Category Archives: Features

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Felix Lussem: Alienating “facts” and uneven futures of energy transition

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past and present projects of large-scale resource extraction and subsequent “recultivation” measures to convert the land back to agricultural production or natural conservation. Lignite (or brown coal) is exploited in vast open-pit mines here – the Hambach mine not far from the city of Cologne is dubbed “Europe’s biggest hole” – “swallowing” everything from forests to villages in their way.

Coal mining – in contrast to the more authoritarian and centralized organization of oil extraction – has been historically associated with the development of the welfare state and the consolidation of workers’ rights in western democracies. However, as Thomas H. Eriksen notes, “contemporary coal mining has been restructured and reconfigured to resemble oil drilling formally”, becoming “less labour-intensive and more capital-intensive than in the past” (2016: 38). This neoliberal restructuring resulted not only in the transformation of institutions of “Carbon Democracy” (Mitchell 2009), as the conditions for workers to organize and wield influence over the means of production were eroded, but also in declining economic dependency on the coal industry in the Rhineland region.

Despite this decrease of economic significance in the region, RWE, the energy company currently operating the mines, has still been considerably involved in local politics over the past decades – not least because of its mandate to secure the provision of cheap electricity for German industry and consumers. To this day the state-approved “general public interest” serves as the legal basis for the suspension of fundamental rights, making possible the expropriation of land titles, the demolition of protected landmarks, or the circumvention of guidelines for environmental protection for the extraction of fossil fuels in Germany’s lignite mining regions.

Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine
Image 1: A new energy horizon after the end of the world? Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine (Picture taken by the author)

Environmental destruction and relocation of tens of thousands of people due to numerous mine expansions in the Rhineland were thus firmly connected to narratives of national progress and regional prosperity. Mourning over losses of personal possessions and feelings of belonging were relegated to the private realm, and little room was left for critical voices in the public domain.

Recently however, this hegemonic state-industry nexus has been successfully challenged by a coalition of environmentalists, citizen initiatives, radical activists and other civil society actors (despite the continued economic profitability of the coal industry, ensured by “environmental load displacement” (Hornborg 2009) and other indirect subsidies). Their demands to save the remaining forest in front of the Hambach mine effectively stopped the encroaching extractivist operation. They were supported by a government commission installed to negotiate the conditions of Germany’s energy transition, following the decision to phase out the coal industry as a national contribution toward climate change mitigation.

The prospect of a global climate crisis has therefore led to the current reevaluation of lignite mining from guarantor of wealth and stability to driver of multi-scalar uncertainties. This enabled previously marginalized actors to voice their concerns by articulating their demands in terms of these globalized discourses. Yet, the (inter-)nationally reported success of the protests around the Hambach forest was only one instance of ongoing negotiations about the pace and scale of energy transition, from the perspective of the critical civil society actors with whom I conduct research in the Rhineland.

Since this seeming breakthrough for civic participation in shaping the region’s future, numerous setbacks and scandals have occurred. These are testament to the inability of carbon-democratic institutions to deal with a crisis that challenges its basic principles of growth as progress and wage labor as key to well-being. Controversies range from the passing of a coal exit law that many critical voices interpret as a “coal extension law”, to the federal government holding back an official report that questions the energetic necessity of the energy company’s plans for mine expansion.

Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I regularly participated in meetings of a local group of critical civil society actors who played a decisive role in saving the forest and turning it into a national symbol of climate activism. Their political engagement served as an opportunity to take a closer look at the uneven futures of energy transition in the Rhineland. As we sit in a circle in the Protestant church hall of a village close to the Hambach mine, many of the participants share impressions of feeling alienated from their home region by the energy company’s mining activities. Despite being part of the majority that does not depend on the coal industry for income, some of the locals feel their concerns were generally ignored by communal politics, making them rather skeptical of established political institutions’ capability to develop a sustainable and equitable future for the mining region.

Nonetheless, they see the impending process of energy transition as a window of opportunity to reconnect with their home region by actively participating in the development of alternative future visions, beyond institutions of representative democracy. This desire for autonomous participation is directly linked to the affective alienation associated by some of my interlocutors with the large-scale landscape transformation of the mining activities, coupled with the close connection between local politics and the energy company.

This carbon-democratic entanglement of political institutions and energy industry experienced in everyday life in the Rhineland’s lignite mining region probably finds its most drastic manifestation in the practice of “creating facts” (“Fakten schaffen”), of which my interlocutors often accuse the mining company. This expression usually refers to the practice of producing accomplished facts which alter conditions in a way to favor certain outcomes. Often their undeniable materiality forces other actors to acknowledge these facts, in turn leading to the retrospective legitimization of the outcomes of Fakten schaffen. Thus, actors with the power and institutional support to “create facts” narrow down an otherwise ambiguous situation potentially open to negotiation by different actors to a specific path of options in their interest.

In this way the energy company continues the controversial destruction of almost completely relocated villages. Under Germany’s new energy policy, the company is sticking to its operating plan and regular rhythm of extraction and redevelopment, despite radically changing socioecological and energy-political parameters. While numerous critical actors unsuccessfully appeal to democratic institutions to inhibit this pursuit of enforcing prior arrangements through material destruction, the following, more ambiguous example will serve to illustrate this modus operandi of Fakten schaffen and its relation to the feeling of alienation.

Photo of solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest
Image 2: “Path dependency” – literal and figurative: Solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest (Picture taken by the author)

Thomas, an outspoken and very knowledgeable member of a local citizen initiative against coal mining, and part of the larger group of civil society actors mentioned above, gives me a ride to the train station after we participated in one of the regular protest-walks through the forest at the Hambach mine. As we pass the bridge over the railway connecting the mines with the nearby power plants, I decide to ask him about the solar panels aligning the tracks beneath us. Their sheer size hardly makes them unnoticeable, but I never paid much attention to them, except for contemplating the irony that the fossil fuel infrastructure gives room to more “sustainable” forms of energy generation here. After all, the solar panels seemed somewhat out of place next to passing trains packed with lignite. The panels simultaneously signal the out-of-time-ness of the coal industry and point to a new energy future on the horizon.  But Thomas’ reaction to my question made me aware of another aspect regarding their significance for the issue of affective alienation in relation to the practice of Fakten schaffen.

Knowing that most of my interlocutors are in favor of direct solar energy generation and having the impressive photovoltaic structure right before our eyes, I am prepared to finally hear a success story about civic participation in local development. Yet, Thomas is not sympathetic to the photovoltaic project at all. He tells me it was a typical outcome of cooperation between energy company and politics in the region.

This sentiment echoes many civil society actors who criticize that, being the biggest landowner there, RWE conducts itself “like the lord of a manor” (“Gutsherrenart”), demonstrating the “feudal” excesses of carbon democracy in the Rhineland, which regularly undermine popular desires of stronger democratic involvement in matters of future-making. Thomas goes on to inform me that a citizen initiative proposed a similar project a few years ago in which the solar panels ought to be lining the highway that was relocated closer to the village because of the encroaching mine. They had imagined the photovoltaic structure as serving multiple other functions, such as protecting villagers from noise and air pollution emitted by the mine and highway. While the project gained some attention in the local press, it was not supported by the communal administration and ultimately had to be relinquished.

Around the same time, the energy company came to an agreement with the administration to make property available for the hitherto largest photovoltaic project in the region, co-financed by a local bank. The uncanny speed with which this project was realized confirmed not only the close ties between politics and coal industry to critical actors like Thomas, but also showed clearly how easily something can be achieved in the region when the energy company is directly involved.

So instead of being perceived as a successful step towards sustainable energy transition in the Rhineland’s lignite mining area, the solar panels symbolize a failure of civic participation. They appear to Thomas as a material (arte-)fact resulting from the dubiously close cooperation between local politics and the energy company. Judged from a distance, this instance of Fakten schaffen produced a material outcome in line with my interlocutors’ desires for sustainable energy generation. However, the concrete infrastructure stands as a monument that exemplifies how flows of innovation are caught up in existing power relations and ultimately contribute to consolidating the local incarnation of the state-industry nexus, even in the face of impending coal exit.

While the lignite industry will disappear in the foreseeable future, the longstanding history of capitalist extractivism – the main reason for the affective alienation of a large group of people in the area – will likely continue, no matter the source of energy. The deliberate promotion of technoscientific development interventions carried out by experts in the context of energy transition policies thus works to forestall the socioecological transformation from below that Thomas and others envision as a necessary step for politics in the Anthropocene.

Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the economic ministry’s newly adopted rhetoric of establishing a special economic zone in the area to speed up planning processes and pursue the double-bind of “green growth” (Eriksen 2016). Meanwhile, they were simultaneously hosting forums for civic participation that seem disconnected from this pursuit, because they operate at a different pace. This contradictory course of action leads many local actors to evaluate the efforts to integrate civil society into official planning processes as a mere façade, intensifying their skepticism towards institutions of carbon democracy in the region.

This brief insight into my fieldwork shows how inhabitants that felt alienated by collusions between energy industry and political institutions, sensed the diverging interest of politics and industry in the context of energy transition as an opportunity to regain some autonomy over the shaping of their region’s future. However, instances of Fakten schaffen enacted by the state-industry nexus function to curtail this grassroots engagement, and to (re-)connect extractive infrastructures of late industrialism (Fortun 2014) to narratives of modernization and progress under the aegis of “green growth”.

A coalition of local actors more attuned to the socioecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene criticizes this carbon-democratic variant of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and pushes for a joint transformation of resource use and political culture in search of a redefined “good life” for all. Rather than a utopian vision of future prosperity, this practical engagement might be characterized as “patchy hope” (Tsing et al. 2019) which, despite being situated and emplaced, operates between the particular and the universal, the local and the global; aware of its own limitations within ambiguous entanglements of politics and energy in the Rhineland.

Felix Lussem is a research assistant and lecturer in the field of environmental anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His doctoral research deals with shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” with a regional focus on the Rhineland’s lignite mining area. Contact: flussem2@uni-koeln.de

Bibliography

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Eriksen, Thomas H. 2016. Overheating. An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. London: Pluto Press.

Fortun, Kim. 2014. From Latour to late industrialism. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 309-329.

Hornborg, Alf. 2009. Zero-Sum World: Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50 (3-4): 237-262.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. Carbon democracy. Economy and Society 38 (3): 399-432.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews & Nils Bubandt. 2019. Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology. Current Anthropology 60 (Supplement 20): S000.

Cite as: Lussem, Felix. 2021. “Alienating ‘facts’ and uneven futures of energy transition.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/felix-lussem-alienating-facts-and-uneven-futures-of-energy-transition/

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Katja Müller, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten W. Endres: Introduction: The political power of energy futures

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

Debates about climate change have long entered political arenas through diplomacy, bureaucracy and regulations as part of worldwide environmental governance. Global efforts to foster greener energy increasingly supplement resource extractivism (IEA 2019). Yet, unfolding protests, from Fridays for Future to Extinction Rebellion, point to the insufficiencies of current measures. As lawsuits threaten the European mega-corporation RWE Energy with the responsibility for glacial melting in the Andes and Sioux sit-ins block the Dakota Access Pipeline in the USA, direct political action is on the rise to fight climate change by transforming energy infrastructure. Social anthropology’s analytical thrust to treat energy systems as sociotechnical constructs urgently needs to challenge the depoliticizing tendency inherent to energy decision-making (Boyer 2019, Howe 2019).

Photo of protest crowd holding signs.
Image 1. Fridays for Future Cologne, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

In particular, narratives of incremental improvement based on efficiency, productivity, and development discourse, must be re-examined in of the urgent need for renewable energy generation (Franquesa 2018, Gupta 2015). At the same time, political turmoil accompanies many renewable energy projects. These range from protests against involuntary displacement and the destruction of ecosystems by hydropower megaprojects like the Chinese Three Gorges dam to sovereignty struggles over Bolivian lithium reserves used in the production of solar batteries to the Spanish governments’ recent decision to hand over wind turbine development to big energy players. Beyond doom and gloom, energy’s production, distribution and consumption rise and fall with technological innovation (Winther 2013, Günel 2019). Our imagination of what makes human life easier and what improves living conditions for societies shapes the technologies we come up with and how we put them to use.

Photo of very tall tree in a forest with a treehouse built near the top.
Image 2. Treehouse with solar panel on the forest edge of RWE’s Hambach coal mine in protest of surface mine expansion, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

Over the last decades, anthropology and other academic disciplines have shown that energy systems are interdependent webs of sociotechnical and sociomaterial connections (Boyer 2014; Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014; Gupta 2015; Appel 2015). They are enmeshed in geographical conditions, spatial identities, traditions, norms and imaginaries as well as in political negotiations and financial assessments (Günel 2019; Moss 2020; Mitchell 2011; Bakke 2016). These assessments and negotiations have often privileged not only one energy technology over another, but one community’s or stakeholder’s future over another (Powell 2018). This grave inequality has led the critical social sciences to question what energy futures entail, how much adaptations are necessary or possible, what we can sacrifice for particular energy scenarios, and to ask who exploits what instruments of power to what particular ends (Smith and High 2017).  

The contributions to this FocaalBlog feature discuss the political legitimacies and forms of power that become possible through renewables’ development and the greening of energy systems. Indeed, the development of renewable energy sources begs questions with high stakes: How does political decision-making on energy sources unfold, including expanding resource extraction, extending the grid, or developing renewables? How do historic injustices and exclusionary legacies of extraction, production and consumption affect future energy horizons? Do imperatives for greening energy create new role models in energy matters that shift the focus within and beyond the dichotomy of “the West and the Rest”? When do debates about local environmental priorities and energy rights undermine or bolster global climate targets? Which new forms of precarity and scarcity do large-scale infrastructural impositions by local or international powerholders entail?

Based on a panel at the 16th EASA Biennial Conference virtually held in Lisbon in July 2020, this collection of papers investigates the contradictions and contestations between the persistence of conventional energy systems and the rise of renewables within the complex operations of political power that affect our anticipated energy futures. From top-down policymaking regarding energy access to grassroots calls for climate justice, the contributions interrogate the policies and politics surrounding renewable energy, and the unintended consequences and alliances in its delivery.

Rethinking energy futures

After decades of constant growth in energy production and demand, climate change is no longer an abstract threat. We are therefore forced to scrutinize established foundations of energy systems. While energy research has already expanded the view from the misperception of localised, insulated extractivism to that industry’s real-world global conditions, climate change forces us to rethink our energy future on all levels.

Formerly the elephant in the room, all too often ignored in energy action, climate change increasingly factors into decisions on changing energy systems large and small. At least, this is reflected in the figures: In 2019, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global energy-related CO2 emissions flattened (slightly) at around 33 gigatons, resulting mainly from a sharp decline in CO2 emissions from the power sector in advanced economies (IEA 2020). This flattening is the result of the expanding role of renewable sources (mainly wind and solar photovoltaic), of fuel switching from coal to gas, and results from higher nuclear power output.

We need to expand our understanding of energy systems beyond sociotechnical systems to socio-ecological horizons. In his Capitalism and the Web of Life, Jason Moore (2015) proposes that the separation of humans and nature resulted in the exploitation of “Cheap Nature”, exacerbating resource use in excess of sustainability several fold. This extensive extractivism then fuelled the rise of capitalism, supporting financial systems that rest on exploitation of both minority societies and the interrelated human-nature-complex. Many energy systems, regardless of their sustainability status, threaten global living conditions and operate by privatizing profits and socializing risks and losses. Critical understanding of conventional energy systems and creative approaches to potential energy futures therefore require both intellectual and political engagement.

Photo of electrical chords tangled together near the side of a building
Image 3. A squirrel scurries across entangled electricity cables in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo by Kirsten W. Endres, 2019

Bridging different scales of inequality and extraction, the blog contributors challenge the undemocratic and unequal ways of owning and producing energy. They question the financial assessments of energy production that ignore or miscalculate environmental and climate effects. However, as anthropologists, they also direct our attention to the human experiences and personal pathways forged through engagement with energy futures. Their case studies affirm that obligations rather than incentives are needed to make green technologies work for all and to reduce energy consumption. Cash cows of energy production within established political and market systems too often fail to provide just and sustainable energy systems.

Thinking of our energy future, CO2 emission developments indicate that socioecological considerations are gaining weight in energy debates and practice, as they flattened after reaching a historical height (IEA 2020). However, these shifts are not yet substantial enough to outpace political powers that focus on the economic or technological dimensions of energy production systems only. Time and again, official statements from politicians and others claim that faster or more consequential shifts to renewable energy are not feasible, thus revealing a reticence to realize sustainable energy futures. Arguments abound that energy networks and electrification need (fossil fuel based) development, or that they require at least bridging technologies to guarantee cheap and reliable supply of sufficient energy. In parallel, quarrels that a technology is not mature or marketable enough break out alongside complaints that solar energy was too expensive to survive on the market. Fears of economic losses, of declining voter favour or of structural change prevent energy transitions that are socioecological in nature and backed by sociopolitics (Sovacool 2016).

Photo of stage with empty chairs and vertical green bars on the screen behind.
Image 4. Joint launch of Green Bond Index between the Luxembourg und Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Beijing, People’s Republic of China 2017. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

To accomplish energy transitions, voluntary obligations of private companies are not sufficient. Such obligations have hardly ever led to improvements of community goods, especially not if cutting profits was a necessity. The voiced by non-corporate stakeholders need to be heard and implemented through legally binding rules. Climate, nature and the planet cannot speak for themselves, but require a socioecological understanding of energy systems to be the basis for energy decision making. This does not imply that we can solve the climate dialectic (Goodman 2016). A socioecological energy system concept will not allow for a sudden political regulation of the climate crisis through regulating energy production. Yet, understanding the political powers at play in energy systems is essential so as to not become paralyzed and to retain instead agency in times of severe crisis: energy futures need to be envisioned, power mechanisms understood and analysed. The papers of this special issues contribute to this endeavour.

Photo of power lines running through transmission tower, taken looking up from below.
Image 5. Power lines shaping current and future energy systems, Germany 2021, photo by C. Schulze

Ethnographic inquiries into energy futures

Our blog contributions take the reader to a variety of geographical settings and socio-political environments. Felix Lussem’s contribution explores the contemporary entanglement of political institutions and the energy industry in Germany’s lignite mining Rhineland, a region with a long history of large-scale resource extraction. As Lussem shows, this entanglement finds its most obvious expression in the practice of “creating facts” in order to (continue) providing cheap energy from the fossil fuel, while activists and other civil society actors try to prevent further damage to their environment and demand greater public participation in designing pathways towards a sustainable energy transition in the region.

Calls for an accelerated transition to climate-friendlier and cleaner energy sources have also gained momentum on the African continent. Some of the pitfalls and challenges of implementing green energy policies at the national/local level become apparent in Pauline Destree’s contribution. Rather than belonging to the future, renewables (such as hydropower) have dominated Ghana’s power sector in the past, while recent oil discoveries have spurred an increased rush for fossil fuel exploitation. Concomitantly, corporate solar investments gained salience during an energy crisis that hit the country in 2015. As Destree demonstrates, this led to a “renewable divide” in urban areas. While a few “green enclaves” benefit from their installed renewables, the financial situation of national utilities has worsened, resulting in higher tariffs for urban residents who continue to depend on the national grid. 

Dragan Djunda’s contribution takes us to the Western Balkans, where small hydropower plants (SHPPs) have recently emerged as a dominant strategy for reducing fossil fuel dependency. This double transformation path to renewable energy and liberalisation of the energy sector as an adaptation to EU standards attracted large flows of foreign investment. But the damming of the last remaining free-flowing rivers in Europe has sparked its own protests, as the selling of SHPPs licences implies the ‘sell-off’ of locally used water and of pristine environs.  In the Stara Mountain region in south-eastern Serbia environmental activists and local residents successfully defended rivers and villages against the impending damage from hydropower development in the region. As an unexpected outcome of the conflicts and contestations, the formerly decaying villages suddenly attracted increased touristic attention as well as financial support for community-relevant infrastructure projects.

In northern Portugal, structural reforms and austerity measures imposed by EU institutions to battle the country’s financial crisis have contributed to another path in renewable energy transition, a path that forges links into the global green bond market. Giulia Dal Maso’s contribution traces the history and location of wind farms in the wine-producing Viseu region that had been refinanced by the first Chinese green bond issued in Europe. Whereas the bond-issuing Chinese enterprise has since been able to extract rent from a previously public infrastructure, this refinancing did not produce any “extra good” for local people in the Viseu region, who keep struggling to pay their electricity bills.

From industrialized regions facing their own coal dependency and growing holes in landscapes of extraction in the German Rheinland to a Ghanaian balancing act between weathered dams for hydropower, new oil and gas discoveries, and the mushrooming of privileged green enclaves, from regional resistance to damming up the rivers of the Balkan mountains to residents in rural Portugal finding themselves poised between local pride in their wind and the pressure of paying for its energy delivery by a Chinese investor: What the contributions to this blog feature show is that pathways towards a renewable energy future are not straight-forward or unilineal, and global players in renewables finance usurp local infrastructures and drive their agendas forward, albeit being consistently challenged and scrutinised by more local imaginations of a sustainable future.

Beyond a focus on energy experts and policy pragmatists balancing public utilities and personal consumption as a calculative endeavour, anthropological investigations show how every energy provision relies on common resources and reshapes shared landscapes. Big players in energy production wield finance and power in ways that may undermine or further political and personal futures, and lead to surprising twists and turns in energy narratives. Yet suturing scales of energy engagement between corporate hierarchies, different state levels, and local energy producers and consumers, reveal that decisions on the form and type of energy used reach into deep historical experiences of developmentalist projects. Tracing the entangled relationships between people forging their energy horizons and reflecting on their demands and obligations to each other, brings to light their commitment to a collective future.

Katja Müller works as a social anthropologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and at the University of Technology Sydney. She conducts research on energy transitions, mining and climate change, as well as on digital cultural heritage.

Charlotte Bruckermann explores carbon as a frontline of value in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Her current research focuses on carbon management in the creation of Chinese ecological civilization, with a focus on carbon offset forests, digital carbon accounting, and the decarbonization of everyday life in a coal region. Her book Claiming Homes was published in 2019.

Kirsten W. Endres is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany. Her current project focuses on the interrelationship between the development of energy systems and the complex operation of modern states and state power in the Greater Mekong Subregion.

References

Appel, Hannah. 2015. Subterranean Estates: Life worlds of coal and gas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Bakke, Gretchen. 2016. The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and our Energy Future. New York: Bloomsbury.

Boyer, Dominic. 2019. Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power struggles: dignity, value, and the renewable energy frontier in Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Goodman, James. 2016. “The climate dialectic in energy policy: Germany and India compared.” In Energy Policy 99: 184-193.

Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Gupta, Akhil. 2015. “An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South.” In Cultural Anthropology 30(4): 555-568.

Howe, Cymene, Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 241 pp.

IEA – International Energy Agency (2020), Global CO2 emissions in 2019, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/articles/global-co2-emissions-in-2019

Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.

Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Moss, Timothy. 2020. Remaking Berlin. A History of the City through Infrastructure, 1920-2020. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Powell, Dana E. 2017. Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Richardson, Tanya and Gisa Weszkalnys. 2014. Introduction: Resource Materialities, Anthropological Quarterly 87 (1): 5-30.

Smith, Jessica and Mette High. 2017. “Exploring the anthropology of energy: ethnography, energy, and ethics.” Energy Research and Social Science 30: 1-6.

Sovacool, Benjamin. 2016. How long will it take? Conceptualizing the temporal dynamics of energy transitions, Energy Research & Social Sciences 13: 202-215.

Winther, Tanja. 2013. The impact of electricity: Development, desires and dilemmas. Berghahn.

Cite as: Müller, Katja, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten W. Endres. 2021. “Introduction: The political power of energy futures.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/katja-muller-charlotte-bruckermann-kirsten-endres-introduction-the-political-power-of-energy-futures/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Adam Brisley: RESPONSE: Ethics and the Anthropological Worker

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Contemporary anthropological praxis sits at the intersection of two ethical traditions. Many anthropologists are equipped with both a sophisticated understanding of the ethics and politics of representation and a practical knowledge of the bureaucratic norms and standards of institutional research ethics (informed consent, confidentiality, anonymisation etc.). And yet, if the PrecAnthro/EASA report (Fotta et al 2020) and the recent scandal at the HAU journal tell us anything (Kalb 2018, Murphy 2018, Neveling 2018, Singal 2020), it is that our disciplinary ethics does little to ensure the ethical conduct of our discipline. As other contributors to this debate have noted, the situation described in the report demands a political and an anthropological response. It requires us to unionise and work ethnographically to understand “the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization” (Narotzky 2021). In my opinion, the report should also provoke us to re-evaluate the ethics of anthropological knowledge production.

I welcome the PrecAnthro report for helping to illustrate the scale of anthropological casualisation in Europe, but it is true that my feelings likely reflect how closely the report describes my own experiences of academic precarity: I was educated in the UK and since completing my PhD in 2015, have worked on fixed-term research contracts. As Susana Narotzky (2021) and Natalia Buier (2021) note, the report privileges the perspectives of researchers like me, whilst excluding the experiences of some of the most marginalised precarious workers in anthropology such as low-paid teaching staff for whom EASA membership is neither professionally advantageous nor affordable. I write here from my located perspective as a post-doc who has worked in the field of research ethics for a number of years.

I found little to disagree with in the FocaalBlog commentaries on the PrecAnthro report and would only contend that I do not believe that anthropologists feel uncomfortable talking about precarity within our discipline. On the contrary, in fact, I think that anthropologists are more than happy to discuss academic precarity because they see it as a largely externally driven phenomenon – part of the same great process of neoliberal bureaucratisation that has devolved power from academics to university managers and driven a culture of performance review and job insecurity across the piece (so called publish-or-perish). Rather, I would think, what makes anthropologists feel uncomfortable is talking about how the precarity of junior colleagues leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by senior colleagues and reluctant to report abuse and bullying due to a fear of reputational damage (Kalb 2021, Drążkiewicz 2021, Rajaram 2021). The kind of exploitation that allegedly took place at HAU may be extreme, but as Neveling (2018) argues, it sits within “a spectrum of social, economic, and political processes that have always driven academia and continue to do so” and that reflect the general conditions of capitalism. Yet, whilst we should of course foreground the political economy of academic casualisation in order to understand the grounds for collective resistance, we must also question what it means to produce anthropology is a way that is sensitive to the risks of exploitation inherent to the contemporary academic process. Such a project would necessarily be as much about the ethics of anthropological knowledge production as the political economy of precarity.    

One of the difficulties that anthropology faces here is a lack of familiarity. Our existing professional ethics and standards are attuned to the practices of conducing fieldwork and writing ethnography. We are not used to thinking about how we interact with each other as a problem of anthropological ethics. Neither do we tend to think of “the anthropologist” as someone who is particularly vulnerable. Indeed, it was not so long ago that the anthropologist was seen as quite the opposite of a precariously employed, exploited worker. Typified by the image of Stephen Tyler on the cover of Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), the figure of the anthropologist-as-writer marked a dawning disciplinary confrontation with the idea that ethnography was not neutral scientific description, as had apparently previously been assumed, but a genre of “persuasive fiction” largely produced by elite, white men, working under conditions of colonial and post-colonial privilege. Anthropologists, who understandably tend to privilege the ethics of their own discipline to those imposed from the outside (i.e., institutional research ethics), have become keen observers of the politics and ethics of representation. Anthropologists are skilled at unpacking assumptions and revealing the structures of inequality that determine whose experience counts and who gets to speak for whom – as demonstrated in this debate by the various incisive critiques of the limits of the PrecAnthro survey. And yet it is unclear how effective our existing disciplinary ethics alone can be when the subject of exploitation is neither a subject of investigation, nor ultimately representation, but rather a fellow anthropologist.

The PrecAnthro report evokes a strikingly different image of “the anthropologist” to that of the elite, white man of crisis of representation. The typical respondent in the report is described instead as “a woman aged around 40… educated in either the UK or Germany… possibly in a relationship but has no children… and probably dissatisfied with her current employment and her work–life balance due to the fact that she works on a fixed-term contract” (Fotta et al 2020: 1). The report further illustrates what many already knew: contemporary anthropological knowledge production relies on a precariat of low-paid anthropological workers (postgrads, postdocs, teaching assistants etc.), many of whom will never obtain a permanent contract in the discipline nor academia more generally. What does the growing visibility of this version of “the anthropologist” mean for anthropological praxis? Are we to continue to imagine that the rights and wrongs of anthropological knowledge production can be discussed independently of the labour relations that structure our discipline? If not, then we may need consider whether our existing professional ethics are equipped to deal with the moral and political realities of anthropological research in the 21st century. Indeed, if it is our ambition to build the kind of class consciousness required for collective mobilisation, then we may need to start by acting in solidarity with precariously employed anthropologists and try to envisage ways that our working practices can be used to help mitigate, rather than exploit, the forms of vulnerability that academia creates.

Adam Brisley is a post-doctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has a PhD from the University of Manchester and has previously held post-doctoral positions in the universities of Manchester and Bristol. His research interests focus on the relationship between care and political economy in the context of health systems crisis.

References

Buier, N. 2021. “What sample, whose voice, which Europe?” Focaal Blog, 27 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/27/natalia-buier:-what-sample,-whose-voice,-which-europe?/

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Drążkiewicz, Ela. 2021. “Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia” Focaal Blog, 5 February 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/05/ela-drazkiewicz-blinded-by-the-light-international-precariat-in-academia/

Fotta, M., Ivancheva, M. and Pernes, R. 2020. The Anthropological Career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists: https://doi.org/10.22582/easaprecanthro

Kalb, Don. 2021. “Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t” Focaal Blog, 27 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/27/don-kalb:-anthropological-lives-matter,-except-they-don’t/

Kalb, Don. 2018. “HAU not: For David Graeber and the anthropological precariate.” www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/26/don-kalb-hau-not-for-david-graeber-and-the-anthropological-precariate.

Murphy, Fiona. 2018. “When gadflies become horses: On the unlikelihood of ethical critique from the academy.” www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/28/fiona-murphy-when-gadflies-become-horses.

Narotzky, S. 2021. “A History of Precariousness in Spain” Focaal Blog, 29 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/susana-narotzky:-a-history-of-precariousness-in-spain/

Neveling, Patrick. 2018. “HAU and the latest stage of capitalism.” FocaalBlog, 22 June. www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/22/patrick-neveling-hau-and-the-latest-stage-of- capitalism

Rajaram, Prem Kumar. 2021. “The Moral Economy of Precarity” Focaal Blog, 9 February 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/09/prem-kumar-rajaram-the-moral-economy-of-precarity/

Singal, J. 2020. How One Prominent Journal Went Very Wrong: Threats, rumors, and infighting traumatized staff members and alienated contributors. They blame its editor. The Chronical of Higher Education, October 5th 2020: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-one-prominent-journal-went-very-wrong?bclid=IwAR1F_go7fNeeRXDtTLZmAhBsNlKjv8ta3fb8e3o2uRn5WD-74cVqWKwsiVI

Cite as: Brisley, Adam. 2021. “Ethics and the Anthropological Worker.” FocaalBlog, 9 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/24/adam-brisley-ethics-and-the-anthropological-worker/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Prem Kumar Rajaram: The Moral Economy of Precarity

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The authors of The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) have made visible the inequality and hierarchy that has become increasingly normalized in higher education in Europe. The impact of the report lies far beyond anthropology, and my reflections here build on the report’s key findings and consider the impact of precaritization on the university and academia as a whole.

Continue reading →
Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Ela Drążkiewicz: Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

I was reluctant to contribute to this blog series. The recently published EASA report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) draws attention to precarious labour in anthropology. However, in the last decade we seem to have been talking about precarity in academia non-stop. There is even a nickname for the genre: “quit lit”. So, what, I wondered, would my story change?

Indeed, I have been telling my story to many colleagues, including to those in positions of power. A few colleagues proved to be wonderful allies, offering kindness, compassion, and practical support. However, quite a few showed little empathy or solidarity, and displayed a strong appetite for power. While academic credentials are key to building a career in academia, personal reputation also matters tremendously. You depend upon your colleagues for recommendation letters. This is even more true when you become an ‘internal candidate’ (the sort of candidate that you, as an international migrant, hated until you finally became one yourself). So you learn to please everybody, to be a “good girl”: not to question your Line Manager in meetings, and surely never, ever, in front of others; do not criticise your institution in public; never make demands; say yes to everything; never complain; do not admit you struggle; and most importantly, show endless gratitude.

When, after almost seven years of working at my last institution (where I arrived from Cambridge with my own Marie Curie grant) my third temporary contract was coming to an end, a group of undergraduates (without my knowledge) decided to collect signatures in support of me. However, at the last minute, they hesitated to go public. They revealed their plans to me and asked, “What if it causes more harm than good?” Even though they were new to academia, they already sensed that critique and bottom-up citizen action might be a great topic for an academic paper, but is not necessarily appreciated at the university offices. For me, the students’ support was moving, not least because it was evidence that I am good at my job – despite the stream of job rejections suggesting otherwise. My students appreciated my research insights and my pedagogical skills, and were willing to take a risk. Yet I feared that it would indeed be seen as an affront and a betrayal. I felt deeply insecure and was afraid of being accused of actually initiating the protest myself. I could be branded as a troublemaker. And who would ever want to hire a troublemaker? 

I was also reluctant to contribute to this important discussion on precarity because I do not wish to be viewed through the lens of the precariat. I want to be known for my craft, not my struggle. After all, we are professional academics, not humans. But, most importantly, I am still struck by the feeling that there is a stigma attached to being a precarious worker.The myth of meritocracy promotes a certain narrative: academic success is based on talent, skill, and accomplishment. Moreover, this is not a mere job, but a vocation, requiring sacrifice. Failure therefore suggests that you are just not good enough, or lazy, an old maid in the academic family. If you struggle, perhaps it’s because you just don’t have what it takes? Maybe you have chosen the wrong job?

Academic labour relations are the perfect field for gaslighting and undermining the abilities and achievements of scholars who are not in a position of power. They also lead to segregation and isolation. In the highly competitive academic market, people are easily reduced to the amounts of identifiable social capital they can offer. If you represent the elite, why would you associate with the academic proletariat?

Furthermore, I did not want to write this blog post because it is embarrassing. How could I be so naïve as to find myself part of a Ponzi scheme? Universities and full professors profit from the accelerated recruitment of people in lower ranks. The more junior scholars you recruit, the less teaching you have to do; they will do it for you. You have more time for research, publishing, networking, gaining ever more valuable ‘academic currency’ in an exponential fashion. The more PhDs you recruit, the more prestige comes to you and your institution. You can build your clan, your estate, your power. The more post-docs you recruit, the better your publication record (the most important academic currency). The goal is therefore the constant expansion of the pool of dependent early-career scholars. The problem is, how to lure them in? In academia, this is done by the promise of permanent, stable, respectable jobs, and the myth of meritocracy: if you work hard, with talent, if you do everything by the book, you will obtain success. But, as the EASA report clearly points out, this is often a false promise.

And here is the final reason for my initial hesitation to write: I am exhausted. I finally obtained the holy grail of academia: a permanent job! I now have the chance to rid myself of the stigma, move on, forget. So why would I go back now and get myself involved in this discussion, associate myself with rebellion, with a fight that is no longer mine? Why would I throw myself back into this mud? I worked so hard to get out of it!

Yet, I decided to write. Because I don’t want to be part of an academia run as a rat race. Because I know intimately about the suffering of the precariat. For those of you, who have never been in that position, think of your pandemic experience: remember March 2020, overwhelmed with teaching because of the unexpected new rules of the game, having to adjust your teaching overnight. This is how many precarious workers feel every September. Scholars who move between institutions have to learn the new rules of the game all the time, prepare new courses, adjust to new environments. Remember, the frustration when senior (often male) colleagues were excited that they would finally have time to publish, while you were drowning in teaching and caring duties? Did you start to stress about your job security, funding cuts, redundancy? These are the daily stresses and frustrations of those in the early career stages. Was it fun to have Christmas or Easter over Zoom, to not see your parents, grandparents? This is how many international precarious workers have been spending Christmas for years. You might also now be familiar with the pressure of caring for your children non-stop. This is the recurrent reality of many of those in the international precariat who have children, but no family networks at hand to help, and who cannot afford a sitter or day care. Did you feel lonely in the pandemic? Are you fed up talking to friends on WhatsApp and would like to see them in person? This is the constant reality of so many international scholars lured by the myths of the Ponzi scheme that academia is, trapped in a precarious limbo.

Many young precarious workers are international migrants, and as such they make good workers. Uprooted from their personal networks, with no relatives to visit on Sunday, they are available to work extra hours. They also have a lot to lose: they have already made so many heavy financial and personal sacrifices for their academic careers that it is very hard for them to change course, which means they are ready to do anything and everything, especially if they are given the hope of another contract. They are also easily replaceable and disposable as often they are excluded from academic patronage networks. Often, they have little or no connection with an Alma Mater of their own. For their new institutions, they are just foreigners who have arrived for their own gain. There is an unspoken assumption that they will leave. Consequently, few feel a moral responsibility for them. They are also highly vulnerable to discrimination based on nationality or race, both within and beyond the workplace. It is shameful that this exploitation happens in academia, particularly in anthropology, where so many careers were built on researching exploitation, migration, and indeed, precarious lives. 

Ela Drążkiewicz is a researcher at the Institute for Sociology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Institutional Dreams: The Art of Managing Foreign Aid. She specialises in political, economic and organisational anthropology.  

Bibliography

Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Cite as: Drążkiewicz, Ela. 2021. “Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia.” FocaalBlog, 5 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/05/ela-drazkiewicz-blinded-by-the-light-international-precariat-in-academia/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Susana Narotzky: A History of Precariousness in Spain

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The EASA report on The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) is an important initiative that offers quantitative evidence about a situation which all of those who work in academia are aware of, many experience daily, and which has repeatedly been denounced since the onslaught of the neoliberal policies starting in the 1980s. I will comment on this document from my situated viewpoint as a Spanish anthropologist, a full time tenured anthropologist, and a PI of large collaborative projects.

As a report produced by anthropologists for anthropologists, my first surprise was to find it not very anthropological. Although the report acknowledges that situations are very different among countries, we do not get a picture of what those differences are. The ‘methodology’ cannot deliver that picture. First, the assumption that EASA membership represents anthropologists working in Europe, and in particular the most precarious anthropologists, is probably inaccurate. In Spain, many of the part-time non-tenured teaching positions have extremely low salaries and their holders juggle a plurality of jobs that make research difficult. As a result, membership in EASA –which is fundamentally tied to participation in the biennial conference—is rarely sought. Therefore, a large contingent of (probably) the most precarious voices, many of which are not proficient in English, is not represented in the survey. This may also explain why a large majority of respondents work in Northern institutions which have more resources than those in other countries.

Second, what does the fact of choosing to produce a ‘survey’ rather than an ‘ethnography’ of “The anthropological career in Europe” say about the discipline of social anthropology, about its trust in the ‘evidence’ produced by our main methodological tool? Why does EASA as an association of social anthropologists thinks that it needs quantitative evidence in order to make its point about precarious anthropologists’ situation in the academy? We have countless ethnographies about labor precarity in Europe, but we have scant detailed ethnographies about precarious anthropologists teaching and doing research in concrete university environments. This has not been an obstacle to insightful and important articles being written from two perspectives: on the one hand, contributions based on personal experience; on the other hand, contributions based on statistical secondary sources enabling theorizations about the neoliberal transformations of the university in general or in a particular country (often in the Global North). As Pérez and Montoya (2018: A5) propose, personal experience should “reveal research paths for future ethnographies of academic precarity”, but it cannot substitute for them. I suggest that producing ethnographies is an urgent task if we want (1) to understand concrete ongoing processes of exploitation, domination and dispossession, and (2) to organize in a collective manner to overturn them.

Third, context and history. The survey does not provide any tools for historical and political context. Rather, it generalizes the neoliberal process as if it developed in the same way everywhere. We know from anthropological investigations into other domains of life, however, that the rolling back and rolling out of the neoliberal state is modulated by concrete historical circumstances.

In the mid-1970s, as a result of an increase in the number of university students, Spanish universities resorted to hiring a large number of non-permanent faculty. The figures vary slightly according to each university but, on average, 80 per cent of the faculty in Spanish universities were non-permanent in the mid-1970s (Profesor No Numerario) (Moreno 2019, Castillo 1982). According to statistical records of the Ministry of Universities, the figure of non-permanent faculty has stabilized at around 45 per cent in the past four years. Precarity, then, was part of an undemocratic university system where hierarchies of patronage dominated the scarce avenues towards stable tenure. Precarity, now, is part of an austerity regime that has reduced public education resources, forcing universities to seek funding from other sources (e.g., research grant overheads) or public-private partnerships. This has important implications for our understanding of the neoliberalisation of Spanish academia; as much as it sheds light on the long history of academic precarity and the struggle against this.

In the 1970s, as part of the general struggles for democratization of the university, a nationwide movement of the No Numerario’s developed. Based on assembly meetings in faculties and universities, it was not attached to parties or unions and was coordinated at the national scale by a committee of representatives. They demanded the same treatment as the permanent faculty, together with access to decision making committees in the university and other democratic requests. They organized long strikes and threatened the continuity of teaching and exams. Yet, their demand of stability and equal treatment sought to obtain a well-paid labor contract and to abolish the life-long tenure of the Profesor Numerario, subjecting all professors to periodic evaluation of their teaching and research and, implicitly, to the possibility of ending their contract. In the end, this radical position –the generalization of “non-tenured” academic labor contracts– was disabled by a law of university reform issued by the first socialist government in 1983, which promoted a process of rapid stabilization of most PhD-holding No Numerario’s through access to lifelong tenure  (Carreras 2004).

Today, the privatization of the public university system is based on the elimination of that life-tenure system and its substitution by tenured labor contracts in a context where the existing labor regulations have deregulated most rights and protections. Precarious faculty today in Spain are represented only partially and by various unions demanding stability, but there is no equivalent movement, organization and coordination to that of the No Numerario’s in the seventies. Why is that?

Local patronage networks are still very much in place, and one of the major assets to access a permanent job is to remain close to one’s Alma Mater, rather than to publish or get an international post-doc position abroad. In public universities 87% of teaching faculty (tenured and non-tenured) have a PhD from the same Autonomous Community, and 73% from the same university where they defended their PhD. Simultaneously, an increasing contingent of young academics who have been competitively selected to post-doc positions in research projects, have generally been able to publish in ‘impact’ journals and have expanded their international networks.

As a result, two very different kinds of precarious academic exist nowadays. They are often pitted against each other in competitions for tenured positions. When committees have to decide the value of teaching or research experience, the value of the local or foreign (i.e. from outside the university) candidate, they often tend to favor the local candidate with teaching experience. Rather than moralizing this as being ‘bad’ or ‘good’ for the university, my point here is to underline the diverse positionalities of precarious academics in Spain and the difficulties that this fragmentation entails in terms of collective organization and mobilization. In a context with more precarity and minimal research opportunities, within an ongoing struggle for democracy, the No Numerario’s movement collectively organized and achieved stability. Why not now? What needs to be done?

As anthropologists we need ethnographies of academic precarities, we need to historically situate the various forms of precarity and to compare them. To act effectively, we need to understand the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization. We know the numbers, now we need to know the souls.

Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Bibliography

Carreras, J. 2004. Evaluación de la calidad docente y promoción del profesorado (IV). Legislación universitaria española (b): de la Ley de Reforma Universitaria (1983) a la Ley Orgánica de universidades (2002). (1ª parte.) Educación Médica 7(1): 9-23

Castillo, J.J. 1982. Universidad: O todos o ninguno, El País, 12 de abril 1982

Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Moreno, I. 2019. Interview with Prof. Isidoro Moreno, Anthropologist, Universidad de Sevilla. 20 March, 2019. http://tv.us.es/el-movimiento-de-los-pnn-y-la-democratizacion-de-la-universidad-y-el-pais/

Pérez, M. & Montoya, A. 2018. The Unsustainability of the Neoliberal Public University: Towards an Ethnography of Precarity in Academia. Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, LXXIII(1): A1-A16

Cite as: Narotzky, Susana. 2021. “A History of Precariousness in Spain.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/susana-narotzky:-a-history-of-precariousness-in-spain/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Giacomo Loperfido: On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Covid19 is producing a crisis – both sanitary and economic – of global structural proportions, threatening the very existence of society as we know it. All precarious segments of society have become more precarious. But even before now, a growing precariat, eating into larger and larger segments of the middle classes, was emerging. Isolation, alienation, precaritization are not a novelty. Looking at the PrecAnthro/Easa survey (Fotta, Ivancheva, Pernes, 2020), one can see that the transformations of the academic system are an integral part of the process of middle class precaritization that started long before the current crisis.

I am an unemployed anthropologist (and have been so for more than two years). I am also a member of the PrecAnthro collective/union. At the EASA conference of 2018 I had the pleasure to be part of Alice Tilche’s initiative to bring together junior and senior anthropologists (precarious and otherwise) to reflect critically on the implications of the current trend of funding academic research through “big projects” (see Tilche and Loperfido, 2019). Before then, I had been a “privileged” (Matos, 2019) precarious researcher, employed as a postdoc in one of those big projects. For four years, I enjoyed the chance to participate in a solidly funded team under the expert coordination of a senior researcher who was also able to embed our collective research among her high level contacts in global anthropology. Despite fundamentally benefitting from having been part of a “big project”, I would like to use my space here to express a critical stance on what seems to have become one of the hegemonic mechanisms of research funding in the European and global arena.

The “big project” trend relates directly to the occupational transformations within social anthropology highlighted by the survey: precaritization, constant competition over funding, growing separation between research and teaching, vertical polarisation of academic hierarchies, de-professionalization of academic labor through multiple contracts, the imperatives of – often restless – international mobility, to cite but a few.

In the 1990s, the extension of New Public Management policies to the university system enforced the managerialization of administrations, introduced performance requirements, and set up unbridled competition. What emerged was a new trans-nationalized educational arena, in which “excellence” and “competition” became not only fundamental key words and real-world access keys to tenured careers. As an effect, an increasing number of tenured positions were proletarianized as a collective body, “and the number of short term or part time contracts at major institutions increased (with the concomitant participation of a handful of highly paid stars)”, as a worried Bill Readings had already stated 25 years ago (Readings 1996: 1). He noted how the university was beginning to be spoken of in the idiom of “excellence” rather than of “culture”. His explanation was that “the university no longer has to safeguard and propagate national culture, because the nation-state is no longer the major site at which capital reproduces itself” (Readings 1996:13).

About ten years later, the establishment of the European Research Council was saluted as “a European Champions League” (Winnacker 2008: 126), and the new way of funding research through big grants was established as part of the EU’s 7th framework program. Here again, “individual excellence” and “competition as the prerequisite for the formation of excellence” were becoming key principles in overcoming the “startling parochialism fostered in Europe by the reality of Nation States” (Winnacker: 124-25).

In much less enthusiastic terms, PrecAnthro’s action has focused on those very processes of increased internationalisation, escalating competition, and the new global imperative of “excellence”. With the above-mentioned event at the EASA conference 2018, we wanted to problematize the ways in which the international academic arena has been transformed into a market, where “scholars who are able to secure large grants have become football stars openly traded in the academic league” (Tilche, Loperfido, 2019:111).  A “Champions League”, indeed. Yet, on the dark side of that seemingly glamorous moon, a less visible academic precariat silently took shap; and became exposed to all the profound challenges and hardships in academic careers and personal life that the EASA/PrecAnthro report brings to light for the EASA membership community.

From all the above, I can only infer a general decline in the perception of the value of public institutions as something being endowed with more than just ‘competition’, such as social equality and cultural reproduction. Certainly, we all love excellent scholarship. Yet, there is a difference between a public action that promotes academic excellence so that it helps everybody to improve their scholarship, and an excellence that comes as a single-minded competition mechanism where only those that already have the label of excellence will benefit. 

Personally, I did benefit from the opportunities offered by participation in a big international grant. But we should refuse to assess collective problems on the grounds of our personal interests only. If we are to do something about “the current tragedy of anthropology as a discipline” (Kapferer, 2018) – and these are, once again, words from a time before the current pandemic – it is important ask, from a political and economic angle, where the public money that I benefitted from did not go. How many more non-tenured positions, how many more fixed-term research contracts and how many part-time teaching contracts does each €2,5 million grant produce? Who shoulders the costs of those grants? The PrecAnthro survey offers important answers to these questions. Now, what happens if we put together the scary picture portrayed by that survey prior to the current pandemic with the projections we have on the impact of Covid19 on the global economy and precarity in the academy in particular? There is enough evidence now for an honest and serious discussion on social justice; and to question where the current organisation of “big grant” transnational research funding fits into the escalating inequality in academia.

Giacomo Loperfido is an independent researcher, member of PrecAnthro. He is currently working on his first monograph, A Birth of Neo-fascism: Cultural Identities, the State, and the Politics of Marginality in Italy, thanks to the generous help of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, CH.

Bibliography

Fotta, Martin, Ivancheva, Mariya, Pernes, Raluca. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Kapferer, Bruce. 2018. “The Hau complicity: An event in the crisis of anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 9 July. www.focaalblog.com/2018/07/09/bruce-kapferer-the-hau-complicity-an-event-in-the-crisis-of-anthropology.

Matos, Patricia, 2019. “Precarious Privilege. Confronting Material and Moral Dispossession”, in Forum: Politics and Precarity in Academia, Social Anthropology 27: 97-117.

Readings, Bill, 1996, The University in Ruins. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.

Tilche, Alice, Loperfido, Giacomo, 2019. “The Return of Armchair Anthropology? Debating the Ethics and Politics of Big Projects”, in Forum: Politics and Precarity in Academia, Social Anthropology 27: 97-117

Winnacker, Ernst-Ludwig, 2008. “On Excellence Through Competition”, European Educational Research Journal, 7:2, 124-30.

Cite as: Loperfido, Giacomo. 2021. “On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/giacomo-loperfido-on-excellence-precarity-and-the-uses-of-public-money/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Natalia Buier: What sample, whose voice, which Europe?

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The EASA membership survey and the associated ‘precarity’ report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) are an important and timely contribution. Surely these are findings we must build on and the critical scrutiny of which is indispensable for formulating minimally shared lines of action. The report is likely to stir discussion both through its inclusions as well as through some of its inevitable silences. It is some of the latter that I want to briefly touch upon here.

Continue reading →
Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Don Kalb: Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The PrecAnthro Collective within EASA has shown staying power and bite. That is what the EASA precarity survey demonstrates (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020). Mariya Ivancheva has turned her elected stint in the Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists to good use. She, her co-authors, and her multiple collaborators and supporters in and outside of EASA should be applauded. This is Europe-wide anthropological collective action at work, and it goes far beyond business as usual.

Continue reading →
Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Stefan Voicu: Introduction: EASA’s ‘Precarity Report’: Reflections, Critiques, Extensions

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Every day across Europe hundreds of social anthropologists wake up knowing that their precarious employment conditions may one day force them to leave the discipline. Still, they keep the discipline going across the continent by teaching, providing vital research data for high-profile research projects and a substantial share of the annual publication output. They also apply for grants and jobs while balancing the tightrope of overtime work and personal life. All for the glimmer of hope of a permanent position.

Continue reading →