Collective Relays: An Anthropology of How Things Hold Together While Moving Apart

What kinds of collective life become possible in an age of cascading catastrophes? In this talk, I approach the question through the figure of the collective relay: the minor logistics of handing over, carrying across and picking up through which common worlds are kept in motion. Drawing on two decades of fieldwork in Madrid, among hackers, neighbourhood assemblies and pandemic food pantries, my forthcoming book Collective Relays argues that relations are only ever available to us as relayed: they change hands, gather momentum or quietly disappear through precarious passages. Seen through its relays, the commons appears as an augural movement that inaugurates the territories and times it will come to inhabit, sustained through fragile acts of continuation. The talk asks what anthropology might learn by staying close to these handovers, to how things hold together whilst moving apart.

Alberto Corsín Jiménez is Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. He is the author of An Anthropological Trompe l'Oeil for a Common World (2013) and co-author of Free Culture and the City: Hackers, Commoners, and Neighbors in Madrid, 1997–2017 (2023) and Historia ilustrada del confinamiento (2025). He was co-editor of Cultural Anthropology from 2022 to 2026. His work moves between the anthropology of traps and the improvised rhythms through which cities are held in common. A new book, Collective Relays: An Anthropology of How Things Hold Together Whilst Moving Apart, is forthcoming.