We will start as usual with introductions and announcements.

Anne Kirstine Rønn, "Anatomy of an opposition: The struggle against sectarianism in postwar Lebanon."

Lebanon is known as a deeply divided society. The country’s political system divides power between Muslims and Christians, and sect-based identities shape social and political life. Yet, throughout its postwar period, Lebanon has also seen an increase in movements that oppose sectarian divisions. The book traces the anatomy of these diverse movements, examining their key characteristics, strategies, and internal tensions. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts, it analyses how resistance against sectarianism unfolds across five key fields: electoral politics, labour and class, urban space, gender and sexuality, and migration and refugee rights. Adopting an intersectional approach, it explores a broad range of cases, from mass protests to localized struggles for public space, showing how sectarianism intersects with other identities and hierarchies. While grounded in Lebanon, the talk offers a broader framework for understanding identity politics in the Middle East and beyond.

Marie Bjerre Odgaard, "On Playful Indifference in a Hyper-engaged Middle East Anthropology."

This talk gives a brief introduction to what Odgaard calls "playfull indifference." Researchers who conduct empirical research in the Middle East engage the politics and ethics of difference-making in contexts where making and marking differences based on claims to identity are necessary and deeply fraught at the same time. Based on over a decade of fieldwork and conversations with queer and feminist activists and artists in Amman, Jordan, I think through the methodological tensions that arise when the demand to account for difference—sexual, gendered, ethnic, cultural, political—meets the everyday work of forging solidarities in spaces where recognition can be dangerous, but where erasing difference is not an option either. Odgaard ask swhat might be possible if we suspend difference as our primary analytic, and instead speculate the subtle work of trust and surrender friendship and play. She looks at the temporal, epistemological and ontological uncertainties that this invites into the picture – in other words through an analytic of playful indifference. This as both a methodological and ethical reflection on how anthropological relation happens—and sometimes fails to happen—in projects shaped by moral, political, and disciplinary expectations and hypes.