[Commlist] CFP EASA: Doing and Undoing the Anthropology of Place in an Increasingly Digitalized World [Media Anthropology Network]

We warmly invite you to submit a paper to the EASA Panel “Doing and 
Undoing the Anthropology of Place in an Increasingly Digitalized World” 
[Media Anthropology Network] at the EASA conference in Barcelona (July 
23-26, 2024). Please submit your proposal here (deadline January 22!): 
https://easaonline.org/conferences/easa2024/programme#14648

Convenors
Monika Palmberger, University of Vienna, Austria

Katrien Pype, KU Leuven University, Belgium


Doing and Undoing the Anthropology of Place in an Increasingly 
Digitalized World [Media Anthropology Network]


Short abstract
Researching the digitalization of everyday life brings us back to the 
query of how to define the ethnographic field and how to conceptualise 
place and its relation to culture. This panel invites empirical and 
theoretical contributions that (re-)address concepts of place, culture 
and the digital.


Long abstract
Since the late 1980s, anthropologists have questioned the concepts of 
“culture” and “the ethnographic field” as bounded entities and gradually 
have shifted their focus from entities to relations. Research into the 
digitalization of everyday life brings us back to the query of how to 
define the “ethnographic place” (Pink et al. 2016), and how to 
conceptualise place and placemaking and its relation to culture more 
broadly. Due to the ubiquitous proliferation of digital technologies, 
including artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, machine 
learning and new communication media, anthropologists encounter place 
and placemaking increasingly as a relational practice in virtual and 
physical proximity (Kaufmann and Palmberger 2022). Concepts such as 
“virtual culture”, “online culture” or “cyberculture” are too narrow. 
While people build social relations, negotiate identities and claim 
space beyond territorially defined places, physical place remains 
important for the experience of being in the world, including the 
experience of inequalities (Udupa and Dattatreyan 2023). Concepts such 
as “ethnographic co-presence” (Chua 2015), “field events” (Ahlin and Li 
2019), and smartphones as “domestic spaces” (Miller et al. 2021) have 
been proposed to address the complex entanglements of place in 
ethnographies of the digital, however there is little engagement with 
the notion of culture in the digital environment and digitalized 
society. Yet, culture can be conceptualized and theorized in different 
ways, especially when attending to its relationship to place.


This panel seeks to re-evaluate place, culture and their 
interconnections and invites contributions that (re-)address conceptual 
questions of place, culture and the digital, empirically and theoretically.

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