United States

American Anthropological Association 2021 Panel Abstract Co-organizers: Catherine Panter-Brick and Rachel Farell Panel Title: “Solidarity and Outrage: Citizen Aid and Grassroot Humanitarianism”  The concept of solidarity in context of crises often signifies commitment to a shared responsibility for addressing burdens, risks, dangers, and perils. However, recent ethnographic work on citizen aid, humanitarianism, and collective action have begun to consider the fiercer side of solidarity: activism, justice, resistance, and struggle. This face of solidarity is characterized by more than compassion and beneficence; rather, when united against forces of injustice, marginalization, and oppression, solidarity and humanitarian action can be productively fueled by outrage. This panel will interrogate the interplay between solidarity and outrage as motivators for grassroot action across a variety of global humanitarian contexts: at borderlands, in refugee spaces, in citizen aid and social justice initiatives. The presentations in this panel will propose a foundation for an anthropology of outrage as it analyzes the links between solidarity and moral indignation in grassroot humanitarianism, citizen aid, activism, and mobilization. It will progress anthropological discussions of the dimensions of solidarity in humanitarian and collective action, the use of outrage as an analytic, and the forces that propel solidarity beyond acts of compassion, pity, or moral obligation. Keywords: solidarity, anthropology of outrage, social justice, citizen aid, collective action

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Anger as a Force for Good: Grassroot Humanitarianism at the US-Mexico border

outrage

solidarity

social justice

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.

technical paper

Embodied Movements: Outrage, Solidarity and Activism along Mexico's Arterial Border and Beyond

Outrage, institutional violence and solidarity at the French borders

Quotidian Solidarity and the Politics of Caring: Disentangling the 'Humanitarian' from Humanitarianism

Contemporary global trends in the rise of populism and what has been loosely termed “post-truth politics'' challenge the heretofore presumed hegemony of the epistemic regimes of liberal rationality. This abstract’s drafting occurs at the one-year mark of a global pandemic, a moment in which Brazil has just passed the undesirable distinction of 400,000 reported dead from COVID-19, and Colombia’s national police - a force designed for war and failing to find its new forms in a post-accord society - stands accused of catastrophic human rights violations after several weeks of social protests and violent armed oppression of protestors. The global pandemic has illuminated the deleterious effects of the structural inequalities that perpetuate the negative consequences of these trends. This panel explores the epistemological stakes of responsibility, accountability, reporting on the “truth”, and the formation of political identities and beliefs in two contexts of acute political uncertainty in the global South: Colombia and Brazil. Five years into the implementation of the Havana Peace Accord, Colombian officials and publics find themselves at loggerheads over nearly all elements of the agreement. The 2022 presidential elections and the 2021 national strike are deepening these divisions, and pandemic conditions have contributed to a precipitous rise in massacres and armed group expansion in some areas of the country. In Brazil, a new political scenario has taken shape in recent years after Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president. The country is immersed in several power disputes and faces an open battle over the hegemony of “truth” supported in part by resorts to emotions, false news and even violence. The disputes occur in the universe of politics, medicine, and the arts: how is truth being constituted by various subjects in different contexts? We draw on these global South contexts to unravel the epistemic knots formed by these converging dynamics, to better understand how (post)truth regimes emerge, exert claims over knowledge, and transform and sediment through social interactions in the political realm. This panel does not have a single discussant as we will be collectively discussing each other's papers throughout the panel.

Peace, Polarization, and Accountability under Fire: Lessons from Colombia and Brazil about the Politics of Truth and Representation

Representation and truth on Brazilian stages: The actors' perspectives

Towards an Anthropology of Divided Societies: The Social Reproduction of Political Polarisation in Post-Peace Accord Colombia

Dementia care has been described in the literature as mostly burdensome, sometimes rewarding, but usually is framed as not involving parties beyond the individual, her family, and/or paid eldercare workers. The aim of this session is to widen the gaze on dementia care, while foregrounding uncertainty, complexity and variability -- around the “truth” of what dementia is, and around “responsibility” for care. On the one hand, we seek to situate dementia within broader local landscapes of care, including legal frameworks, social welfare and health systems, and more-than-human environments. Borrowing from Ciara Kierans the term “regimes of care,” this panel highlights how dementia care arrangements draw together publicly funded and/or private sector institutions, “kinship and friendship networks, charitable associations, and civil society organizations [in ways] that cannot be specified in advance.” (Panel 1) On the other hand, we seek to attend to the variability and complexity of dementia itself -- this historically uncertain category that historian of medicine Lara Keuck called a “working title,” because of its constantly shifting meaning and the doubt that surrounds dementia over time (and, we would add, across contexts). We approach dementia, in other words, as a site of onto-epistemological diversity • which manifests also in diverse needs for and practices of care. (Panel 2)  How are such “regimes of dementia care” lived and performed? How do people work to cobble together care out of contingent, locally specific, often incoherent and fragile assemblages? This panel explores the multiplicity of dementia care regimes addressing a multiplicity of dementias, across a range of distinct settings. Keuck, Lara. 2021. “A Window to Act? Revisiting the Conceptual Foundations of Alzheimer’s Disease in Dementia Prevention,” In: Preventing Dementia? Critical perspectives on a new paradigm of preparing for old age. A. Leibing and S. Schicktanz (eds.). New York/Oxford: Berghahn. Kierans, Ciara. 2019. Chronic Failures: Kidneys, Regimes of Care, and the Mexican State. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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Anger as a Force for Good: Grassroot Humanitarianism at the US-Mexico border

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