SANT 2025 | The Swedish Anthropological Association annual conference

Metztli Hernandez, Matias Menalled, Uppsala University 

Abstract

Climate change has emerged as a tangible and urgent crisis that demands immediate attention. No longer confined to the slow violence of environmental degradation, it now manifests in immediate and catastrophic events: raging forest fires, droughts, water scarcity, environmental displacements, targeted attacks on environmental defenders, rapid biodiversity loss, and more. 

These unfolding realities compel us to confront the cascading consequences of environmental collapse and the profound inequalities and vulnerabilities it exacerbates. In doing so, they raise pressing questions about the systems and frameworks that once provided ontological security.
This panel seeks to explore the potential of ethnography and ethnographically constructed theories as tools to navigate the uncertainties, anxieties, and discomfort arising from these disruptions. By offering a critical lens to examine and interrogate the transformative processes driven by climate change, it aims to address the urgent need for action in an era of escalating uncertainty.

Moreover, the panel aspires to foster discussions that envision different futures—both hopeful and cautionary—while embracing the complexities of our evolving relationship with the environment. By inviting dialogue on pathways toward a more sustainable and equitable future, it seeks to advance collective understanding and action in the face of this profound crisis.
 

Nina Gren, Lund University, Maria Padrón Hernández, Malmö University

Abstract

Discomfort lies at the heart of ethnographic fieldwork. In the pursuit to understand another point of view the ethnographer’s own norms, values and pre-conceptions have to be disrupted and relativized. At the same time we also (unintentionally) break local norms and values by virtue of being an outsider. However, in volatile, unsafe, violent and unstable contexts, discomfort goes beyond that. Whether the ethnographer is exposed to violence or threats of violence, witness violent acts, live in the constant tension created by an unsafe environment or talk with interlocutors about their experiences of violence – discomfort is prevalent. This also elicits a need to seek comfort through a myriad of coping mechanisms, some of which create even more discomfort as privilege is made evident. 

In this panel we encourage the contributors to share their experiences of discomfort and/or their coping mechanisms used to seek comfort. To what extent does discomfort deepen our understanding? How does discomfort limit us and the knowledge we seek? What do we do to handle experiences of discomfort, insecurity and violence to safeguard our physical and mental health? How do we write (or not write) using the knowledge gained in these types of field sites?

Sten Hagberg, Jennifer Lorin, Uppsala University

Abstract

This panel aims to address how global challenges, and geopolitical transformations articulate with political change in Africa, thereby bringing dis/comforting perspectives to the fore. Focusing on diverse political trajectories – military transitions in countries such as Guinea, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali; liberal democratic regimes like Senegal, Ghana, and Botswana; semi-authoritarian contexts exemplified by Mozambique, Tunisia, and Uganda; or other forms of political change – this panel encourages papers that explore dis/comforting perspectives on contemporary political reconfigurations. It welcomes case studies and/or general analyses of current political dynamics in African states and societies, considering processes of decolonization, national specificities, and local spaces (neighbourhoods, municipalities, districts, etc.).

• How should we interpret the ways in which new political reconfigurations shape cultural norms and political practices? 
• Which roles do discourses on re-Africanization, Pan Africanism, and endogenous development play in the consolidation of such reconfigurations? 
• How are classical and emblematic figures, such as the hunter, warrior, king, or chief, re-mobilized in contemporary political narratives? 

This panel aims to examine dilemmas and dis/comforting perspectives on these political reconfigurations, while interrogating the ongoing processes of decolonization and of sovereignty across the continent.

Jenny Lindblad, KTH, Tomas Cole, Stockholm University 

Abstract

This panel explores experiences, imaginaries, and the governance of dis/comfort in the context of ecological restoration. In response to ongoing environmental crises of extreme weather events and biodiversity losses, increasing efforts have been directed towards restoring degraded ecosystems. Recently, the approval of the EU Nature Restoration Law promises that considerable areas of degraded land and water bodies be repaired. While restoration is by no means a recent practice, modernist restoration programs came into their own in the 20th century. 

Restoration entails assumptions about an ecosystems’ ideal state of ecological and human-nature relationships. As such, they are imbued with assumptions as to what species belong to a certain habitat and which do not, and about the expected characteristics of the ecosystem in question. Therefore, restoring ecosystems is far from a straightforward process. Diverse ways of knowing, valuing, and living with ecosystems come to the fore through claims about imperatives for their restoration on the ground. 

Restoration takes shape through struggles among competing frameworks of value variously privileging issues such as climate adaptation, biodiversity, water purification, recreation, and property values, and diverse ways of knowing and living environments. Moreover, restoration interventions rearrange human-nature relations, which can generate dis/comforts around multi-species co-living. 

The panel welcomes contributions that address issues such as:

• Whose dis/comfort is cared for and whose is ignored, and on what grounds?
• How does dis/comfort play out in more-than-human relations in urban environments?
• What role does dis/comfort have for how restoration efforts are imagined and designed?
• Can dis/comfort be productive and generative for more just futures, and if so, how?

Proshant Chakraborty, University of Gothenburg

Abstract

If anthropological scholarship is one that grapples with self–other questions, what are the key epistemological, methodological, and ethical tensions that shape experiences of dis/comfort in or during fieldwork? Building on the SANT 2025 conference theme, this panel invites submissions that reflect on the affective and embodied dimensions of fieldwork that are vital in navigating, and accounting for, dis/comfort.

In particular, this panel invites submissions that engage with experiences of dis/comfort that materialise across a range of fieldwork experiences: How do researchers deal with anxiety or awkwardness? What happens when we encounter ambivalence or disinterest? How can ethnographers deal with situations where they encounter antagonistic, or perhaps even adversarial, social relations?

By raising these tentative questions, this panel encourages submissions that place an emphasis on the body—and its affective, embodied, emotional registers—as the instrument of fieldwork. At the same time, it asks how fieldworkers’ bodies are anchored to, but can also become unmoored from, the space–time of fieldwork in moments of encountering and negotiating dis/comfort. Potential submissions can focus on methods (like autoethnography or phenomenology), and/or thematic issues that exemplify dis/comfort along axes of power relations, identity and space (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, caste, location, dis/ability, neurodivergence/typicality, etc.).
 

Susanne Bregnbaek, Simon Turner, Lund University

Abstract

Around the world identity politics are important to people and at the same time they have become increasingly politically divisive. This creates a conundrum for anthropologists, who interact with people to whom issues of race, gender, religion and other identity markers are important and sometimes highly sensitive. As a result, we sometimes find ourselves more or less unwillingly thrown into polarizing debates in today’s often toxic political climate. Some anthropologists choose to stay within a comfort zone of “preaching to the converted”, while others end up retreating from scholarly or public debates because of the discomfort that it generates as the risk of being misunderstood may feel like too high a price to pay. 

This panel invites presenters to critically rethink identity politics/identity thinking in the spirit of trying for a moment to suspend one’s political affiliation, whether with the left, the right, the righteous or the wronged, since all human beings are susceptible to seeing the world at large solely from their vantage point and reifying it as it if were a universal truth. James Baldwin famously wrote “From my point of view, no label, no slogan, no party, no skin color and indeed no religion is more important than the human being”. 

We invite presenters to reflect on how issues of identity politics or identity thinking play a role in their research with a particular emphasis on the ways in which these issues generate discomfort. Our hope is that this can allow us to collectively think of new ways in which anthropological insights can contribute to furthering understanding between people and groups. 

Claudia Merli, Uppsala University, Ben Kasstan, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Abstract

This panel explores the dis/comfort of bodies in different health contexts as the focus of medical anthropology, examining how health practices and technologies transform bodies amidst contemporary precarity. Well-being, sought to alleviate life’s fragility, is sought through technologies, knowledges, and practices that slash and assemble bodies into new states of relief and ethical quagmires. Reproductive and immunitary innovations, while promising to preserve life, also reinforce systemic inequities, perpetuate neo/colonial power, and reshape the alignments between individual, social, and political bodies (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). Medical knowledge retains comfortable hegemony. 

We welcome papers dealing with issues such as:  

• How medical technologies un/do and recompose bodies, providing comfort while reshaping ethical boundaries.
• Chronic illness management as a site of both therapeutic intervention and systemic vulnerability.  
• The hybridization of traditional practices within global biomedical frameworks.  
• Trauma care’s cognitive focus, overlooking broader epistemological dimensions.  
• The marketization of academia coupled with a commanded ancillary role, impacts anthropological knowledge production and its responsibility.  

By interrogating the dual processes of assembling and disassembling, this panel highlights the body—human and disciplinary—as a central site of tension and reimagination. It asks how anthropological assemblies can address fragility, confront systemic inequities, and propose alternatives for a more equitable and sustainable future. To paraphrase Nancy Scheper-Hughes, is our role still “afflicting the comfortable, living anthropology as the ‘difficult science’”? 
 

Aliaksandra Shrubok, Adelaida Caballero, Qing Shen, Uppsala University  

Abstract

Ageing, popular discourse maintains, comes with multiple discomforts. Influential perspectives such as ‘successful ageing’ (Rowe and Kahn 1998) have challenged understandings of old age as intrinsically related to decline, yet they also have established new benchmarks for what it means to ‘age well’. While some of the aspirations to which such benchmarks have given rise – maintaining health, activity, and functionality for as long as possible – wake concerns about issues of social justice, they also pose challenges for academic research. Progressivist/productivist scholarly narratives and theoretical orientations often dismiss older persons as individuals caught in kinds of suffering that is uncomfortable and ethically challenging to work through, or around. 

Rejecting scholarly discourses that conceive elderly people as “the suffering subjects” (Trouillot 1991), we welcome papers with phenomenologically-oriented, ethnographically rigorous accounts of older people’s lives. What does ‘ageing well’ mean, and how does it look, across cultures and in different regions? How do older people reflect on the past, engage with the present, and envision the future? What are the methodological challenges that ethnographers face when working with older informants? How can we engage with such challenges?

Cosmo Melania Esposito, Salome Berdzenishvili, Uppsala University 

Abstract

This panel invites MA students of social and cultural anthropology to explore the role of discomfort as an essential tool for critical reflection and resistance. While discomfort is often framed as an obstacle, this panel examines its regenerative potential, in particular, how it disrupts conventional perceptions of bodies, identities, and oppression.

Contextualizing our work in a time where depersonalization, disengagement, and the erosion of critical inquiry are reinforced, this panel examines how discomfort can be reimagined and mediated as a critical tool in ethnographic encounters, whether through researcher-participant dynamics, ethical dilemmas, or the limits of academic discourse itself.

This prompts us to ask: How does discomfort reveal and challenge mechanisms of power? What role does embodied knowledge play in fostering resistance to normative structures? How can discomfort be harnessed as a tool for critical reflection and societal change? How do we as anthropologists develop frameworks that center dis/comfort as a generative process for rethinking power, identity, and positionality?

Lisa Eklund, Helle Rydström, Lund University

Abstract

In this panel, we examine the prospects of futures when life is framed by violence in specific ethnographic locations across the globe. Manifesting in divergent ways, violence inflicts severe crisis and discomfort in those targeted. The panel approaches violence broadly as direct and systemic acts of abuse and harm in respect to people, lifeworlds, and livelihoods as well as communities, environments, and societies. 

With this panel, we wish to shed new light on the diverse dimensions of violence as those are shaped in human interaction along gender-intersected lines and, moreover, in the mis/use of ecosystems and non-humans. In doing so, the panel asks: 

1. How is violence rendered mundane through daily life practices? 
2. Is it in any way possible to “make sense” of violence? 
3. How can resilience strategies in respect to crises of violence point towards better futures? 

We welcome papers at different stages, which can help us to critically explore the “thingification” inherent to violence.  

Corinna Kruse, Johanna Dahlin, Karin Skill, Linköping University

Abstract

Many of us teach in courses and programs that are not specifically anthropology – most (in)famously through methods courses. While the familiar may be comfortable to us, teaching the (comfortably) familiar in a different context may lead to discomfort: We may be uncomfortable about being asked to teach ethnographic methods within a very limited timeframe (as for example through a single lecture), we may feel apprehensive about methods becoming stripped of their context and perspective, we may even feel that we’re selling out. Our students may be uncomfortable with being asked to learn things they perceive as irrelevant or quaint, and they may be very uncomfortable with being asked to challenge certainties. 

This panel aspires to be a roundtable format that includes the audience. It starts off with vignette-like short presentations and then invites the audience into a conversation about bridging the gap between disciplines and worldviews, about the comforts of anthropology, and our – and our students’ – discomfort when familiarity is disrupted. What makes us un/comfortable, whose dis/comfort do we notice, and what does that teach us (and our students)?

We invite anyone interested in discussing with us and the audience to submit a few sentences about the gist of their short presentation – or just join up!

Don Kulick, Uppsala University, Helle Rydström, Lund University

Abstract

Applying for research grants is something we all do, but like many of the other tasks we are called on to perform as professional academics (teach, organize conferences, present papers, publish, and so on) we are rarely given any real training or education about how to do so. This makes grant writing a challenging and very do-it-yourself affair. We learn to do it in an ad hoc, piecemeal manner. When we receive the email informing us of the outcome of a grant proposal, stomachs clench and hearts tighten. If the result is positive, we celebrate. If—as more often happens—we don’t get the grant, the discomfort is profound, and we mourn.

This roundtable discussion will dissect the vicissitudes of applying for research grants. It will include useful suggestions for applying, and helpful tips for dealing with the rejection we inevitably feel when we don’t get the grant. Panelists include colleagues who have received grants from national and international research councils. But what also ties the panelists together is that all have applied for research grants that they did not receive.

Do not submit papers to this roundtable – just join up! 

Presenters:

• Don Kulick, Uppsala University
• Camelia Dewan, Uppsala University
• Shahram Khosravi, Stockholm University
• Kristina Göransson, Lund University
• Mirko Pasquini, Göteborg University
• Helle Rydström, Lund University

Annika Rabo, Stockholm University, Nina Gren, Lund University

Abstract

Universities are fundamental in democracies, promoting academic freedom and freedom of expression. Since the Hamas attack against Israeli civilians and military personnel and the following Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, the suppression of student protests and the experienced silencing of staff at universities across the world, including Sweden, have challenged these ideals and practices. In the name of academic freedom, but also under the pretext of security concerns, university regulations and neutrality in matters of foreign policy, university leaders have quailed most protests and created a culture of fear and silence among both students and staff. 

This roundtable will be an occasion to share and discuss recent experiences of teaching and researching about, as well as advocating for Palestine. What are the differences between different universities, departments and institutions in Sweden? How can our experiences inform future activism? How can we develop academic spaces for inclusive intellectual debates? Are the responses of university leaders also linked to the right not to be exposed to discomfort, as expressed in the SANT call for papers? If so, how can we analytically and practically manage this to support continued political activism?  

Do not submit papers to this roundtable – just join up! 

Presenters:

• Annika Rabo, Stockholm University (Chair).
• Nina Gren, Lund University
• Victor Nygren, Stockholm University,
• Maria Padron, Björkåfrihet, Göteborg,
• Hossam Sultan, Linköping University,