INTERFACE SEG PANEL: MEDIATORSHIP AND TRANSFORMATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Schweizerische Ethnologische Gesellschaft / Société Suisse d’Ethnologie

Associazione Svizzera di Antropologia / Swiss Anthropological Association

Annual Meeting 2026

5–7 February 2026

Organizing committee: Social Anthropology Unit, Department of Social Sciences, University of Fribourg

Care, Maintenance, Decay Ways of attending to vulnerability in a transforming world

PROGRAMME

Facing the ongoing climate change, political and health crises, and societal challenges, humans react in multiple, often contradictory ways to vulnerabilities that arise. This conference aims to explore care, maintenance, and decay as relations that express and produce collective meanings around such vulnerabilities.

We will explore how the processes of social and material decay on the one hand, and care and maintenance on the other, intersect across places and times with situated cultural, political, social, and economic practices and how those shape human, material, and inter-species relationships. We encourage discussions on how care, maintenance, and decay are imbued with social, political, and cultural meanings, moral imperatives, and ethical dilemmas. Further, we welcome critical approaches that scrutinize the disruptions, power abuses, and pitfalls that these relations entail and how those link to memories, traumas, power dynamics, and social hierarchies. We also aim to pay attention to the questions of unequal access to care resources, marginalization of certain forms of knowledge and situated understandings of just and functioning care relations.

Mediatorship and Transformational Anthropology: Creating Cultures of Care in Learning and Research Communities

Convener(s)/Organizer(s)

Claire Vionnet, Eda Elif Tibet, Susan Mossman Riva

1. Theatre and ethnographical practices sustaining the construction of life in Quibdó (Colombia) Claudia Howald (claudia.howald@supsi.ch), SUPSI

2. Trusting the Tap: Care, Embodied Learning, and Relational Knowledge in a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Community

Christian Pierce (christian.pierce@unisg.ch), University of St. Gallen

3. Lived Experience in Research and Care: Building Sustainable Practices of Mutual Recognition

Lauren Cubellis (cubellis@wustl.edu), Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

4. Proposing Relational Filmmaking as a Pedagogical Practice for Care-ful Research Communities

Serjara Aleman (serjara.aleman@unil.ch), University of Lausanne; HES-SO Fribourg