Halfway through the first lockdown in 2020 I spoke with my brother on the phone. ‘There you go, Anselma’, he said. ‘Now this is already the second historical event we’ve witnessed in our lifetime. Personally I feel one would have sufficed’. As a former East German he was referring to the fall of state socialism in 1989 and German reunification in 1990 as the first event, the current Covid19 pandemic as the second. I advised caution: ‘you know, Sebastian, given our age, there is a fair amount of scope for a third’. And personally, I wonder what flavour such a third might have.
There we have it, pasts and futures, imagination, all rolled into a three-minute conversation on the phone, between a brother and a sister, one in Germany, one in the UK. The pandemic has certainly raised many questions about the future, in particular I think. There was hope for the environment in the first and most severe national lock down in the UK; concern about children’s development after months of school closures; and all along wishes to get back to ‘normality’, but which one?
In the midst of all this eventfulness however, running cluster meetings and attending to the creative process of research has been much harder. This blog concerns the cluster activities during the start of 2020 and May 2021.
After many hectic months of trying to come to terms with this new pandemic present, the first cluster meeting in June 2020 was a social get together via zoom videocall to provide time away from emails, news announcements and the pressures of converting to online teaching and assessment. We did the same again in July 2020, and for many this involved again a cup of coffee or tea. During this period, we were joined by Nina Liebhaber (Innsbruck), who works on a project regarding environmental education of school children. We welcomed back Matthias Wienroth (Northumbria) and Felix Ringel (Durham), and enjoyed hearing about Audrey Verma’s work, which in Feb 2021 involved the fascinating online symposium Hope and Resistance in the Anthropocene. PGR blog link here.
We began meeting again in an unstructured way in November 2020. Since then the cluster has once again engaged in more targeted conversations. On 25th March 2021 Dariusz Gafijczuk and Anselma Gallinat reflected on ‘the social life(use) of metaphor’ from a sociological and anthropological perspective respectively.[i] We heard that Dariusz had become more interested in the topic when teaching epistemology in first year and thinking about what guides perception. Anselma told us how this is often conceptualized as meaning-making in anthropology, but that metaphor specifically has more recently been linked to the production of culture. The conversation led onto the role of emotion and Anselma was prompted to think of Veena Das’ argument that (academic) concepts also stem from emotions, not just intellect.[ii]
We used this thought as a bridge into our meeting on 26th May on Knowing the past, rethinking the future through gut feelings.
was-faellt-die-besseren-entscheidungen
Grit Wesser was going to reflect on gut feelings as knowledge about the East German Stasi; and Janice McLaughlin would speak about the possibilities of rethinking the future from the here and now. Unfortunately, on the day Grit was indispensed. The group enjoyed hearing from Janice about her thoughts – prompted by developments during the pandemic – about how to effect political change for disability rights without losing space for alternatives. This prompted discussion in the group about conditions for change. Hugo Radicce (Leeds) wondered whether the status quo prior to the pandemic was already a contested one, that would enable a return to a different ‘normal’ in the aftermath? With the mentioning of the role of emotions to strengthen arguments Ken Taylor was reminded of impact activities in a recent project, which prompted Angeliki Sifaki to think about her work on nationalism among LGBT communities in Greece.
After these stimulating discussions, we intend to close this yet again tumultuous and often simply very hard year with a relaxed and supportive zoom get together in early July when we will also think about our plans for next year 2021-22.
AG, June 2021
[i] After Sapir, D and Crocker, J C. 1977. The social use of metaphor. University of Pennsylvania Press
[ii] Das, Veena. 2018. The life of concepts and how they speak to experience, in Nielsen & Rapport (eds). The composition of anthropology: how anthropological texts are written. London: Routledge.