Čarna Brković and Eva-Maria Walther Contributed to the 15th EASA Conference

Last week, Graduate School's Dr. Čarna Brković and Eva-Maria Walther, M.Sc. contributed to the 15th Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in the Swedish capital Stockholm. The theme for this years meeeting was "Staying, Moving, Settling".

Eva-Maria Walther, doctoral student of the Graduate School in Regensburg, presented the paper "Welcome with open arms or with reservations? Personal relationships between refugees and their supporters in Slovakia" in the panel "Refugees and migrants network and mobilise with activists and NGO workers", which took place on Tuesday, 14 August 2018. Her paper focused on refugee supporters in Slovakia. Applying an individual perspective. It maped out the contradicting impulses that guide their behavior in their encounter with refugees, ranging from paternalistic care to performance pressure. Eva-Maria is doctoral student of the Graduate School since November 2016.

On Friday, 17 August 2018, Čarna Brković gave a presentation on "Queering Montenegro: freedom, sociality, and creativity in the Balkans" in the panel "The roads to freedom? Liberal grammar in translation. This paper explored ‘failures’ of political imagination and what they can tell us about distribution of an ability to be ‘creative’ in contemporary Europe. It focused ethnographically on a collaboration between social anthropologists and LGBTIQ activists in Montenegro. Čarna was a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate School and a lecturer at the University of Regensburg from May 1015 until April 2018. From October 2018 onwards she will hold a position at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

EASA is a professional association open to all social anthropologists either qualified in, or else working in, Europe.