Analysis, Management and Evaluation of Public Policies” at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is also a member of the Observatorio de la Alimentación (ODELA) at the University of Barcelona.  He is the author of Los otros y nosotros. Imágenes del inmigrante en Ciutat Vella de Barcelona, Madrid, Ministerio de Educación y Cultura (Cultural Research Award Marqués de Lozoya). He has been published in the following journals: Migraciones, European Journal of International Migration and Ethnic Studies, Scripta Nova, Revista Brasileira de Ciencias Sociais, Architecture, City and Environment, Intervención Psicosocial. His current research topics include the cultural perception of spatial urban practices and identities, nationalism, transnational migrations, and food heritage processes.

Bofill, Silvia

Profesora Titular

Silvia Bofill Poch is an Associate Professor at the Social Anthropology Department of the University of Barcelona. She has done research in the fields of Political Anthropology and Mexican Ethnology. Her PhD focused on the analysis of forestry policies and community forestry in Mexico (Michoacan), with particular attention to community-based forestry enterprises. She has been visiting scholar at ‘El Colegio de Michoacan’. She has also worked in Ageing and policy making. Her most recent work addresses cultural, economic and juridical issues around the care of aged people, with a particular interest in gender differentiation. Her work focuses also on global care chains, in particular the relationship between immigrant women workers in the domestic sector and the political and juridical frameworks that channel the flows of care work. Some of her most important publications are: Bosque político. Los avatares de la construcción de una comunidad modelo (San Juan Nuevo, Michoacán, 1981-2001); “Aging and Loneliness in Catalonia: The Social Dimension of Food Behavior” (Aging International); “Cuidado formal e informal en Cataluña. Un análisis de la percepción de las mujeres mayores en relación a sus derechos y obligaciones en materia de cuidados y atención” (Etnográfica); “La injustícia en la vellesa” (Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya). Amongst others, she has participated in the European Project Food in Later Life. Choosing foods, eating meals: sustaining independece and quality of life (V Framework Program).

Lafazani, Olga

Researcher, PhD

Olga Lafazani studied Economic and Regional Development in Panteion University, Athens and her MA was on Urban and Regional Planning in the department of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens. Since 2010 she was a PhD scholar in the programme “Heraclitus II”. Her PhD thesis on “Transnational Geographies of Migration: Negotiations of Borders and Boundaries” was completed in 2014, in the Department of Geography, Harokopio University.

Olga has worked in several research projects such as Gemic (Gender Migration and Intercultural Interactions in the Mediterranean and South East Europe: an interdisciplinary perspective, Fp7, http://www.gemic.eu/ ),  Contemporary Greek Cultural Landscapes”(Harokopio University, Department of Geography, funded by Latsis Foundation, http://galaxy.hua.gr/~landscapesatlas/index.php), Mignet (Transnational Digital Networks, migration and gender, Fp7, http://www.mignetproject.eu)  and her academic interests evolve around migration, borders/boundaries, gender, space/place.

Olga’s publications include:

“The border between theory and activism” in Acme 11(02):189-193 (2012), “Illegalisation, Discipline, Resistance. Detention Centers in the Era of Crisis.” in Chronos 01 (2013), “A Border within a Border: The Migrants’ Squatter Settlement in Patras as a Heterotopia.” In Journal of Borderlands Studies 28(1):1-13 (2013), “Crisis, Migration, Racism and Antiracist Struggles”, co-authored with G.Maniatis, in L.-M. Heimeshoff, S. Hess, S. Kron, H. Schwenken, M. Trzeciak (eds), Grenzregime II: Migration – Kontrolle – Wissen. Transnationale Perspektiven (2014).

Contact: olgalafazani@yahoo.gr

Leidereiter, Carmen

PhD Candidate

Carmen Leidereiter studied Sociology, International Relations and Anthropology at University College Roosevelt in Middelburg, the Netherlands. She holds an MA degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, where she received a CEU fellowship award. During her undergraduate study, she was a visiting student at the faculty of Humanities at University Pretoria. Her previous work investigated the Mozambican “food riots” of 2010 vis-à-vis media representations of the events. She focused on the centrality of (bread) consumption to identity formation and socio-historical memories of socialism in the two urban centres of the country.

Her MA recent research considered the provisioning topology of largely self-sufficient farming communities in the southern Algarve alongside the morality that simultaneously constrains and enables such endeavours. The contribution of this work lies in capturing the inevitable gap between what is attempted and what is achieved by understanding “the will to autonomy” as a discursive catharsis of incoherent and oftentimes ideologically contradictory, economic practices of everyday provisioning struggles.

Carmen’s current PhD project at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) engages the reconfigurations of everyday economic household practices and moralities. The ‘economy of crisis’ is understood as a breakdown in continuity that may open new perspectives and pathways – labour, provisioning, collective bargaining – while also limiting peoples’ abilities to imagine the future as prosperous social reproduction. The investigation of household behaviours and the moralities which guide these may contribute to an articulation of the rationalities of everyday economic choices.

Taking impulse from her research interests, Carmen has spent several years working in collectives and self-organized farms throughout Europe and South East Asia. She also participates in several environmental and educational platforms, as well as civil society groups, such as the Gili Islands Eco Trust, Seeds of Change Learning Centre, Food Not Bombs and the Berliner Volksküche Gardens.

Loperfido, Giacomo

 Researcher, PhD.

Giacomo Loperfido holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the Università degli Studi di Bergamo. His research deals with questions of political violence, political radicalism, cultural enclavization, social and economic disintegration, in the wider context of global-systemic crisis and the decomposition of larger political and institutional orders. His PhD focused on the disintegration of the mechanisms of political representation between citizens and institutions during the 70’s in Rome. Within this context, he analyzed the radical reactions and political violence that emerged in the wake of this process. His PhD thesis, titled “Spontanéisme Armé et les Formes Culturelles de la Radicalisation” was awarded the highest grade by the issuing institutions École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the Università degli Studi di Bergamo.

In recent years, Giacomo has been a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the SarchI Chair in Social Change, University of Fort Hare, where he has undertaken research around the constitutional processes of a post-apartheid identity among white middle class South Africans. In South Africa, he has also been a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, where he has developed a comparative analysis of the economic, social, cultural, and representational processes of the Cold War, with specific attention to the ways in which “internal others” were produced – locally –  within this particular global frame.

Some of his Publications are:

Loperfido, Giacomo, 2014. “Integralismo culturale e xenophobia”, Riccio, Bruno (ed.) Antropologia e Migrazioni. Rome: Cisu, 221-232.

Loperfido, Giacomo, (forthcoming), 2014. “Neither Left Nor Right. Crisis, Wane of Politics, and the Struggles for Sovereignty”, Focaal Blog (accepted article).

Loperfido, Giacomo, (forthcoming), 2014. “Monstres, ou: le Sommeil de la Raison Anthropologique?”. Social Anthropology (submitted article).

Loperfido, Giacomo, (forthcoming), 2014. “The Dragon’s Eggs. Identity, time and the politics of violence among neo-fascist young militants, Italy”, late 70′s, Social Analysis (submitted article).

Contact: caneandaluso@gmail.com

Matos, Patrícia

 Researcher, PhD

Patrícia Matos studied social anthropology at FCSH, New University of Lisbon, and at Goldsmiths, University of London. Based on an extended case-study in the Portuguese call centre sector, Patrícia’s doctoral thesis – entitled ‘Precarious Labour in Portuguese Call Centres: An Anthropological Study’ – addresses broader themes, such as: a) the links between global shifts, illustrated by the increased ‘normalization’ and institutionalization of labour casualization (i.e. precarity) on both sides of the Atlantic, and the historically situated, context-bonded and contingent nature of neoliberal economic restructuring processes – as represented in the Portuguese context in increasing feelings of downward social mobility, generational dispossession (i.e. ‘the lost generation’ effect) and middle class precariousness among the emergent call centre precariat – and, b) the nature of value-creation in service production regimes and emerging forms of commodification of the labouring subject in the neoliberal service economy. In 2011 Patrícia was awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), having as a host institution the Centre for Research in Social Anthropology (CRIA) based at the New University of Lisbon. Her post-doc project examined the themes of neoliberalism, unemployment and the changing shape of the welfare state since the 1970s to the austerity crisis in contemporary Portugal. Her current project – Towards a Grassroots Economy of Welfare. Crisis, Unemployment and Livelihoods in Austerity Portugal – proposes to explore the grounded economic responses and regimes of meaning, value and morality mobilized by households and individuals confronting the austerity crisis, as they struggle to establish a ‘grassroots economy of welfare’.

Her most recent publications and reports include: (2012) “Call center labor and the injured precariat: shame, stigma, and downward social mobility in contemporary Portugal” in Dialectical Anthropology, 36 (3): 217-243; (2014) “Gender commodification and precarity in Portuguese call centres: the (re)production of inequality’ in Etnográfica, 18 (1): 5-32 and, (2014) “Neoliberalismo, Reconfiguração do Estado-Providência e Desemprego no Portugal Contemporâneo” (Neoliberalism, Reconfiguration of the Welfare State and Unemployment in Contemporary Portugal), Post-Doc Fellowship Extended Report submitted to the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal (unpublished; 112 pages); (under review), “Challenging Hardt and Negri’s ‘Immeasurability’: the commodification of human agency in call centre labour”, Critique of Anthropology.

Contact: patricia.r.m.a.matos@gmail.com // p.matos@gold.ac.uk.

Palomera, Jaime

Post-Doctoral Researcher

Jaime Palomera Zaidel holds a PhD in Social Anthropology (University of Barcelona) and a Masters in Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths College, University of London). During his doctoral research, he was visiting fellow at the Graduate Center in New York (PhD Program in Anthropology, 2009-10) and at the Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques in Paris (EHESS, 2010-11).

His main research interest is the embeddedness of the market in the sphere of social reproduction, particularly through the field of real estate and finance. Advocating a grounded and historical approach, he has explored why and how a growing majority of people in industrialized societies are entering the logics of homeownership and financial debt, and the effects these processes have at the scale of the household and neighborhood/locality. This question has led him to deal with a variety of related topics, such as the regulation of mortgage and housing markets, class formation, urban fragmentation, and the commodification of everyday life.

He is preparing a monographic book based on an in-depth ethnographic research in Ciutat Meridiana: a housing project in Barcelona’s ‘backyard’ that was engulfed in the recent financial boom-and-bust (1996-2007), becoming a hotspot for predatory lending. His most recent articles include:

• “How Did Finance Capital Infiltrate the World of the Urban Poor? Homeownership and Social Fragmentation in a Spanish Neighborhood”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 38 (1): 218-35 (2014)
• “Reciprocity, Commodification, and Poverty in the Era of Financialization”, Current Anthropology, vol. 55 (S9): S105-S115 (2014)

Contact:   jpalomera@ub.edu   jpzaidel@gmail.com

Pusceddu, Antonio Maria

Researcher, PhD

Antonio Maria Pusceddu studied Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Cagliari and received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Siena (2010). His previous work has dealt with the meanings, practices and ideologies of “developmentalist” discourse in southern Europe, for which he carried out field research in the highland border region of Epirus, in northern Greece. Dealing with the new division of labour affected by the inflow of Albanian migrants in the Greek countryside, he gradually broadened the focus of his research to include the study of borders and transnational mobility. In 2010-12 he engaged in a comparative research project supported by a grant of the Autonomous Region of Sardinia and the European Social Fund, studying cross-border mobility, ethnicity and the social and political dimensions of religion in the Greek-Albanian borderland.

More recently he has worked on deindustrialization in southern Italy, exploring post-industrial meanings and practices in the post-mining districts of southern Sardinia. In the present he is broadly concerned with social practices and meanings related to deindustrialization and regional differentiation in Italy. His research will aim at exploring the multiple dimensions of ordinary economic practices and the expectations and material conditions that shape individual and household strategies in outlining life projects and worldviews.

Antonio’s recent publications include:  Lagging Behind: The Reshaping of Rurality and the Quest for Development on the Northwest Greek Frontier in Hana Horáková & Andrea Boscoboinik (eds.) From Production to Consumption: Transformation of Rural Communities, Berlin, Lit;  Local Brothers, National Enemies: Representations of Religious Otherness in Post-Ottoman Epirus (Greece), «Oriente Moderno», vol. 93 (2), 2013; and the co-authored article Mobilities, Boundaries, Religions: Performing Comparison in the Mediterranean,  «Journal of Mediterranean Studies», 22 (2), 2013. He recently co-edited the volume Storie di questo mondo. Percorsi di etnografie delle migrazioni, CISU, Roma, 2013.

Sarkis Fernández, Diana

 Researcher, PhD

Diana Sarkis Fernández studied History and Anthropology at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. She holds a DEA on Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona, where she is currently finishing her PhD. While a PhD student she was visiting fellow at the École d’Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Centre d’Enseignement, de Documentation et de Recherches pour les Études Féministes-Paris VII (Paris), the Institut Français du Proche Orient (Damascus, Alep and Beirut) and the University of Damascus. Actually she is a member of the Grupo de Estudios sobre Reciprocidad (GER) and the International Research Network Athimar [Research Collective on agriculture, environment and labour in the Arab World].

Her dissertation, ‘Worki

ng Consciously’: Work, Capital and Moral Economies in Syrian agriculture, is based on 27 months of multi-sited fieldwork and examines the reconfiguration of social relations of reproduction, agricultural experiences of work and moral economies in the context of the Syrian Economic Reform [Islah el Iqtisadi] of the 2000 decade. The ethnography pointed up the plurality and simultaneity of diverse economic logics and moral frameworks and highlighted the prevalence of very personalized labor relations (family, friendship, patronage) and historical rooted moral metaphors (cooperation, intimate solidarity, reciprocity) which structure economic practice and experience. Diana argued that these embedded forms of living and practicing economy are both 1) the expression of subaltern classes’ history of struggle over reproduction which has been reenacted by the political project of Arab Socialism, and 2) the core of contemporary processes of accumulation of capital.

Her current project addresses the restructuring of household working-class economies following the Economic Crisis in South-Eastern Spain and examines their grassroots explanations about this political process presented by mainstream economics as a reified product of mathematical laws or as a national failure. The preliminary hypothesis tackles the grassroots metaphors of the ‘theft’ and the ‘troika’ as two central notions of a folk explanation about the crisis condensing the perspectives of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and that of ‘international division of labor’.

Her publications include: (with Alquézar, R., Hom

s, P. and Morelló, N.) “Prácticas cooperativas: ¿estrategias de supervivencia, movimientos alternativos o reincrustación capitalista?”, ARS & HUMANITAS, special issue about Reciprocity and Solidarity (2014); “El contrato es la ley: estado, economía y políticas de la responsabilidad en la agricultura Siria”, in I.Terradas Saborit (ed.) Antropología de la Responsabilidad (2011); “Le devenir controversé des femmes syriennes. Regards croisés sur le travail, le mariage et la domesticité”, Nouvelles Questions Féministes 27, 3 (2008).

contact: dianasafe@gmail.com