ANNAN NOUR |
Nour Annan is a writer, organizer, and interdisciplinary artist. After completing her undergraduate studies in Beirut, she moved to New York to pursue an MA degree in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. Her thesis research currently centers collective cultural memory and contemporary revolutionary politics through forms of photographic material and speculative fiction. She is a former editor at Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal.
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Sowparnika Balaswaminathan |
I’m an Assistant Professor in Religions and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. I am an anthropologist, who is currently exploring whether a non-extractive ethnography is possible. I am interested in the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, and the potential for the polyvalence of “the good.” My current research explores the labor of religious bronze casters in India, and the persona of the artisan in the national imaginary. My proposed project will consider the entanglements between religious nationalism, cosmopolitan connoisseurship, and the true crime genre in the world of illegal antiquities trading.
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Marc Bellinghausen |
I am working in documentary film, editing, camera and sound, in addition to contributing to organising and media in projects on migration, racism and memory. Previously studied dentistry, worked as an author and editor for medical online portals, trained at the self-organised film school filmArche e.V., and as an author and editor for the television magazine Xenon campus tv at EMS, curated film series such as at the globale film festival Berlin, active in media and conception for exchange projects on National Socialism in the European context.
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Evie Despotopoulou |
She has studied Pedagogy (BA) and Social Anthropology (MA) at the University of Thessaly and since 2021 she's studying Social Anthropology and History (BA) at the University of the Aegean. She introduces herself to the world as an anthropologist, a musician, a geek gamer and a pop culture enthusiast - whatever that means. Academically, she's interested (mainly but not exclusively) in Anthropology of Music and Sound and its entanglements with Digital and Multimodal Ethnographic Practices, Everyday Music Practices, Performance(s) and Audile Techniques, Sonic Materialities, Radio Broadcasting, and the Singing Voice(s).
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Margarida Farinha |
Margarida is a junior lecturer, mentor and research assistant at the Anthropology Department of the University of Amsterdam. She received a M.Sc. in Cultural and Social Anthropology from the same university with a thesis on statelessness and unclear nationality in Germany. Through this research, she became a member and writer for Statefree, an online community connecting stateless people and their allies. Previously Margarida worked as a program coordinator for Humanity in Action and has a background in dance and movement research. She is interested in critical pedagogy and fostering creative encounters of inquiry and learning.
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Artemis Fyssa |
Artemis Fyssa is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at University of Basel. Her research interests lie at the intersection of art, space, politics and migration. Having conducted extensive fieldwork on the five Aegean islands where the Hotspot Approach is implemented, her thesis deals with the socio-political entanglements that emerge within and across the Hotspot infrastructure space. She holds a joint MSc in Urban Studies, obtained on a scholarship from Onassis Foundation; a MA in Music Culture and Communication (University of Athens) and a degree in Sociology (Panteion University). Born in Athens, she has lived in Budapest; Rotterdam; Brussels; Vienna; Copenhagen; Madrid; Basel; and Thessaloniki where she is currently based.
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Vassilis Gerasopoulos |
Vassilis Gerasopoulos is a PhD candidate and a lecturer at the Willem Pompe Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Utrecht. His doctoral research focuses on how the migration 'crisis' of 2015 reconfigured and produced the figure of the migrant as the cultural 'Other' in the Greek context. Alongside his PhD research, he is also involved in projects regarding the dominant representations of crime, migration, sexuality and gender as well as the intersection between criminology and queer studies. He has published articles on the recent refugee crisis in Greece, the contemporary modalities of racism in the country, and the intersection of deviance and popular culture.
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haid Isabella |
Isabella Haid is an undergraduate student at Bard College in New York. Studying a combination of American Studies and Computer Science, her approach to work is deeply interdisciplinary.
She is a Media Corps member at Bard’s Experimental Humanities Center and has conducted independent research through the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network. Focusing on how digital technology re/makes the self and the world, Isabella is passionate about how the combined histories of craft, labor, and imperialism constitute our cybernetic present. She is also the 2022 award recipient of the Professor Bernard Tieger Award in Labor, Community, and History at Bard. |
Hazal Halavut |
Hazal Halavut is a PhD Candidate at the Women & Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto. Interested in postcolonial feminist theory, psychoanalysis, trauma and memory studies, her written work encompasses literary criticism to state violence and witnessing; feminist history and politics to colonial traumas. Her doctoral project grapples with the question of what remains after collective loss when loss is historically erased, politically denied and collectively repressed. By excavating the traces of the Armenian Genocide at the intersection of history, memory and literature in Turkey, she investigates how unreconciled histories of racial and colonial violence slip into the present through affect and shape national identities as well as collective imaginaries. Hazal is also the co-editor-in-chief of the online feminist journal, 5Harfliler.
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Wesam Hassan |
I am excited to be joining Pelion Summer Lab. I am a medical doctor and a public health practitioner who is passionate about anthropological research. Currently I am pursuing my DPhil degree in anthropology at the university of Oxford. I’m intrigued by experimental and digital ethnography and using film and comics to disseminate ethnographic knowledge. I think through concepts of uncertainty, temporalities, and risk both in the biomedical and economic spheres. For my MA, I worked with mothers living with HIV and AIDS in Egypt post 2011 to understand the subjectivity of living with HIV/AIDS and its related biopolitics. In my doctorate research I research games of chance practices in Istanbul, Turkey. I am also animated by material culture and anthropology of consumption with focus on affective relations with practices (shopping, money, gambling, and betting) both offline and online.
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Holly Hudson |
Holly Hudson (she/they) is a social and climate justice activist and researcher. She is an organiser/researcher for the decolonial anti-gas collective 'We Smell Gas', campaigning for an end to new gas projects in Europe and beyond. She is also an organiser for Green New Deal Rising in the UK and has been published in the Guardian and Shado-Mag. Her MA is from SOAS where she specialised in abolitionist social justice movements in the UK.
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Georgia Koumantaros |
My name is Georgia Koumantaros. I am an MA student in Social Anthropology at York University. I am currently conducting my MA research which focuses on village futures in a rural mountain region in Peloponnesus, Greece. I am interested in the relationships between terrain, embodied subjectivities, shared subjectivities, and differentiated imaginative horizons and potentials of the village’s future. This work explores how the village itself; specific topography, materials, places, landmarks, or sensory experiences (like smells, sounds, taste) evoke memories, stories, and ideas of both the past and the future of what ‘the village’ can be.
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Natalia Koutsougera |
Natalia is an anthropologist and director working at the intersection of anthropology of dance, visual anthropology, gender, youth and hip hop studies. Her postdoctoral research revolves around hip hop, urban dance scenes and street femininities. She has produced two ethnographic films on hip hop and street dance styles in Greece entitled “Born to Break” (2011) and “The Girls are here” (2015). She is currently a fellow in Comparative Cultural Studies (CHS, Harvard University). She works as Laboratory Teaching Staff in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University, Athens. Her forthcoming documentarian venture entitled “Girls Wanna JUST dance” is about to be accomplished in November 2022.
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Maria Lagou |
I was born and raised in Volos, Greece. I got my bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, with a specialization in Social and Clinical Psychology. Now, I work as a Psychologist at a Vocational High School. I am a postgraduate student in Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly, and I am in the process of completing my dissertation, concerning the political dimensions of the dead body of the pandemic. My
research interests focus mainly on the Anthropology of Death and Dying, Body Politics, and how these can be combined theoretically with Queer Studies. |
Héctor Miró Beltrán |
My name is Héctor and I come from Muro d'Alcoi, a small town in Valencia. Since I was born, I have been used to live surrounded by nature and the beautiful mountains of the Mediterranean side of Spain. When I was 16, I was awarded with the opportunity to study at a boarding school in Wales, UWC of the Atlantic. This was a great change of environment for me, but one I deeply appreciated because it gave me the opportunity to live by the sea. Moreover, I was part of a very close knit international community, which inevitably led to many deep, political discussions. This prompted me to study politics, and that's how I ended studying a BA on Economics, Politics and Social Thought at Bard College Berlin. It has been my first time living in a city. In the future, I hope to continue my studies in the field of philosophy.
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Carol Montealegre |
Visual artist and filmmaker.
I studied Social Anthropology at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá and then received an MFA in Visual Arts from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM. My research and practice intersect cinema and performance, and I am now enrolled in the MA program in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. I create experiences that allow the audience and the performers to immerse themselves in other possible realities to decolonize the body, mind, and soul. I am now working on a film project, "Howls In the Mountains" with a women ́s union in Colombia. www.carolmontealegre.com |
Anna Mundet Molas |
I am a practice-based & critical writing researcher and interdisciplinary artist based in Barcelona. I hold a BA in Audiovisual Communication and Media Studies from Pompeu Fabra University and I have an academic background in Philosophy and Digital Humanities. My current focus of research is on cultural memory and its relation to space colonization and posthumanism. Last year, I was awarded a scholarship to do an exchange stay at the Department of Radio, Film, and Television at the University of Texas where I discovered artistic research and I started to produce work in the intersection between new media, storytelling, curatorial practices, and community-based participation. I am also co-founder of the media production company Malniu Films.
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Penny Paspali |
Having a background in History and Gender Studies, Penny has embarked the project of doing a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and as part of it she conducts an ethnography about digital feminist activism against femicides in Greece. Her research interests are orchestrated around affect theory, digital anthropology, posthuman theory, feminist and queer readings, and the ways that the above can be applicable in activist practices. She’s terrible at writing bios, because she wishes to be funny yet always ends up feeling awkward. She loves self-burn jokes and dark chocolate.
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Beja Protner |
I am a sociocultural anthropologist, working in the fields of Anthropology of Politics, Anthropology of Emotions, Memory Studies, and Migration Studies. My educational path started in Slovenia and continued in Turkey, where I researched the Kurdish issue, belonging, political and visual violence, and hope. I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, conducting ethnographic research among Left-wing and Kurdish political refugees from Turkey/Kurdistan in Greece. My research focuses on time and space, particularly emplacement/displacement and materiality, emotional geographies, and spatiotemporal (im)mobilities in the context of political exile. I am interested in engaged research and epistemologies that challenge the hierarchies of ethnographic knowledge production.
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Christian Schirmer |
My name is Christian Schirmer and I am currently obtaining my Master’s degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Philipps-Universität Marburg while working part-time. I obtained my B.A. in Ethnology at the Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg and recently have tried to find my way back into the topsy-turvy world of Higher Education. I am interested in the philosophy of the subject, the theories and practices of emancipatory social movements, and critiques of ideology. I like weird and scary things like psychoanalysis and Zombies. An Injury to one is an injury to all.
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Angelica Sgouros |
Angelica Sgouros is in the research MA in Cultural Analysis at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam, where her academic work explores narratives of grief, desire, ecstasy, and mystical affect. She is also editor-at-large at Barricade, a journal of literary translation and antifascist politics. Her chapter “Super-Feelers: Grief, Queer Ecology and Creative Ecstasy in H.D.’s Jellyfish Consciousness” will be published in Nina Lykke et al.’s Queer Death Studies Handbook (Routledge, forthcoming 2023) She comes from a background in publishing and works as a writer and editor, based between Athens and rural Maine.
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Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa |
I'm a Sri Lankan-born anthropologist and visual ethnographer, with a PhD in Development Anthropology (Bonn) and a background in geography (Oxford), literature and theatre studies (NUS, Singapore). I work on cultures of water, decolonial island relations, and speculative urban infrastructural futures across the Indo-Malay Archipelago, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka while drawing on mobile, multimodal ethnographic approaches. Presently a postdoc researcher at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (Germany), I co-lead a DFG-funded project BlueUrban and serve as founder-member of a SSRC-supported arts-science oceanic collaboratory, the Southern Collective.
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João Sá |
Born in Portugal, I moved to the UK in 2015 to study East Asian Studies at the University of Manchester, where I researched the impact of Afro-Japanese sociocultural interaction within contemporary Japanese animation. I am currently finishing my MA in Social Anthropology at SOAS, and my current research focuses on the intersections of utopian realities and tourism. I will be doing my fieldwork at Boom Festival in Portugal, to analyse whether Boom works as a space where transformative ideologies of living and co-existing can be transplanted onto a life-long state, or whether they merely exist within this liminal utopian space.
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Julia Tulke |
Julia Tulke is a PhD candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, NY.
Her research broadly interrogates the politics and poetics of space, with a particular focus on crisis cities as sites of cultural production and political intervention, with Athens as a central case study. Her work on the city through the past decade includes research and writing on political street art and graffiti, austerity urbanism, crisis photography, and the emergence of feminist and queer protest. Cumulating and concluding these endeavors, her dissertation traces the proliferation and significance of artist-run spaces and initiatives during the historical period bounded by the 2008 economic crisis and the 2020 pandemic emergency. |
Georgia Vavva |
Georgia is an ethnomusicologist with a background in music and anthropology. In 2019 she completed her Ph.D in Ethnomusicology in Royal Holloway, University of London, funded by the Crossland Research Scholarship. Her research concerns music and the economic crisis in Greece with a particular focus on the Athenian jazz scene in the post-2010 period. She specializes on music and globalization, the politics of value, urban music cultures and change, and the ethnography of the economic crisis in the Mediterranean. She has published at Polyphony and The Greek Review of Social Research. Beyond academia Georgia is an experienced tutor of classical guitar and electric bass and performs occasionally in Athenian venues.
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Vita Zelenska |
Vita Zelenska (born in 1991 in Vinnytsia, Ukraine) is an anthropologist, curator, and artist working in the spheres of political anthropology, anthropology of sound, anthropology of art, and sound studies. Their main interests include political agency, subjectivity, and production of space (space-in-the-making).
Doctoral candidate at the Leibniz ScienceCampus Regensburg. They are writing about knowledge production/knowledge making as related to the topic of migration in Greece and the USA, including sonic knowledge. Graduated from the European University at Saint Petersburg in 2016, majoring in cultural anthropology (MA). Co-curated “Vslukh” (En. Out Loud: A Study of Sound) educational program at the New Holland Island (Saint Petersburg) in 2018. Worked as a researcher and curator at the exhibition „Revision. Places and Communities“ (August – September 2018) at the New Holland Island cultural center. As artist, they are exploring experimental collective sonic and textual production. Two projects around these topics were presented at Work Hard! Play Hard! festival in Minsk (one co-authored by Marina Israilova). The upcoming EASA conference 2022 will include their sonic laboratory “Research Hurts” which will deal with political moments of frustration in research. |
Despoina Zoupa |
I graduated from AUTh after five years of being a hyper-active and dedicated fieldwork archaeologist in the making. Eventually, my commitment shifted from the dead to the living which brought me to my current Maters in Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven. My interests include climbing ethics, resistance, decoloniality, relationality, mobility, as well as collaborative, feminist, activist, and anarchist anthropological research. Hiking and climbing are central in my life and the mountain is where I feel at home. Mobility is my middle name, but upcycling/ repurposing and hooping keep me creative when adventures are out of reach.
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Chris Zisis |
(He) holds a B.A. degree in Philosophy and History of Science (National Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece) and a Master's Degree in the field of Heritage/Museum Studies
(European University Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder). He is currently registered as a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology, Hamburg University, and since Spring Semester 2017 has been working consistently as a Lecturer at the department of Social Work, University of Applied Sciences Kiel, as well as at the aforementioned department in Hamburg. Along with his standard research foci, which intersect fields such as Museum/Heritage Studies, Migration research, Anthropology, critical and anti-racist education, he is equally interested in examining artistic practices and interventions, new social movements/nonmovements, eventually how critical knowledge is (co-) produced by “bottom-up”, unofficial archives and actors, not only in museum spaces/memory sites, but public space. |
