Anthropology PhD Conference 2018: Vulnerability and Resilience in Research and Representation
This conference explored the various ways in which anthropologists at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology engage with global vulnerabilities and social resilience through their ethnographic research and representation. All staff and students were invited to participate in this intradepartmental event.
Can you marry a museum artifact? What happens on a newspaper work floor, and what does censorship look like in the digital age? Who would attend a ‘fiscal literacy’ course and why? How do people surviving a severe car crash talk about their past, present, and future? How does taking out a life insurance ‘script’ our future? How can digital currencies refashion economic institutions, and how do financial innovators wish to impact the very fabric of citizenship and society?
These are the questions that our PhD students at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology are answering through in-depth, long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Chile, Taiwan, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. On 29 November 2018 they presented their fresh results from the field and their insightful analyses about postcolonial relations, financialization, and the limits of neoliberalism in their self-organized PhD conference, inviting the Institute’s research staff as discussants, and answering challenging questions about the ethics of research and the usefulness of anthropological knowledge together with our senior members of staff.