Miriyam Aouragh delivers plenary at ASA2025 Conference: “Anthropology on the Move”

At this year’s ASA2025 Conference (Association of Social Anthropologists in the UK), Critical Junctions: Anthropology on the Move, held at the University of Birmingham from 8–11 April, Prof. Miriyam Aouragh joined a plenary panel exploring academic freedom, precarity, and public engagement.

The tremulant geopolitics of our time present us with ecological disaster, rising ethnicised nationalisms, and the effects of past and present settler colonial projects. The authoritarian creep in UK public life, compounded with anti-poor sentiments and racialised border-policing policies, are some examples of these wider shifts across the globe – and ones that demand responses from us as anthropologists in the UK. As a discipline we have, for a long time, been good at indexing and diagnosing these transformations, and exploring them with care through our ethnographies. How should we reflect on them as and when they impact us, our students, and our colleagues. Anthropologists have continued to speak and act from conscience, principle, and conviction. They do so where they research, where they work and in public discourse.

Chaired by Dr. Fuad Musallam, and joined by Riccardo Jaede (PhD Student, London School of Economics), Dr Mariya Ivancheva (Senior Lecturer in Education, University of Strathclyde), Dr Ammara Maqsood (Associate Professor in Social Anthropology, UCL), the panel discussed the need for collective, critical responses to hostile immigration policies, the Prevent agenda, and the ongoing erosion of academic and civic spaces.

The participants in the roundtable reflected on academic precarity and how it relates to academic freedoms; the racialization of students and academics on campus and in public discourse, including through state policies such as Prevent and the hostile immigration environment, the policing and criminalisation of staff and student action on university campuses, and the scope and role of anthropologists engaging in public following from their convictions.

Learn more and see the full conference programme here.