Το «Κάτι για μένα» σε Διεθνές Συνέδριο Ανθρωπολόγων
Tο «Κάτι για μένα» παρουσιάζεται στο διεθνές συνέδριο ανθρωπολογίας «Anthropologists and New Audiences: Pathways to Teaching and Learning», που διεξάγεται στο Πανεπιστήμιο Αιγαίου, 16–18 Οκτωβρίου 2025.
KATI GIA MENA: Empowerment, Belonging, and Reclaiming Anthropology in the Digital World
My name is Anthi Pazianou, and I am the creator of KATI GIA MENA (“Something for Me”) — a women’s and femininities’ empowerment program grounded in an anthropological and gender-aware approach.
I am a journalist, coach, and social anthropologist.
In 2009, I was completing my Master’s dissertation in Gender Studies, focusing on gender, labour, and migration.
At the centre of my research was the acid attack on Konstantina Kouneva, a migrant cleaner working for the Athens Metro, who had been investigating exploitative labour conditions among cleaning women — those performing invisible, yet public “female” labour.
It was a period when Gender and Anthropology in Greece existed in a rather introverted state.
While academic debate was rich, political organisations, parties, and movements paid little attention to anthropology — a discipline that tends to erode certainties and struggles to produce simple slogans.
Equally, gender — often dismissed as a “secondary contradiction” — received minimal attention in public discourse, soon to be overshadowed by climate change and the economic crisis.
Since 2003, I have studied Social Anthropology and History through a uniquely interdisciplinary program, and I have always felt deeply fortunate.
Anthropology, once it captures you, infiltrates your whole life — and yet, it can often make you feel not only unique, but also alone. Many colleagues have felt the same.
After submitting my dissertation, I transitioned from restaurant service work to local journalism. I decided to stay, and today I count 17 years in journalism on Lesvos — as well as an equal number of years in psychotherapy, through behavioural analysis.
I began to think: perhaps I could practice anthropology through journalism, by giving voice to the subjects themselves.
My path in journalism was profoundly shaped by the refugee issue.
For many years, Lesvos has been a gateway to Europe and a key site in the contemporary history of humanity, solidarity — but also of racism and xenophobia.
It was fertile ground for misinformation and fake news to flourish.
Between 2012 and 2020, guided by an anthropological lens, I spent years reporting in and around refugee camps — in hotspots, solidarity structures, and informal settlements known as “jungles”.
This ethnographic reporting — amplifying refugees’ own voices — helped deconstruct fake news and racist myths.
Yet, it also drew hostility from far-right groups, both near the camps and online.
Gender, however, never left my field of concern.
Still, for many readers, listeners, and viewers, the combination — refugees, gender, human rights — was “too much”.
Often, my response was simply “yes, all of them.” But many times, I felt very alone in doing so.
All of this unfolded alongside the realities of daily life — colleagues, relationships, friends, children, dogs, and new projects:
the founding of a journalistic cooperative (KOINSEP Enimerosi) and an NGO for digital rights.
During the same years, the global discourse of “self-improvement” arrived in Greece through social media:
“You can be better, stronger, achieve anything — if you really want it.”
Such slogans, omnipresent online, apply to every domain of life, and they exert a particular influence on women — from weight loss and dating to fertility, motherhood, and even grief.
It is no coincidence that the majority of followers of such accounts are — or rather we are — women.
I recall the late anthropologist Professor Diana Traka saying in 2008:
“I don’t know what happens to all these women — they complete the Gender Studies MA, excel, and a few years later you find them married, with children, suffocating in everyday life.”
Allow me to answer experientially:
Yes, patriarchy is a system of rules, roles, and destinies — an ideology which, paraphrasing Althusser (1971), moves subjects almost blindly and unconsciously according to its laws.
Slide 5
Yet, along this path, there appear cracks in the performance of gendered power, as Butler (1990) puts it — and it is through those cracks that relief can enter.
Observing women in everyday spaces — at hair salons, beauty centres, or styling workshops —
the most common phrase I have heard is: “Now I’m doing something for me.”
Usually expressed as a justified reward after a long day devoted to others, this phrase has become a quiet declaration of dignity rather than selfishness.
It is rarely said by men, but often by women who feel permanently expected to be available to everyone else.
Slide 6
I kept that phrase — “Something for me” — and wondered:
Could anthropology offer an answer to the gospel of self-optimization and positivity?
Could it provide the tools to widen the cracks between “you must be strong, kind, beautiful, clever, resilient”?
I answered yes — and created KATI GIA MENA as a program of women’s empowerment in the sense of reinforcement, not strength.
As one participant, grieving a loss, told me:
“I don’t want to have to be strong anymore.”
It felt essential to create a space where vulnerability is welcome.
Participants are not clients or audience members but subjects — with history, experience, voice, and silence.
They do not need gurus or “10 steps to success”; they need permission to be themselves, as they are today.
Anthropology provides exactly that: a field for encounter, reflection, and shared understanding.
If my own starting point was multifaceted — combining journalism, psychotherapy, coaching, and anthropology —
then anthropology itself remains an open field of encounter between subjects and between disciplines.
KATI GIA MENA aspires to be, paraphrasing Durkheim, all of this and something more.
Between observation and participation, understanding and co-creation, the project unfolds in several strands:
A blog featuring articles, interviews, and inspiring content.
Personal sessions of coaching and self-reflection.
Group sessions for women and femininities, where — through anthropological and gendered perspectives — we explore themes such as family and kinship as cultural relations, beauty and body image, the diet culture, self-care routines, the influence of the digital world, and women’s claims in the public sphere.
Monthly community meetings, where an invited woman presents her research or experience, followed by open discussion among participants.
Notable contributors include:
Professor Venetia Kantsa (on assisted reproduction and parenthood),
Dr Nancy Francis (on vulnerability),
Dr Falia Varelaki (on the anthropology of cancer),
and Professor Manto Rahovitsa (on technology and algorithms).
This is an applied, interactive form of feminist-anthropological learning, combining the methods of social anthropology — observation, narration, reflexivity — with the concepts of social construction and intersectionality, within a coaching and self-awareness framework.
Its core assumption is that each participant already carries knowledge and insight — what she needs is space to articulate and share it.
The goal is to recognize oneself as an active subject, not a “problem to be solved,”
and to foster a community of learning and empathy, where the personal is political is lived, not merely proclaimed.
Within this space, the anthropological gaze acts as a tool of de-guilt and understanding, showing how what we perceive as individual weakness often reflects social structures.
Thus, KATI GIA MENA becomes a way for anthropology to return to the public — to the people from whom it began.
All sessions are held online.
This facilitates access from anywhere, though not all participants are digitally familiar.
Finding a secure platform that protects personal data does not always mean finding one that is simple or affordable.
Yet the greatest challenge is not technical but structural:
To sustain and expand, the program must maintain an active social media presence — but without succumbing to clickbait or motivational clichés, which would undermine its very philosophy.
After ten months of operation, KATI GIA MENA has attracted hundreds of women and femininities, achieving its initial aim:
to create a space of relief, reflection, and connection.
I close where my initial hypothesis began:
Anthropology may not need new audiences — it needs new meeting grounds.
Communities where experience becomes knowledge, vulnerability becomes data, and self-care becomes methodology.
Thank you.
