PSL Team

Penelope Papailias

Penelope Papailias grew up in New York City, the child of a Greek immigrant father, studied English literature at Harvard and cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, before migrating (back?) as an adult to her father’s homeland, where she is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Thessaly. 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 (2005) and Digital Ethnography (2015, in Greek). Co-founder and director of the PSL and member of the steering committee of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, she is committed to reimagining (anthropological) pedagogy and research through experimentation with multimodal genres (data-stories). She is also a founding member of the initiative dëcoloиıze hellάş, which calls for the urgent re-viewing of the place of modern Greece in relation to geographies and genealogies of European colonialism.

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.

George Mantzios

George Mantzios is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores how contested histories are embodied, disavowed, or reimagined in public space. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto (2023), where his work examined historical redress in Athens through practices such as archival activism, speculative fiction, and the defacement and reappropriation of national monuments and abandoned infrastructures. His research engages debates on monumentality, ruination, political aesthetics, infrastructure, collective memory, and reparative justice. George has been involved with the Pelion Summer Lab since 2017, first as a participant and later as part of the organizing team. He is currently the 2024/25 Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University’s Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies.

Alexandros Papageorgiou

Alexandros Papageorgiou holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Thessaly - Department of History, Archeology and Social Anthropology (IAKA). His doctoral dissertation explored modern day politics of knowledge, specifically "projects" as a technology of governance and subjectification in EU policies for research. Alexandros is interested in contemporary conditions of anthropological labor and knowledge production, and in anthropology’s position and role in public debate. This was the focus of the research project "Anthrobombing: Narrative Experimentations for the Design of a Public Anthropology Platform" (2020-2022) that he carried out together with Alexandra Siotou and Penelope Papailias. He was a member of PSL 1 (2017) & 3 (2019) cohorts.

Penny Paspali

Penny Paspali is a Ph.D. candidate of Social Anthropology in University of Thessaly and a researcher for the Greek department of the European Observatory on Femicides. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis about digital grassroots feminisms based on the ethnography she was conducting the last three years. Her research interests are focused on digital anthropology and anthropology of social movements, as well as ecological matters of care and survivance. She holds a BA in History and an MA in Gender Studies and she was a cohort member of PSLs 1 (2017) & 4 (2022).

TOM WESTERN

Tom Western is a writer, researcher, and artist. His work builds creative geographies that seek to imagine futures beyond the colonial past and present. Tom works primarily in Athens, where he’s involved in various forms of creative and collaborative research and movement building. He is currently finishing his first book – titled Circular Movements – about Athens and the Mediterranean, written in circles and circulations, gathering imaginations of the city and the sea, and mapping ways out of the linear histories and geographies of empire. Tom regularly produces spatial art-research pieces that seek to make new maps of Athens and its Mediterranean relations, gathered together on the site Undercartographies. He is based at UCL as a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography.

Dimitra Morosou

Dimitra Morosou (she/her) is a postgraduate student in the postgraduate program "Studies in Mobility", of the Department of Anthropology, University of Thessaly. Her undergraduate studies were in the field of social anthropology, with an emphasis on racial and feminist theory but also on experimental methodologies of anthropology. Her interests concern the field of disability studies in dialogue with anthropology, critical racial theory, anthropological approaches to the body and care, public anthropology and experimental methodologies. She was student intern in PSL 5.