SAND

S.AND team co-organizes panel at 2024 EASA in Barcelona

How does a focus on sand as active ingredient of coasts force an undoing of anthropology, as researchers are compelled to work across disciplinary boundaries and leave the relatively stable ground of human exceptionalism? How can these collaborations do theory for livable coastal futures?

At the upcoming 2024 EASA conference in Barcelona, the S.AND team co-convenes a panel with the geographer Kate Dawson (UCL) to address the transformative potential of sand and sand research. We invite papers that describe how sand and coastal matter not only inform how people do things on shore, such as fishing and embanking, but how it also “grounds” thinking. They may analyze models for coastal interventions that travel internationally (e.g. Sand Engine) and materialize in specific historical contexts. Papers will also deal with activist efforts to protect coastal ecologies from reclamation projects. Together, panelists examine processes by which sand “leaks” into ethnography, as a generative matter (un)making anthropological methods and theoretical practice.