European Society for Oceanists 2027 Conference

ESfO 2027. Oslo, 01 December 2027 - 03 December 2027

The 2027 ESfO conference will be held as an in-person conference in Oslo, Norway, over three days. The conference theme is 'Inalienable'.

The dates are the following:
• Wednesday 1st of December 2027: Registration & opening reception at the Oslo City Hall; Raymond Firth Honorary Lecture
• Thursday 2nd of December 2027: Keynote 1 and panel sessions
• Friday 3rd of December 2027: Keynote 2 and panel sessions; General assembly and closing ceremonies

Details about the conference program, working groups, and registration will be announced at a later date and continuously updated on the UiO Conference Page.

Conference Organizers

Inalienable

Across the Pacific, communities confront overlapping forms of loss – of land, language, biodiversity, and cultural continuity – while also enacting diverse strategies to prevent, mitigate, and transform such loss. 

Inspired by Annette Weiner’s concept of inalienable possessions, the 15th ESfO Conference foregrounds practices of retention, attachment, and non-substitutability in a world increasingly organized by the logics of commodification and standardization, and invites explorations of materiality, value, loss, and resistance in contemporary and historical perspective.

At the same time, the conference aims to reaffirm the centrality of Pacific research to anthropology, showing how Pacific perspectives remain invaluable to the discipline’s theoretical vitality and comparative force, exploring questions such as: How might Pacific perspectives continue to unsettle dominant assumptions about ownership, exchange, and the nature of value? And, counterfactually, where would anthropology have been without the challenges from theory with Pacific roots?

We welcome contributions that engage Pacific epistemologies and practices as generative sites for rethinking materiality, value, and relationality. 

Finally, we would like to address the shifting global frame in which sustainability and biodiversity concerns are increasingly overshadowed or refracted through securitization and defence-oriented agendas, intensified though the lens of global capitalism and resource extractivism. 

What are the implications of these shifts for local livelihoods, ecological knowledge, and political futures, and how do we approach them ethnographically and conceptually, examining how inalienability is asserted, negotiated, or challenged in contexts shaped by colonial histories, climate change, extractive economies, and legal regimes?

ESfO and the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo invites you to attend this three day conference.