I will participate in a panel discussion supporting policy research for UK government which is exploring the question of how to plan for overheating in urban settings, through international examples of how cities are currently tackling heatwaves and extreme heat.

This panel will explore ideas of unbuilding the future, both in terms of literally de-composing things in order to proceed towards a different kind of future, as well as deconstructing the very idea that ‘the future’ is something that we should be proceeding towards.

Convenors: Constance Smith (University of Manchester) and Hannah Knox (University College London)
Discussants: Maria Salaru (University College London) and Penny Harvey (University of Manchester)

This panel aims to ethnographically inspect the temporal and material ways in which makeshift practices play a crucial role in making everyday infrastructural lives possible in contemporary times of urban transformations.

Convenors: Deana Jovanović (Utrecht University) and Maria Șalaru (University College London)

During the London Architecture Festival, I organised a roundtable discussion in collaboration with the Romanian Cultural Institute on the topic of care and ageing in the built environment through the prism of the work of the following scholars: Daniela Calciu (Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urban Planning, Bucharest), Gabriela Nicolescu (University of Oxford, Anthropology)
, Iulia Stătică (UCL, The Bartlett School of Architecture) and myself. Discussant: Hannah Knox (UCL, Anthropology)

Challenge 12 #DeaArhitecturaAcasa: Case de film” face parte din activitățile De-a Arhitectura începute în plin context pandemic când asociația a dorit să găsească o modalitate prin care să aducă arhitectura și educația de mediu construit mai aproape de copii și tineri, direct în casele lor. Rețeaua De-a arhitectura a dezvoltat periodic noi conținuturi adaptate acestor timpuri incerte care să se poată desfășura de la distanță, dar, în același timp, să îi provoace pe participanți în moduri creative, să fie jucăușe și accesibile în termeni de timp investit și materiale utilizate.

What do we share when we live in a city, a neighbourhood, or a block of flats? In what ways do we share use the shared spaces of a contemporary Romanian city? What are the main perspectives on this phenomenon in the past, and what can we do in the future?

The discussion will be moderated by Radu Ponta (Republic of Architects), and my fellow discussants are Bodgan Suditu (geographer) and Cristi Borcan (architect).

Boundaries between academia and the rest of the world are fast dissolving, yet facilitating collaborative learning between academics, students, companies or other organisations presents significant challenges. How can anthropologists and other social scientists rise to these new challenges?

Convenors: Maria Salaru (Durham University); Simone Abram (Durham University)

This workshop builds on the Erasmus+ PEOPLE project which engaged commercial and public organisations in postgraduate student learning to solve real-life industry challenges. Workshop participants will gain insights into the challenges and opportunities of co-creation through the PEOPLE-centred development approach, covering how to: identify and negotiate relationships with potential partners, translate academic concepts for practical purposes, and managing conflicting priorities.

The lab will rethink how social reality is reproduced through everyday practices of measurement and ask how anthropology can contribute to the re-design of everyday life. 

The lab will ask, 'What is a meter?' What does it measure, and what does it ignore? How do meters configure you as a user and your actions as part of a social collective? How is their authority maintained? Is a meter merely a way to facilitate exchange of service for money, or is it a means to generate a calculative subject (von Schnitzler, 2008)? Do meters produce a kind of "space of calculability" (Callon & Caliskan, 2005) which invites residents to subject their daily consumption practices to a constant metrological scrutiny? How do meters mediate the relationship between state and citizen (Anand, 2015; Fennell, 2011; Min & Golden, 2013) or company and consumer (Coleman, 2014)? How much of the meter's utility is evident in its design, its placement, its representation and its products? And what are the implications of digital, smart or open-source meters that promise to give new kinds of agency to both people and things? 

Lab run together with Simone Abram (Durham University) and Hannah Knox (University College London) 

Based on long term fieldwork in an apartment building in Piatra-Neamț, my research explores the role various social and material actors play in the maintenance of blocks of flats in Romania, while raising larger questions about the complex interrelationship between people's rapidly changing everyday lives and decaying infrastructure in post-socialist cities. My project expands upon current anthropological debates in architecture, infrastructure and economic anthropology, but in this talk I would like to particularly highlight the contributions my work makes to visual anthropology by discussing extracts from my observational documentary, The Block, that follows the story of the block’s administrator in his effort to mediate relationships between neighbours.

A heated debate: an ethnography of welfare and energy poverty in Urban Romania

The administration room: money and suspicion in a Romanian apartment block

Making a hole in the water: an anthropological approach to water consumption in urban Romania

Making one's home: an ethnography of the material transformations in Romanian blocks of flats

Walls have ears: an ethnography of energy consumption in Romanian blocks of flats

The Tropenmuseum through the lens of its photographic past

Souvenirs from the other side': A social biography of photographic postcards in the Tropenmuseum