Carantes was initially founded by a group of young scholars who met at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies’ Summer School in 2022. We came together following the release of the episode of the Association of Celtic Students’ Podcast on Celtic Studies, Fascism, and the Far-Right, because we felt it was necessary to do something to help protect the field we love from the global growth of Fascism and Far-Right movements. As time went on, supervisors, senior scholars, fellow students, and others expressed interest in supporting us and getting involved. Our small group grew into a network of like-minded people, both academics and non-academics, who are deeply invested in the future of Celtic Studies, and wish to work together to make that future the brightest it can be.

The name Carantes comes from Proto-Celtic *karantes, meaning “friends”. Our logo, by the wonderful ForFeda Project, brings together the hound and the raven, two important symbols in Celtic-speaking traditions. They have some association with war, but we think it’s important to reclaim such symbols in order to protect them from fascist appropriation and in that spirit we are happy to tell that you they are best buds. As fascism’s first characteristic is to allow and even encourage violence towards perceived out-groups, we felt that focusing on friendship as a uniting power was the best way to represent our goals.

As an organisation, Carantes seeks to help inoculate Celtic Studies against fascism: to teach people how to notice dog whistles, to examine the history of the field and learn from past mistakes, to provide an environment for scholars of any level to come together to read relevant scholarship and discuss these issues, while keeping in mind the busy schedules of students, ECRs, and senior faculty. 

At the moment there are three distinct endeavours under the Carantes umbrella.

• The newsletter: if you sign up for our mailing list, we will send monthly suggested readings from a broad range of scholarly perspectives from varous fields, such as works by Mary Rambaran-Olm, Alan Tansman, Theodor Adorno, Stefan Quiroga and many more.
• We also hold public meetings online around each of the quarter days (Samhain, Imbolc, Beltaine, Lughnasa), where everyone is welcome to come together and discuss what we have read in the past four months, and particularly the readings that will have been recommended in the previous newsletter.
• For the Samhain public meeting, we host online lectures from invited speakers to cover specific topics. No readings required for this one.
• And finally, you can now join the Carantes reading group, which meets online bi-monthly to discuss various articles and books. Everyone is welcome!

Carantes has its roots in academic Celtic Studies, but we are by no means confined to it. We welcome members from all backgrounds: everyone has a role in creating anti-fascist knowledge, and forms of expertise exist everywhere.This network’s structure is intentionally loose, in order to allow for greater flexibility as fascism is itself protean, ever-changing, and we need to be able to adapt to its many shifting heads. We hope to facilitate and support many varied endeavours, though we cannot take part in all of them. In fact, we think it vital that we (the organizers) are not involved in every anti-fascist effort in the field. As such, we do our best to resist the formation of leadership roles in the network and adhere to an anarchist philosophy: everyone is welcome to put forward and work towards their own vision of what the network can achieve. Email us and we will add you to our mailing list, invite you to the discord, and bring you into the conversation!