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panel
The Futures of European Political Ethnography
keywords:
transnationalism
borders
belonging
This roundtable discussion takes as its departure point the books and works-in-progress of a handful of Europeanists who are thinking about what it might mean to write 21st century political ethnography. This thinking involves asking who and what the “agents” of political and historical action are, including a focus on the work of the dead and/or ghosts in driving particular conceptions of community and justice. It also involves thinking beyond the conventional boundaries of the nation-state in several ways. Some authors focus on the global circulation of particular representations of bodies, differences, and belonging, representations that shape the kinds of activism, imaginaries, and solidarities are possible possible for subaltern groups across Europe. Others emphasize transnational regional experiences of mobility in the longue durée or trace out the sometimes far flung and surprising networks that allow for the construction of transnational kin networks. Sometimes, those networks end up feeling more like “home” than the physical and social neighborhoods in which people live. All of these approaches reimagine the who, what, and where of meaningful community and therefore what might count as significant socio-political action in relation to the state in which people find themselves.