COŁLEÇTIVE
The collective coordinates the Decolonize Hellas initiative, is responsible for the program, as well as for any collaborations, and makes decisions horizontally.
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos
I am an anthropologist, assistant professor in the Department of Politics at the American University of Beirut. I study international policy institutions, focusing on expert politics, epistemic violence, techno-morals, the cosmopolitanisms of humanitarianism and peace, and the cosmopolitics of solidarity and political equality. This year, as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, I am completing a monograph on violence and expertise in peacemaking and crisis prevention in post-war Lebanon. Beyond this, I am very interested in the sea as a fluid background of economic and transnational power, as well as terraqueous solidarities, maritime radicalisms and political imaginaries of equality and insurgent cosmopolitics. At Decolonize Hellas I hope to embark on a collective, creative and critical approach to terracentric postcolonial ideas in society and social science, and especially to develop research-activism agendas around - for example - the theorization and globalization of the popular wisdom encapsulated in the proverb "The Aegean belongs to its fish".
Penelope Papailias
I am a social anthropologist at the University of Thessaly. My research centers on cultural memory and the history of the present, the politics of witnessing and archives, visuality and violence, digital culture and technosocialities, from postcolonial, anti-racist and feminist perspectives. I am currently writing a book on the materialities and medialities through which contested deaths haunt contemporary cultural debates and political struggles in Greek society. As a hyphenated Greek and migrant in reverse, I am skeptical of homelands and origin stories. I hope Decolonize Hellas can become a welcoming refuge for other nomads and bastards, and a platform for collaboration, conviviality and public-facing academic engagement.
Despina Lalaki
I am a historical sociologist interested in long-term social and cultural changes, changing modes of consciousness, the ideological and cultural foundations of the state and the role of intellectuals. I teach for the City University of New York - CUNY and write for academic and non-academic audiences. Currently I am working on a book project in which I investigate the ways American policies of economic liberalism and capitalist democracy invested symbolically in Hellenism radically transforming it in the process. A sociology of archaeology and an archaeology of the Greek state, the book focuses on the field of archaeology as a privileged place in the history of the Greek nation-state and Western civilization at large and central node in a complex network of trans-national institutional and intellectual relations.
Fotini Tsibiridou
Fotini Tsibiridou is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies at the University of Macedonia and acting Director of the Laboratory for the Study of Culture, Borders and Gender. She has done fieldwork in a former refugee village and among the Pomaks in Greek Thrace, in Macedonian and Peloponnese villages and the Sultanate of Oman. She has also researched nationalism and multiculturalist discourses and practices in Greek Thrace, as well as gender, citizenship and creative counterpublics in Istanbul. Currently (since 2018) she is researching two topics: post-Ottoman religiosity and gendered subjectivity in the frame of post-colonial critique (Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East), and feminist and other decolonizing methodologies deployed in creative protests and resistance practices in Mediterranean cities in the way to/of cosmopolitics.
Sissie Theodosiou
Αspasia (Sissie) Theodosiou is a social anthropologist and associate. professor at the Department of Music Studies of the University of Ioannina. Her research includes long-time fieldwork among Gypsy/Roma musicians in Epirus (Greek-Albanian border) and more recently research with the Mizrahi and the politics and practices surrounding Greek music in Israel, as well as in the Romaniot Jewish community of Ioannina. Her interests revolve around the anthropology of music, issues related to nationalism and sovereignty, the politics of culture and affect around popular music, artistic labour, cultural racism and legacies of national purity. Her theoretical perspective includes questions related to the pertinence of post-colonial critique for Romani studies, as well as for the understanding of Mizrahi subjectivities in the Israeli state.