Conference reports Conference Report: Past Legacies, Present Tensions, Future Visions: Anthropology and Ethnology in and of the Baltic Sea Region

The international conference Past Legacies, Present Tensions, Future Visions: Anthropology and Ethnology in and of the Baltic Sea Region, held at Södertörn University from March 30 to April 1, 2026, brought together around thirty scholars—from doctoral researchers to senior academics—to reflect on the shifting political, social, and epistemic landscapes of the Baltic Sea region.

Published on balticworlds.com on June 29, 2026

The international conference Past Legacies, Present Tensions, Future Visions: Anthropology and Ethnology in and of the Baltic Sea Region, held at Södertörn University from March 30 to April 1, 2026, brought together around thirty scholars—from doctoral researchers to senior academics—to reflect on the shifting political, social, and epistemic landscapes of the Baltic Sea region. At a time marked by militarization, fortified borders, ecological degradation, and anti-immigration sentiments, the conference highlighted the particular value of ethnographic approaches for understanding how such transformations are experienced and negotiated in everyday life.

A central ambition of the conference was to challenge the methodological nationalism that continues to shape much ethnological, anthropological, and area studies research. Rather than approaching the Baltic through nationally bounded perspectives, the participants explored it as a historically layered and relational socio-cultural space, shaped by mobility, overlapping imperial legacies, conflict, and uneven belonging. Several contributions also engaged critically with the place of ethnology and anthropology in the production of Western epistemologies and with current efforts to decolonize knowledge about the region.

The conference opened with a welcome by Florence Fröhlig and Jenny Gunnarsson, whose presentation on the past and future of the “European” within European Ethnology set the tone for the first panel on academic lineages and disciplinary categorization across the Baltic Sea region. Scholars from Estonia traced the movement from earlier emphases on material culture toward contemporary social roles spanning both universities and museums. Aivita Putniņa further reflected on the contemporary responsibilities of anthropology, especially in the face of neoconservative politics and growing pressures on academic autonomy.

These discussions culminated in the keynote by Zuzanna Bogumił, “European Pivot or Peripheral Sea? Towards an Anthropology of the Baltic Sea.” Bogumił argued against viewing the Baltic as peripheral and instead presented it as a deeply relational region shaped by imperial histories, mobility, and contested belonging. Her lecture stimulated discussion on what kind of ethnology and anthropology is needed to understand the Baltic Sea region today—one that moves beyond inherited models and recognizes the region as multilayered, transregional, and not easily bordered.

Borders and bordering practices constituted one of the strongest thematic threads of the conference. Presentations explored both territorial borders and broader bordering processes: from research on the Latvia–Belarus border to studies of migrants and remigrants navigating fragmented globalities. Other contributions addressed the racialization of Roma in Lithuania, showing how structural racism is often rendered invisible in public discourse. Across these papers, borders emerged not simply as state demarcations, but as active processes shaping social relations, exclusions, and knowledge production.

Imperial and post-imperial legacies formed another key area of discussion. The panel “Echoes of Empire” examined the Russian language as a contested imperial heritage and demonstrated how mobile populations may reproduce forms of “colonial aphasia,” thereby maintaining centre–periphery relations. Soviet legacies in Estonia and Latvia were analyzed in the changed political context after 2022, especially through the renarrativization and relocation of controversial monuments. Other papers turned to urban and museum settings, examining, for example, social justice in a Vilnius neighborhood and the entanglement of material traces of displaced German residents with the living memory of Polish settlers in Koszalin.

Ecological perspectives added another important dimension. Drawing on interdisciplinary and post-humanist approaches, several contributions examined human and non-human entanglements in landscapes undergoing rapid transformation. The Białowieża Forest bordering Poland and Belarus, for instance, was discussed as an active participant in the EU migration crisis—variously framed as ally, enemy, witness, and victim. Other papers focused on winter landscapes around the Curonian Lagoon and on wetland restoration practices in Lithuania, emphasizing ecological imbalance as both an environmental and socio-political issue.

Questions of security and resilience were addressed particularly through papers on Finland. One presentation explored how the closure of the Finnish–Russian border intersected with memory politics and affected Russian-speaking communities. Another presentation examined reservist practices in the Helsinki region, showing how resilience and preparedness are incorporated into everyday life in response to changing geopolitical conditions. On the final day, the panel “Contested Belonging” returned to questions of identity and memory in post-border landscapes, with papers on the Livonian Coast, post-German Pomerania, and the Vilnius region demonstrating how historical bordering continues to shape local memory and place-making.

The conference was supported by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies and organized through collaboration among scholars from Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden. This transnational partnership not only made the event possible but also laid the groundwork for a wider research network in anthropology and ethnology across the region. During the concluding discussions, participants also reflected on the complexity of regional terminology. Although Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden all border the Baltic Sea, they are often separated by labels such as “Nordic,” “Scandinavian,” “Baltic,” or “post-Soviet”. The conference therefore argued for a more inclusive, sea-centered perspective capable of connecting these categories without erasing their historical specificity.

One of the most important insights to emerge from the conference concerned a line of division that had not been fully anticipated. While the organizers had expected primarily a territorial differentiation within the Baltic region, the composition of participants and contributors revealed a more complex divide—at once institutional, disciplinary, and geopolitical. The relatively limited presence of scholars from the Nordic countries, contrasted with the strong representation of participants from the Baltic states and Poland, reflected not only the origins of the conference itself but also deeper structural asymmetries in how the Baltic is constituted as an object of research.

In the southern Baltic context, studies of Nordic societies are often situated within Scandinavian studies, whereas ethnology and anthropology tend to privilege either national settings or more distant fields. A comparable pattern exists in the Nordic countries, particularly in Sweden, where ethnological research frequently remains focused on domestic or regional contexts. While Södertörn University partly challenges this pattern through Baltic-oriented research supported by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, this remains an institutional exception rather than the rule. As a result, the Baltic still appears less as a fully shared academic space than as a fragmented field shaped by uneven disciplinary traditions, funding structures, and geopolitical legacies.

This fragmentation is particularly significant given the urgency of the challenges currently facing the region: populism, exclusionary nationalism, anti-immigration politics, ecological crisis, social polarization, and the politicization of history. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has further transformed the Baltic Sea region by reshaping mobility, intensifying securitization, and disrupting older routes of academic exchange that were long structured primarily along East–West lines. Several discussions suggested the need for stronger North–South perspectives in future research and collaboration. In this context, the conference demonstrated the continued relevance of ethnology and anthropology for understanding the lived consequences of political upheaval, mobility, memory politics, and ecological change.

Overall, the conference showed that viewing the Baltic through ethnographic perspectives is not simply a methodological preference, but an important way of rethinking a region currently being redefined through conflict, insecurity, and new forms of interdependence. It also made clear that if the Baltic is to become a more genuinely shared academic space, this will require not only conceptual shifts beyond methodological nationalism but also sustained efforts to bridge existing institutional and disciplinary divides.

Florence Fröhlig