9 – 10.6.2022, Tampere University, Finland
Venue: Lyhty, main university building, Kalevantie 4
People disappear for various reasons – in accidents, as victims of crime or violence, or of their own free will – and in many cases are never found again. Moreover, a growing number of disappearances take place in contexts of transnational mobility. A missing or disappeared person is always an anomaly (Douglas 1966) in relation to the social and cultural order, and every disappeared person disturbs the normal flow of social life in families and communities, often also the smooth working of state bureaucracies. There is a growing awareness that disappearances are a particular kind of social and political predicament, affecting large numbers of people. However, disappearances in different contexts elicit vastly differing reactions from both the state and other actors involved.
This seminar brings together scholars who work on human disappearances in different contexts, ranging from enforced disappearances under oppressive regimes to disappearing undocumented migrants and singular cases wherein ‘individual’ citizens disappear from their everyday environments. What are the similarities and differences between these various cases of disappearance?
The seminar is free of charge, but pre-registration is needed.
Registration link: https://www.lyyti.in/DiMig2022
9.6. Theme: Disappearance, an anthropological perspective
10.15 Laura Huttunen: Welcome and introduction to the seminar
10.45 – 11.45 Anthony Robben: The personal and political mourning of disappeared persons
11.45 – 12.15 Discussion
12.15 – 13.30 Lunch
13.30 – 14.30 Anna Matyska: Disappearances in Poland and across borders: families, institutions, and the (trans)national search for the missing
14.30 – 15.15 Laura Huttunen: Governance and grieving: towards anthropology of disappearance
15.15 – 16.00 Discussion
10.6. Theme: Migrant deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean
10.00 Welcome to day two
10.15 – 11.15 Valentina Zagaria: The dignity of the living and the dead: migratory and political trajectories across the Central Mediterranean
11.15 – 12.15 Jan Bikker: Missing migrants at the Evros borders
12.15 – 13.45 Lunch
13.45 – 15.30 Panel discussion: Missing in the Mediterranean
Saila Kivilahti, Anitta Kynsilehto, Ville Laakkonen; discussant: Gerhild Perl
15.30 – 16.00 Discussion, Closing remarks
Antonius C.G.M. Robben is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and past President of the Netherlands Society of Anthropology. His latest books include the monograph Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018), and the edited volumes .Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (2015; co-edited with Francisco Ferrándiz), Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader (2017), and A Companion to the Anthropology of Death (2018).
Anna Matyska is a senior researcher in anthropology at Tampere University and a visiting researcher at KU Leuven. She has researched and published on Polish transnational families and labour mobilities. She is currently a researcher in the DiMig project “.
Laura Huttunen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Tampere, Finland. She has worked extensively on issues of migration and transnational communities, and she has conducted long-term ethnographic research among the Bosnian diaspora since 2001. More recently, she has worked with the anthropology of human disappearances. Her previous research project focused on the question of missing and disappeared persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina; currently she is leading the research project ‘Governance and Grieving: Missing Migrants and Emerging Politics’ (DiMIg) with a focus on disappearances in migratory contexts. Currently, she is working on an edited volume on the anthropology of disappearances with Gerhild Perl.
Valentina Zagaria is a post-doctoral fellow at the Central European University (CEU) as part of the Striking from the Margins team and an associate fellow of the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis. She is currently carrying out fieldwork on the intimately political aspects of Libyan women’s lives while in long-term or intermittent exile in Tunisia. She holds a PhD from the Anthropology Department of the London School of Economics (LSE) examining how dignity, responsibility, and belonging are shaped and curtailed by different migratory projects and gendered expectations in a post-revolutionary Tunisian coastal town. Valentina is also the founder of international theatre company Senza, with whom she writes and directs theatre ethnographically.
Jan Bikker (PhD) is a Forensic Anthropologist/ Human Remains Identification Specialist and the founder of The Platform for Transnational Forensic Assistance (Forensic Missing Migrants Initiative) Dr Bikker is a practising forensic anthropologist and the founder of the Platform for Transnational Forensic Assistance, a Foundation (Stichting) registered in the Netherlands since 2018. Under the umbrella of the Foundation, The Forensic Missing Migrant Initiative aims to address and highlight the cross-border challenges in the forensic management of missing and unidentified deceased migrants at the European borders. Currently based in Greece, Dr Bikker has worked professionally on the thematic of missing migrants since 2015. He currently advises on several multidisciplinary academic research projects on missing migrants and projects to explore novel methodologies for forensic identification. He also conducts independent research and fieldwork in Greece, collaborates with stakeholders working on the missing file and interacts with families of the missing. Dr Bikker received his PhD in Forensic Anthropology from the Faculty of Medicine/Department of Forensic Pathology at the University of Sheffield and conducted post-doctoral research at the renowned Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee. He previously worked as a regional forensic advisor in the Mediterranean for a large humanitarian organisation before establishing his Foundation.
Ville Laakkonen is a Doctoral Researcher in Social Anthropology at Tampere University. He is part of the research project ‘Governance and Grieving: Disappearing Migrants and Emergent Politics’ and looks at refugee and migrant disappearances and border deaths on the Greek side of the Greek-Turkish borderlands. Previously he has researched the everyday life of Muslim residents in the international working-class suburb of Varissuo, Turku. He holds a MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from University of Oxford and a M.Soc.Sc. in Social Anthropology from Tampere University.
Saila Kivilahti is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Tampere University in Finland and a member of the project ‘Governance and Grieving: Disappearing Migrants and Emergent Politics’. Her dissertation explores the search and identification of the undocumented disappeared migrants in the Western Mediterranean. She has conducted fieldwork in Spain and Morocco with the relatives, friends, and travel companions of the disappeared persons.
Anitta Kynsilehto is Senior Research Fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute. Her research interests include global mobility, different forms and practices of solidarity and resistance, and the concept and practical implications of intersectionality. In her current work she focuses on mobilities in the so-called Global South and on possibilities and forms of decolonizing knowledge production.
Gerhild Perl Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany. She conducted fieldwork in Spain and Morocco for her dissertation on death during migration across the Mediterranean and received the Maria Ioannis Baganha Award and the Dissertation Prize of the German Association for Cultural and Social Anthropology for this work. She co-led the Public Anthropology Project ‘Confronting Hostile Terrains: Border Regimes and Their Global Impact’ and is currently developing her new project on inheritance as a cultural, economic and social practice in transnational spaces. Her latest publications include ‘The Production of Illicit Lives: Racial Governmentality and Colonial Legacies Across the Strait of Gibraltar’ in Zeitschtift für Ethnologie/ Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology (in press) and ‘Migration as Survival: Withheld Stories and the Limits of Ethnographic Knowability’ in Migration and Society. Advances in Research (2019).