SANT 2025 | The Swedish Anthropological Association annual conference

Conference Theme: Dis/Comfort

Our everyday lives are marked by a constant pursuit of comfort. We search for comfort to alleviate diverse quotidian pressures, to beat the daily race against time, and to find simplicity in a world that is as complex as it is conflict driven.

What, exactly, provides comfort and who determines its value?

As the world appears to be becoming more and more unsafe and the future increasingly uncertain, we lean towards comfort that provides ontological security, makes the world knowable, and protects us from external disruptions – or so it appears. Thus, whether emotional or material comfort, comfort provided by technology and AI, or comfort found in opinions shared by like-minded people, our aspiration to make our lives comfortable informs many of the choices we make every day. But what, exactly, provides comfort and who determines its value? Where do we look for it; with and from whom and at whose expense? Moreover, how do we navigate the uncomfortable ethical struggles that dovetail the search for comfort; what consequences does that search have for global inequalities and systemic injustices?

Is comfort always something we should strive for? Is it always valued in the society?

Today, we also see a growing recognition of the right to not be exposed to discomfort. The comfort provided by, say, diverse commodities becomes conflated with the right to wellbeing and safety. Yet there is a flip side to this, which prompts us to ask:
is comfort always something we should strive for? Is it always valued in the society? On one hand, experiencing discomfort may often seem like a ‘necessary evil’ in the pursuit of comfort. On the other hand, in today’s ethos of high performance and competition, we appreciate the value of moving outside the comfort zone, as if feeling uncomfortable were elemental for achieving and progressing. The most prized accomplishment thus may imply the ability to perpetually push the boundaries of one’s comfort zone; to learn to endure discomfort.

The balancing between avoiding discomfort and embracing it lies in the heart of our anthropological work. Discomfort is a well-known, integral aspect of long-term ethnographic fieldwork. As such, it is also a subject present in classroom conversations, ethnographic writing, and fieldwork notes and diaries. But what we discuss less regarding our work is comfort. So, what does comfort mean for us anthropologists as we navigate challenges in the field or write about our research? Or inversely, how does our relationship to discomfort factor into how we teach anthropology to our students?

What do we do when we find truths that cause discomfort?

This SANT conference invites participants to engage with the theme Dis/Comfort from theoretical, empirical, and critical perspectives. We encourage further exploration of what comfort and discomfort mean, their situatedness and context-specificity, their role as an organizing principle for structural inequalities, and how they guide people’s dreams, actions, and ideological stances. Our openness towards the world allows us as anthropologists to find unexpected and uncomfortable truths. What do we do when we find truths that cause discomfort? And for whom are these truths uncomfortable? This conference encourages us to not only ask these and other related questions, but also to consider how we can embrace Dis/Comfort as valuable aspects of our research and engagement with the world.