CfP Anthropology’s new sensibilities

In anthropology, sensibility is one of the key features that allow practicing the discipline. Anthropologists constantly listen to the pulse of social life and vigilantly look out for its new forms and meanings. The sensibilities of anthropological theories are changing, their lens is transforming and it begins to capture those aspects of reality that were previously invisible or perceived as unimportant. Changes in sensibility take place in the methodology of anthropological research. New sensibilities of anthropology also result from its openness to broadly understood political transformations related to decolonization or social crises.
As a result of these changes, anthropology opens up new research fields, such as the relations with the more-than-human world. When the role of plants and animals in the domains of work and leisure or in private and public spaces shifts, anthropology poses questions about what methods allow for the inclusion of new subjects in ethnographic research, what are the ways of their (re)presentation in texts. Another example is the growing significance of expert knowledge in the life of an individual. In response to these processes, anthropological interpretations of medical and psychotherapeutic knowledge and practices, therapeutic culture, or bureaucratic processes related to the creation and life of documents or data may arise. Also, these is a case of the renewed interest in materiality or the emergence of infrastructure as an object of anthropological research.
Anthropology’s sensibility is also its founding myth. George W. Stocking Jr. sees romantic sensibility as an inherent and permanent feature of the discipline (“Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility,” 1989). Reinterpretations of this myth, however, give rise to new sensibilities—both anthropological and sociopolitical (for example, Bhrigupati Singh, “A Decolonial Birth of Anthropology,” American Ethnologist, 2023; or “Ukrainian Landscapes: Reconstructions. War. Art. Decolonization,” a special issue of the journal Konteksty, 2023).
Inspirations for thinking about new sensibilities of anthropology can also emerge from the work of recalling, restoring and seeing anew the experiences of the previous generations of researchers. Among others, the figures and works of Aldona Jawłowska and Elżbieta Tarkowska are highly important for shaping the sensitivity of Polish social anthropology. On the one hand, they dealt with the issues that were a "signs of the time". On the other, their work included the threads that were not at the time recognized as important. Thanks to these anthropologists’ sensibility, they were visibilised and transformed into research issues.
We invite authors to submit manuscripts that address the category of sensibility and seek to conceptualize and analyze what “anthropology’s new sensibilities” might mean when applied to their empirical material and theoretical explorations.

We invite you to submit texts in both Polish and English. The guidelines for preparing texts for publication in “Kultura i Społeczeństwo” are available at: https://czasopisma.isppan.waw.pl/kis/about/submissions

The guest editor of the issue is  Anna Horolets, University of Warsaw  (a.horolets@uw.edu.pl).

The publication of the issue is planned for June, 2026. We are waiting for manuscripts until the end of August, 2025. Manuscripts are accepted exclusively via the journal's website: http://www.kulturaispoleczenstwo.pl