Organizers

Penelope Papailias

Penelope Papailias (@penel_p) teaches anthropology at the University of Thessaly, where she also directs the Laboratory of Social Anthropology. She has written extensively on cultural memory, historical culture and witnessing, focusing on the intersection of technology and culture in critical media events, affective networks, spectacles of public death, social mourning and performative memorialization. Her books include Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Digital Ethnography (2015, in Greek). She recently organized the conference Data-stories: New Media Aesthetics and Rhetorics for Critical Digital Ethnography.

Christina Mitsopoulou

Christina Mitsopoulou, Archaeologist (Sorbonne Paris IV), PhD in Classical Archaeology (University of Athens) and Licensed Cultural Tour Guide (Athens), is Laboratory Teaching Staff at the University of Thessaly. She assists the PSL on an organizational level.

Petros Petridis

Petros Petridis holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology and currently teaches as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Thessaly. He has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Greek Research Center for the Humanities. His main interests focus on the ethnographic research of digital culture; specifically, digital economies, file sharing and intellectual property rights, algorithmic cultures, gamification, fan cultures and the politics of knowledge in technosocialities such as peer-to peer networks and Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

Pantelis Probonas

Pantelis Probonas (@pprobonas) is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly. He is working on a multi-sited ethnography about the politics of death and the disposal of refugees' dead bodies at the EU frontier. Theoretically, he is mostly interested in the body, politics of life and death, medical anthropology, borders and borderlands.

Alexandros Papageorgiou

Alexandros Papageorgiou is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the IAKA department of the University of Thessaly, conducting research on contemporary processes of grassroots knowledge transfer across cultural and institutional contexts. Specifically, he is studying how ideas and practices of cooperation that have been applied in different localities are being introduced, translated and (re)produced in Greece today. He is also interested in experimenting with non-textual ways of academic knowledge production and dissemination, hence his participation in the ongoing research project ‘Anthrobombing: Narrative experimentations for the design of a public anthropology platform’.

George Mantzios

George Mantzios is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Building on yearlong ethnographic fieldwork in Athens in 2017– primarily at Ellinikon, an abandoned national airport turned temporary refugee camp– George’s PhD research develops an experimental engagement with anthropologies of austerity and historicity in Greece informed by a political aesthetics of montage. Anachronistically drawing together disparate documentary materials, archival formations, literary genres, and visual images pertaining to the airport’s many repressed, forgotten, and/or fabular histories and futurities, he attempts to (re)present the disjointedness of historicist narrations of modern arrival, providing a lens through which to see the present in Greece negatively: by way of the places, figures, and temporalities that were negated so that the geographies of the present could take on their consecrated shape.