Mempop: Memory and Populism from Below

02/10/2026

📸 The newest fieldwork glimpse on our web page comes from Laura Mafizzoli and her fieldwork in Istria.

Behind these brambles lies the Surani foiba in Croatian Istria, where Norma Cossetto's body was found. Daughter of a fascist squadrista, she has become the martyr of the foibe tragedy in Italian national discourse, her memory saturating public space. Between institutional absence on one side of the border and political saturation on the other, nature emerges as an agent of both remembering and forgetting.

Check out more of our fieldwork glimpses at https://www.mempop.org/glimpses/

23/09/2026

MEMPOP will hold a strong presence at the next VANDA - Vienna Anthropology Days. After Panel 14, Voluminal Politics from Below co-organized by Laura Mafizzoli and Ognjen Kojanić, we also draw your attention to Panel 9, Infrastructures: Questions, Debates, and Directions, co-organized by our colleagues from Uni-Wien, Phillip Budka, Peter Schweitzer, Ria-Maria Adams, and our post-doctoral researcher Franz Graf

Deadline for abstract submission is October 12!

Panel description: Over the past two decades, anthropological
and ethnographic research has shown that infrastructures are far more than technical systems. As material, social, ecological,
and political formations, infrastructures shape everyday life and open new perspectives on governance, inequality, and social
change. Beyond serving as an empirical object of study, infrastructure also provides an analytical lens for exploring enduring anthropological questions concerning political authority, popular sovereignty, human–environment relations, colonial and postcolonial dynamics, and how people remember the past and imagine the future. This panel provides a forum for advancing these conversations through diverse ethnographic and conceptual contributions.

The panel invites papers that examine infrastructures across diverse social, political, and geographic settings and consider what they reveal about processes of transformation.
We welcome contributions on transport, digital, water, energy, and other infrastructures, as well as their interconnections. Papers may explore how infrastructures are maintained,
contested, or repaired, and what these processes reveal about institutional practices and everyday experience. While grounded in anthropology, the panel is also open to ethnographically informed contributions from other disciplines. Bringing together empirical cases and conceptual approaches, the panel seeks
to connect studies of infrastructure with broader anthropological questions concerning power, social relations, difference, and
belonging. The panel particularly encourages contributions that combine detailed ethnographic analysis with theoretical reflection.

We are opening 34 open panels, 4 open roundtables, a Young Scholars’ Forum, and two special exhibition formats. We warmly welcome contributions from researchers at all career stages. Students working on or having completed their MA are especially encouraged to submit papers to the Young Scholars.....

20/09/2026

🥪 What's a Sunday picnic without a homemade gourmet sandwich? For such a culinary adventure, our PhD student, Ioana Brunet, recommends the delicious Sissi salami from her fieldwork in Bukovina, seasoned with post-imperial nostalgia.

🔗 For more fieldwork glimpses by our researchers, visit https://www.mempop.org/glimpses/

16/09/2026

The Department of Mobility and Migration at the Institute of Ethnology CAS invites you to the upcoming Morning Brew Talk “The Fire Will Never Cease: Defiant Ecologies in South Lebanon ” by Munira Khayyat, a writer and anthropologist whose work focuses on life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South.

The lecture will take place on Tuesday 29.9.2026, 9:30–11:30 (CET) in the conference room (5th floor) of the Institute of Ethnology CAS, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1. To attend online via MS Teams, please follow the link
👇

11/09/2026

Dear colleagues,

Please consider proposing a paper for the panel P14 "Voluminal Politics from Below" at VANDA - Vienna Anthropology Days , co-organized by the MEMPOP post-doctoral researcher Laura Mafizzoli and Ognjen Kojanić, our colleague from the Department of Ecological Anthropology at the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of Fribourg

https://univie-vanda2027.eventsairsite.com/call-for-papers

*Call for papers is open until 12 October 2026.*

Panel Abstract
The analytic of volume developed first by geographers has been gaining traction in anthropology. Paying attention to the three-dimensional aspects of socio-political life has brought about a rethinking of a range of topics, most notably geopolitical ones, such as governance, state power, and struggles to gain and maintain control over territories. Scholars have also examined spatial development and differentiation within human settlements as taking place in three-dimensions, rather than on horizontal plains. As these topics are related to national sovereignty, territorial claims, and elite knowledge production, the dominant way of approaching them has been top-down. We contend that anthropologists are well-positioned to pose novel questions related to voluminal aspects of everyday life, that is, from below. In this panel, we propose voluminal politics as a lens to explore how social and political practices relate to three-dimensional spaces and what contestations these relations produce. The overarching question we want to tackle in this panel is: How is space, understood as volume, embedded in social, economic, and political geographies, and in more-than-human relations more broadly? We invite papers that engage with the concept voluminal politics, including but not limited to the following topics:

• environmental contestations • memory politics • infrastructural politics • public health.

We are opening 34 open panels, 4 open roundtables, a Young Scholars’ Forum, and two special exhibition formats. We warmly welcome contributions from researchers at all career stages. Students working on or having completed their MA are especially encouraged to submit papers to the Young Scholars.....

01/09/2026

🎒 September 1st means back to school for many! MEMPOP is committed to bringing our research beyond academia and engaging younger audiences with anthropology and ethnographic research.

This June, MEMPOP researchers joined colleagues from the Department of Mobility and Migration in representing the Department of Ethnography of the Czech Academy of Sciences at the Prague Science Fair, where an interactive game invited young visitors to explore migration through experiences inspired by ethnographic fieldwork.

🔎 And this weekend, September 4-6, the Science Fair is coming to Brno with the same exhibition, offering another opportunity for young visitors to discover ethnography!

👉 Read more about MEMPOP’s engagement: https://www.mempop.org/output/bringing-ethnography-to-the-public-mempop-at-the-prague-science-fair-2026/

MEMPOP researchers took part in the organization of the Institute of Ethnology's presentation at the Prague Science Fair, contributing to an interactive exhibition that invited visitors to explore migration from the perspective of migrants through experiences and methodological insights drawn from e...

01/09/2026

Always a pleasure to meet with our dear Spectral Recycling - ERC Starting Grant

🍂It’s already meteorological autumn, can you believe it? Fortunately, we can always warm ourselves up with summer memories. 🌞 In July, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, Karina Hoření (Karin VonReichenberg) and Magdalena Bubík took part in the biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Poznań. It was a great opportunity to meet new people but also to see dear friends. As always, a warm hello to the Prague Mempop: Memory and Populism from Below team, in Poznań represented by Astrea Nikolovska, MEMPOP associate researcher. It was great to see you and exchange ideas for future cooperation🤝

📸Astrea Nikolovska (an associated researcher for the ERC-funded project “Memory and Populism from Below” (MEMPOP)), Karina Hoření, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, Magdalena Bubík

27/08/2026

☀️ It’s still summer, and many of us are spending at least some of it as tourists. But when you stay at a hotel, do you notice the people whose work makes your holiday possible? Who do you see, and whose labor remains invisible?

These questions are at the heart of a new journal article by our associated researcher Astrea Nikolovska, published open access in the latest (special) issue of Anthropology in Action

🏝️ “Visibility of Labor and the Aesthetic of Opulence: Representation of Work in The White Lotus” takes the popular HBO series The White Lotus, subject of the AIA special issue, as a starting point for thinking about labor in luxury tourism. The article asks how the image of effortless luxury depends on making much of the work that sustains it disappear, while allowing some service workers to become selectively visible.

So, if The White Lotus was part of your summer viewing—or tourism part of your summer plans—take a closer look at who is working behind the scenes.

📖 Read the article here: https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/aia/32/1/aia320105.xml

Abstract This article examines how the popular TV show The White Lotus represents labour within luxury tourism through hierarchies of the tourist gaze. It first reflects on how the imagination of luxury depends on the invisibilisation of the ‘dirty labour’ that sustains it. It then explores thos...

13/08/2026

📢 New interview with our postdoctoral researcher Diána Vonnák!

In a new interview with VědaVýzkum.cz, Diána Vonnák talks about her long-term ethnographic research in Ukraine and reflects on how the ongoing war is transforming memory, cultural heritage, and everyday life.

Diána also introduces her research within , where she explores how experiences of conflict reshape understandings of the past and how questions of trust in state institutions intersect with memory and contemporary politics. The conversation touches on what it means to conduct ethnography during wartime and how everyday and cultural life persist despite years of war.

🇨🇿 The interview is available in Czech.

👉 Read the full interview: https://vedavyzkum.cz/rozhovory-a-osobnosti/rozhovory/diana-vonnak-stand-upu-se-na-ukrajine-dari-lepe-nez-kdy-driv-lide-ziji-sve-zivoty-at-se-deje-cokoliv

Web Věda a výzkum poskytuje nezávislé a ověřené informace o vědeckém výzkumu, inovacích a výzkumné politice. Nabízí aktuální zprávy, analýzy a přehledy důležitých událostí z českého i mezinárodního výzkumného prostředí.

31/07/2026

📖 A new blog post on our site takes us to Belgrade to examine an unofficial monument that stood in front of the Serbian National Assembly for almost five years. Our associated researcher, Astrea Nikolovska, argues that this monument allowed Serbian victimhood to move from private mourning into the center of commemorative narratives, while leaving ambiguous whether it spoke against the state, to the state, or increasingly on behalf of it.

https://www.mempop.org/who-speaks-through-monuments/

In this blog post, Astrea Nikolovska examines an unofficial monument that allowed Serbian victimhood to move from private mourning into central public space, while leaving ambiguous whether it spoke against the state, to the state, or increasingly on behalf of it.