'We want bread, education and freedom' An ethnographic snapshot of Athens on 17 November

Avramidis, K. (2012). ‘Live your Greece in Myths’: Reading the Crisis on Athens’ Walls’, working paper no.8. Trento: Professional Dreamers. Available at: www. professionaldreamers.net/_prowp/wp-content/uploads/Avramides-Reading-the-Crisison- Athens-walls-fld.pdf.

The emergence and the widespread usage of politicized urban art on Athensʼ walls, as a physical, visual and conceptual border, could be seen as one of the most emblematic manifestations of the current “state of exception” generated by the crisis. Through writing, each group or individual displays its demands, needs and hopes, and, in the process, transforms walls into a living communication venue. These messages are doomed to pass into oblivion, losing their communicative dimension over time. Nonetheless, by envisioning new worlds and adumbrating new potential ways of experiencing the existing, they provide a revealing glimpse into the communities which produce them. Politicized urban art is a testament to how creativity can occur in difficult times.

Our grandparents, refugees Our parents, immigrants We, racists? 1 The slogan that prefaces the paper provides the theoretical caveat for the tensions, limitations, and contradictions of academic discourses in conjuring the daily realities of the era of the 'refugee crisis' in Greece. This paper has the form of a dialogue between a sociologist and photographer (Myrto) and a political theorist and activist (Anna) who investigate different forms of the ways the 'refugee crisis' is changing the socio-political landscapes in Greece. The multiple aspects of our identities provide valuable tools with which we unpack the multiple and contradictory narratives of researching, learning, and disseminating in the current milieu. In particular, we are interested in the ways we shape knowledge and the tension between the episte-mological and the ontological ways of knowing. In other words, by moving from theory to praxis and back, we are attempting to reconcile the problem of knowing and the problem of being part of a specific crisis milieu. For example, how can we use crisis as a research methodology? What can we learn from the ongoing 'refugee crisis' in relation to issues of citizenship, belonging, and the future of the European project? Furthermore, the paper attempts to transcend discursive borders between social sciences and the humanities by analysing the deeply performative, situated and embodied practices of doing research in moments of crisis. For example, how to navigate multiple, and at times contradictory, aspects of one's identity without returning to outmoded discourses of positivism and objectivity?

Visual Communication , 2015

Drawing upon ethnographical research carried out in Greek cities, this article discusses the use of political graffiti as a creative, playful response to the economic depression, social upheavals and precariousness surrounding the writers and as an act of civil disobedience and political protest in the context of the Greek economic crisis. The graffiti creation releases a flood of cultural responses to the crisis and gives an insight into the lived experience endured by the Greek people faced with the gloomy conditions of a society in crisis. The analysis traces the ways in which activists and unaligned writers turn their attention to the creative and expressive potential of graffiti and articulate cultural heterotopias on the visual landscape of Greek cities. Spatial politics allow distinctive political voices to transform the material dimensions of urban life in meaningful visual expression. The act of doing graffiti in the dystopia of crisis shows the desire of grassroots artists and cultural activists to use their creative capacities to overcome the unfavourable material conditions of their existence and to build alternative counter-hegemonic spaces of representation in the urban landscapes, challenging austerity policies and the existing social order.

Antipode, 2020

This article engages with the political struggles staged by illegalised migrants and activists in solidarity amid the long summer of migration and the "Greek crisis". Grounding its analysis on Orfanotrofio's housing squat in Thessaloniki, it narrates how such struggles are articulated to politicise migration and stage the equality of newcomers-migrants and refugees-and locals. Drawing on Jacques Ranci ere's political writings and contemporary geographical work on solidarity, the article argues that such struggles not only disrupt the exclusionary ordering of our cities but also construct political spaces and infrastructures of dissensus wherein equals in solidarity discuss common political problems and devise common political strategies. Through the notion of equals in solidarity, the article investigates how the performative enactment of equality can form the basis for solidarities across differences and analyses how some of the tensions that emerge around collective political subjectification are negotiated. Building on this, it explores some of the challenges and limitations that these struggles face in their efforts to transform the existing order of the city.

This paper is the intruduction to an edited volume on the Greek crisis. The volume brings together new anthropological research on the recent crisis in Greece and provides valuable ethnographic explorations of a period of radical social change. With contributions from scholars based both in Greece and abroad, the book addresses a number of key issues such as the refugee crisis, far-right extremism, new forms of resistance to crisis, and the psychological impact of increased poverty and unemployment. It provides much needed ethnographic contributions and critical anthropological perspectives at a key moment in Greece's history, and will be of great interest to readers interested in the social, political, and economic developments in Europe. It is the first collection to ethnographically explore this period of radical social change and its impact on anthropological understanding of Greece, and Europe overall.

“Solidarians in the land of Xenios Zeus: Migrant deportability and the radicalisation of solidarity”. In D. Dalakoglou and G. Aggelopoulos (eds.), Critical times in Greece: Anthropological engagements with the crisis. London: Routledge., 2018

This volume brings together new anthropological research on the recent crisis in Greece and provides valuable ethnographic explorations of a period of radical social change. With contributions from scholars based both in Greece and abroad, the book addresses a number of key issues such as the refugee crisis, far-right extremism, new forms of resistance to crisis, and the psychological impact of increased poverty and unemployment. It provides much needed ethnographic contributions and critical anthropological perspectives at a key moment in Greece's history, and will be of great interest to readers interested in the social, political, and economic developments in Europe. It is the first collection to ethnographically explore this period of radical social change and its impact on anthropological understanding of Greece, and Europe overall.

2014

Skleparis, D. (2017) The Politics of Migrant Resistance amid the Greek Economic Crisis, International Political Sociology, 11(2), 113–129

This paper focuses on a particular instance of migrant resistance: the hunger strike of three hundred irregular migrants in 2011 in Greece. It does not conceptualize the politics of migrant resistance as an isolated incidence of mobilization of irregular migrants against the government in support for their rights in existing institutions. By drawing on a set of fifty-two face-to-face semi-structured interviews with migrant protesters and organizers of the hunger strike, this paper rather argues that the politics of migrant resistance is performed in the daily lives and day-today activities of irregular migrants. It is performed by irregular migrants and those who stand in solidarity with them through the mundane production of information, tricks for survival, mutual care, social relations, services exchange, solidarity, and sociability, which challenge security policies and controls and establish an alternative form of life. The differential inclusion of irregular migrants in various social fields, and the leeway that this inclusion potentially creates in their daily lives and social relationships, enables irregular migrants to create ties with other agents/actors in dominated positions in their social fields, who possess and control the essential capital for the creation of these alternative modes of life.

2019

Recensione di Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgios Agelopoulos, eds, Critical times in Greece: Anthropological engagements with the crisis , New York, Routledge, 2018, pp. 277.