United States

Contemporary global trends in the rise of populism and what has been loosely termed “post-truth politics&#39;&#39; 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&#39;s papers throughout the panel.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

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

power

epistemology

politics

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.

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.

technical paper

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.

Multiple Dementias and Regimes of Care - Panel 1: Regimes of Care

Care on the Shadow Side. Institutional Time and Ethics of 'Following' at a Danish Dementia Ward

Processual Relations of Interdependence in Dementia Care in the U.S. and Poland

Suspicious Minds: Subjectivity, Potential futures, and Temporality of Suspected Dementia in Israel

The Risks of Care: What Is at Stake in Letting in the Context of Care and Dementia in Montreal

Unruly temporalities and regimes of care at the end of life with dementia

This roundtable will consider the critical and necessary interventions of feminist and queer theory, method, and practice in contemporary conversations on prison abolition, state policing, and mass incarceration. As a collaborative effort with the Association of Black Anthropologists, the roundtable will showcase the work of leading feminist anthropologists and center pre-circulated guiding questions gathered from the wider associations’ memberships. The roundtable will consider how unified and intersectional analyses of gender, sexuality, race, kinship, the state, and capitalism shed light on contemporary and future anthropological theory and praxis surrounding abolition and social justice. Participants will each deliver short comments on how their work is informed by and engages with critical anthropological frameworks before delving into a collective conversation that proactively reflects on the broader trends, theoretical innovations, and possible future directions for feminist anthropology and the discipline more broadly.

Feminist Approaches to Abolition: A State of the Field Review

John Jackson (2005) animates a collective understanding of Blackness through the lens of performance studies focusing on the difference between authentic performances of Blackness and what he coins as racial sincerity- efforts and performances that intend to benefit the Black community. Sincere racial performances have everything to do with intention and the performer’s ability to (re)produce the real. This study focuses on how racial differences impact social interactions, both ethnographic and clinical, as a key theme that is often under-thematized in anthropology, and how racially sincere performances can (re)produce clinical encounters as a means of training mental health clinicians to broach conversations about racism.  The responsibility to address uncomfortable truths about race and power relations in therapy lies with clinicians but is often placed on clients. Harrison’s (1997) “decolonizing anthropology” urges the field to more responsibly tell the truth about its relationship to race and to wider communities, including racialized and medical communities. Viewing truth through the lens of racial sincerity requires facing difficult and uncomfortable realities, making space for critiquing intentions that are meant to benefit Black clients but may actually cause harm, and addressing the systemic inequity which is reproduced when clinicians place their comfort (failure to discuss race) above their responsibility to create space for clients to cope with racial onslaught.   Non-textual/multimodal formats (i) demand a different kind of ethical responsibility towards the security/confidentiality/safety of subjects and (ii) provide a distinctive angle on the truths of our social world. The ACT (Anti-racist Clinical Training) study in the state of Washington used theater-based methods to train white clinicians to broach discussions on racism with Black youth clients. This roundtable will explore social dynamics between the actors/directors/co-creators, how uncomfortable truths are dealt with in the rehearsal stage, the ways in which Black actors were called upon to reproduce sincere characters, and the actor-facilitator-audience interactions during improvisation. We ask: How did incorporation of Black researchers, practitioners, and actors in the data collection, analysis, scripting, and editing of the short films problematize the sincerity of performances of Blackness?  How might the filmed performances have contributed to the intentions and performances of clinician trainees during the live improvisations?   The roundtable will be chaired by Dr. John L. Jackson, Jr and includes co-PI Jasmine Blanks Jones, Postdoctoral Fellow with the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at The Johns Hopkins University, co-PI Noah S. Triplett, MS, Graduate Student in Child Clinical Psychology, University of Washington, Actor/Film editor Maryann Dreas-Shaikha, and invites the participation of the two featured Black youth actors and four practicing Black clinicians who served as dramaturgists and small group discussion facilitators for a scaffolded theater as pedagogy approach culminating in live improvisation where clinicians were able to practice having conversations about racism with trained Black actors. This roundtable offers implications for multimodal methods as creative approaches to addressing race and racism in cross-racial dyads with multiple levels of power and agency by documenting the processes by which the creators’ embodied practices facilitated greater discursive possibilities for themselves and their audiences.

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