The thematic thread, curated by Viola Castellano and Olivia Casagrande and published on Allegra Lab, critically engages with a specific triangulation happening in contemporary anthropology: the shrinking of academic employment; the political and epistemic crisis of (European) anthropology; precarity as a generational condition affecting both ethnographers and research participants. Dialoguing with the EASA Report ‘The anthropological career in Europe’ (Fotta, Ivancheva & Pernes, 2020), this collection of texts interrogates some of the pitfalls, struggles, challenges as well as opportunities arising from such configuration. In doing so, far from uniforming experiences in the name of a generational proximity flattening global inequalities, the textual and graphic pieces engage with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and their interlocutors in and beyond the field. As a whole, they address the following main questions: if precarity is ‘the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails’ (Muehlebach 2013: 298), what does it mean for precarious anthropologists to be subjected and, at the same time, to bear witness of its various degrees of dispossession? What kind of knowledge and political subjectivities emerge and are produced in the process? How is the ethnographer’s own positionality filtered, modelled and potentially silenced by the standards regulating academic knowledge production?

Starting from these interrogatives, the thematic thread moves beyond the (fundamental) debate on academic precarity in the field of anthropology (Ivancheva 2016) to mobilize a discussion in which this is put into relation with the dynamics of fieldwork. 

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