Call for Contributions – 1st CASA Conference

Our Common Grounds: Pasts, Presents, Futures of Anthropology in Cyprus

The Cyprus Association of Social Anthropologists (CASA) invites contributions to its inaugural conference, to be held in Limassol, Cyprus, on 4 and 5 September, 2026. This conference marks the launch of CASA, an association dedicated to bringing together anthropologists working in and from Cyprus, fostering scholarly exchange, supporting professional development, and connecting academic anthropology with broader public and applied contexts. We are delighted to inaugurate CASA with a gathering that reflects the full scope of what such an association can be: a community of practice, a space for exchange and critical reflection, and a platform for collective action.

In this spirit, the conference engages with anthropology in Cyprus as an occasion to examine, celebrate, and critically reflect on the discipline as it has been practiced, transformed, and reimagined on and from this island. Rather than approaching Cyprus merely as a field site, the conference foregrounds anthropology in and from Cyprus, across academic, professional, and public contexts. In other words, we turn the discipline’s own tools — reflexivity, historicity, comparative analysis — upon ourselves, our trajectories, and the conditions that have shaped our work.

Themes and Questions

We invite participants to reflect on the conditions, trajectories, and directions of anthropological work as it has been practiced, transformed, and reimagined over time. Contributions might engage with questions such as:

• Histories and genealogies: The intellectual, institutional, and biographical trajectories that have shaped how anthropology has been practiced in and from Cyprus.
• Methodological innovation and reflexive practice: New and evolving approaches to fieldwork, writing, and representation — including experimental ethnographic practices, multi-sited research, and critical reflection on the researcher’s position.
• Engaged, applied, and public anthropologies: Anthropological work beyond academia — in NGOs, arts, policy, media, design, cultural institutions, and civil society — and the tensions, possibilities, and ethical questions such work raises.
• Urban, environmental, digital, and more-than-human worlds: Ethnographies of built environments, infrastructures, ecological relations, digital life, and post-human entanglements.
• The conflict and its shadows: A critical reflection of how the Cyprus Problem has structured — and sometimes overdetermined — anthropological attention on the island: what has been seen, what has been marginalized, and what it might mean to do anthropology that goes beyond, beside, or beneath the conflict.
• Migration, class, borders, memory, and belonging: Ethnographic and reflexive accounts of mobility, class, nationalism, displacement, and the politics of the past — attending both to lived experience and to how these themes have been framed within Cyprus studies.
• Cyprus elsewhere, and elsewhere in Cyprus: Comparative and connective perspectives: anthropologists from Cyprus working in other contexts; researchers bringing frameworks from elsewhere to bear on Cyprus, including diasporic, transnational, and Mediterranean dimensions of Cypriot social life.
• Teaching and practicing anthropology under precarity: The institutional and personal conditions under which anthropology is taught, learned, and sustained, and what they mean for the discipline’s reproduction.
• Futures of the discipline: Visions, proposals, and provocations about the directions anthropology in and from Cyprus might take: its methods, its publics, its institutional forms, and its responsibilities.

We especially encourage reflective, situated, and practice-based contributions that speak across generations, sectors, and disciplinary boundaries.

Formats

We welcome proposals for:

• Paper presentations
• Visual/multimodal contributions
• Methodological or practice-oriented interventions and workshops

The accepted submissions will be organized into different panels at a later stage.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit your proposals in this form

Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2026

Notification of acceptance: July 30, 2026

Practical Information

• The conference will be held in person in Limassol, Cyprus, in the premises of the Cyprus University of Technology
• The working language is English
• Further details regarding the program and logistics will follow.
• Registration fees: €50 for full-time academics or practitioners, €20 for part-time academics, researchers, or practitioners, and €10 for students or graduates with no current employment.

Scientific Committee:

• Melek Kaptanoğlu
• Ibrahim Latif Ince
• Yiannis Papadakis
• Selin Genc
• Theodoros Kouros
• Georgina Christou

Organizing Committee

• Panos Achniotis
• Andreas Anastasiades
• Georgina Christou
• Evi Eftychiou
• Melek Kaptanoğlu
• Theodoros Kouros