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This conversation will bring to the meeting Professor Danny Miller (Univ College London), director of a newly completed multisited global ethnography study, the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA - https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/assa/about/), and two post-doctoral researchers from the project, Xinyuan Wang and Charlotte Hawkins. The project consists of simultaneous 16-month field-based ethnographies conducted in ten field sites across the globe, from February 2018 to June 2019, focusing on mid-age and older adults. Smartphones and other digital technologies are now central to the experience of older people, whether in terms of accessing information about health, socializing with others, or organizing their lives during retirement. The researchers also explored how generational understanding and use of smartphones, especially for accessing health information and enabling translocal systems of care might be impacted by inequality. Smartphones are equally important in creating a new form of collaborative and comparative anthropology which will be represented by the eleven volumes the project is publishing. The conversation will be moderated by Maria Cattell and Jay Sokolovsky who have each logged in over 4 decades of traditional ethnographic research with Sokolovsky having recently published one of the first multimedia enabled ethnographies. In the midst of rapidly transforming translocal and transnational engagement of generations this conversation ultimately explores three grand issues: 1. As a successor to the global “Project A.G.E.” (Age, Generation and Experience), carried out in the 1980s, how does the ASSA Project move forward a comparative, cross-cultural understanding of older adulthood in the 21st Century? 2. Can the methodological efforts of the ASSA project properly transcend what Gabriele de Seta calls “the three lies of digital ethnography”? These are: illusions of the networked field-weaver, the eager participant-lurker and the expert fabricator. 3. How do the methods of the ASSA project inform anthropology about the possibilities of fieldwork and research dissemination in the age of COVID?

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing: Exploring the future of multimodal-digital ethnography

aging and life course

digital and virtual anthropology

collaborative research

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

panel

Anthropologists are currently engaged in the problems of policing and racism in a variety of ways, some with police and others with communities most impacted by intensive policing. Their roles have ranged from cultural expert, research consultant, acute observer of the everyday, and as critical analysts of language and policy. Invoking these roles, this panel engages with current police reform efforts to include a) technological innovations, b) changes in laws and rules about police stops, summonses, use of force, decriminalizing cannabis, and accountability, c) training in areas such as implicit bias, cultural awareness and community engagement, and d) coordination with other agencies and experts when responding to youth, family or mental health problems. They ask, But does this burst of reform across the country amount to a significant shift in policing or is largely a scramble to keep the current system in place?

Anthropological Engagements with Policing, pt. 2: working to imagine solutions

Anthropology has a long, if not well understood, history of engagements with policing. Since the 19th century, police work has created the material conditions which enable anthropological research in many field sites, especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Conversely, the theoretical work of anthropologists have served as foundational justifications for regimes of policing. For example, both the ‘criminal anthropology’ of Lombroso and the anthropométrie judiciare of Alphonse Bertillon were attempted engagements with contemporary anthropological problems such as parsing competing philosophical claims of free will, rationality, and the materiality of the body. This dialog extends through the work of Malinowski on informal social control mechanisms--central to much of the conceptual infrastructure of “community policing,” “broken windows” and “order maintenance” initiatives--and various iterations of cultural theory, from “culture of poverty” frameworks through contemporary engagements with “police culture.” Even today, amidst an anthropological profession nominally committed to racial and social justice, anthropologists continue a challenging pathway towards engaging with police and policing, as collaborators, interlocutors, antagonists and as objects of study in themselves. This panel, the first of two related sessions, will explore the legacies of such engagements--paying particular attention to the challenges and pitfalls they engender.

Anthropological Engagement with Policing, pt. 1: legacies and challenges

Im/mobility regimes refer to the political-economic processes by which people are bounded, emplaced, forced or permitted to move and to migrate (Brandhorst, Baldassar, and Wilding 2020; Glick-Schiller and Salazar 2013). This panel examines how im/mobility regimes relate to lived experiences of aging around the world. Additionally, this panel grapples with how a focus on age and aging may enhance understanding of im/mobilities. Investigating im/mobility regimes destabilizes assumptions about mobility in old age. While old age is often associated with stasis and decline, the world’s population is increasingly growing up and growing older in contexts of migration. Older adults engage in return and retirement migration; they are refugees, displaced by violence and environmental change; and they actively participate in transnational families, even when they do not migrate themselves. Yet, it would be equally problematic to associate mobility in old age with freedom (Salazar and Smart 2011). Anthropological research suggests that migration often reproduces the social, political, and economic inequalities that shape differential aging experiences and undergird the need to migrate (Coe 2017; Yarris 2014), even as older adults and their families creatively adapt to migratory contexts (Ahlin 2018; Lamb 2009). How do we reconcile this tension between creative agency and inequality in aging, as foregrounded by im/mobility regimes? This panel brings together research on aging and migration in diverse contexts, including eldercare in transnational families, international retirement migration, repeated migration throughout the life course, and migrations to elderhood. Together, the papers in this panel theorize relationships among mobilities, immobilities, and aging.

Aging in Contexts of Im/Mobility Regimes

Contemporary Chinese Senior Retirement Migrants' Global Lifeways

Kinwork and Aging in a Changing Global Context: Migrant Emplacement in Sri Lanka

Migrations to Elderhood: The Art of Becoming and Being Old Puerto Ricans

Moral Maps of Aging: Space, Time, and Value in Older Puerto Rican Adults' Quests for Good Old Ages

With their eyes to the West: (Im)mobility regimes and intergenerational care in Indian transnational families

COVID-19 has unmasked the ways that chronological age--and especially old age--has become a lethal marker of otherness in both lay and medical discourses. This panel aims to contextualize the current intersections of age and crisis in the longstanding, if banal, ways that age and aging have marked forms of otherness across time and place. Recognizing that practices of age-based othering can be both (and sometimes simultaneously) lethal and generative, we ask how such practices are linked to the ways life and lives come to be valued. How have various forms of expert knowledge, including anthropology, participated in constructions of aged others, and with what consequences? While old age has drawn most of the attention around these issues, this panel explores how age marks value and otherness across the lifecourse, for example, in the ways that youth come to be marked as dangerous or transgressive, or that people with disabilities come to be treated as child-like. The papers on this panel examine how age intersects with other forms of difference, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and ability, and investigate how such forms of difference relate to sociocultural and political-economic forms of inequality. In the first paper, Buch and Robbins explore how enduring distinctions between “the West” and “the rest” shape anthropological research on aging, and how these distinctions obscure links between age and power in the ethnographic record. In the second paper, Thomason examines how age has become a source of critique of rural Chinese grandparent care in ways that reveal the hegemony of nuclear family ideals. In the third paper, Grace demonstrates that Ecuadorian assumptions of equivalence between student and youth identities are belied by gendered practices of familial care, leading to unequal gendered forms of citizenship. In the fourth paper, Wright describes a medical treatment to show that practices that conceive of people with disabilities as living in non-normative temporalities produce unequal forms of personhood even when they aim to promote inclusion. In the fifth paper, Valente draws upon a case study of a Brazilian youth upon his eighteenth birthday to show how age demarcates persons seen as deserving care versus punishment in relation to criminal justice. This panel contends that age plays an undertheorized role in the structuring of power and inequality across social worlds. Collectively, these papers ask how age categories participate in the generation of valued life and lives, so that anthropology can better account for the intertwined workings of age and power.

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