Othon Alexandrakis

Candidate statement

Othon Alexandrakis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at York University. His research and publications explore cultural processes of change, micro-social responses to conditions of shared hardship, the politics of knowledge, transnational migration and childhoods, and ethnographic methods. He has over fifteen years of ethnographic research experience in Greece, primarily among undocumented migrants, anti-establishment youth, the Roma community (commonly known as Gypsies), and unaccompanied refugee children. Alexandrakis is currently engaged in two research projects, the first as single-investigator exploring political agency among unaccompanied migrant youth titled Critical Humanitarianism: Precarious Pathways and Disruptive Sanctuary in Greece, and the second as co-investigator on an international interdisciplinary research team examining how liminal life shapes migrant child well-being and developmental trajectories titled Exploring the Impact of Protracted Displacement: War-affected Refuge Children in Greece, Israel and Kenya. He has published seven articles in leading journals, three chapters, is the editor of Impulse to Act: A new Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice (2016), and author of Radical Resilience: Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility (2022).