United States

With plant-anthropo-genesis we address the entanglements between plants and people over time, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic and historical research to offer new and critical insights into the ways in which plant-human lifeworlds co-produce one another -- from racializations in plantation societies to the aspirational interventions of gardeners, farmers and scientists aiming for redemption from chemical industrial agriculture. Invoking Despret’s (2004) notion of anthropo-zoo-genesis for the ways ethologists and animals become attuned to and transform one another, plant-anthropo-genesis substantiates the ‘plant turn’ extending beyond Lewis-Jones (2016). If the current moment of climate crisis, the so-called Anthropocene, originates not from fossil capital, but from the global disruption of biosocial life wrought by European imperial expansion, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the decimation of indigenous peoples by disease -- the Plantationocene -- imagining other possible futures may well benefit from embracing an aspirational Planthroposcene (Myers 2018). This roundtable covers a variety of contexts and perspectives, from how monocrops and plantations displace human lives, shape racialized existences, and naturalize social inequalities, to ritual and religious dimensions of plant-human interactions, and to the regenerative alternatives to extractivist agriculture that re-imagine plant-human relations and agro-ecological possibilities, even as various registers of global power and crises contaminate the emergent scope of plant-anthropo-worlds.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Plant-Anthropo-Genesis: the Co-production of Plant-People Lifeworlds

agriculture and agrarian systems

multispecies

labor/labour

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

The expanding field of environmental anthropology navigates critical questions of how to transform our collective humanity in the midst of ecological disasters. The central project to emerge focuses on emergent possibilities and nascent futures beyond ecological destruction. Recovering diverse possibilities of living on a damaged planet (Tsing, et al 2017), anthropologists are taking up experimental projects that speculate on what life might and could be like. Major interventions look to erase the gap between human and nonhuman worlds and broaden the moral community beyond humans (Ingold 2013), for example, by valorizing exemplars • often indigenous ontologies • of life flourishing together, with humans as kin to other species and sentient entities, that have intrinsic rather than instrumental value (Escobar 2018). From within troubled ecologies, anthropology calls for us to "imagine new relationships" between nature and humans, and we are to do so "even as it is clear that things are not working out" (Besky and Blanchette 2019:19). For scholars like McCall Howard (2017), however, the destruction of the environment is a problem of practical human relations that cannot be solved by efforts to seek out idealized connections between humans and their environments. Capitalist relations, she reminds us, are simultaneously destructive to the environment and yet sustaining to billions of people around the world (Cooper 2008), making any sudden shift in political-economic relations on behalf of the environment a potential site of exclusion and resistance by those who depend on extraction for their livelihood••like fishing, farming, logging, and more. Where do people live, but not at the expense of multispecies others? Does our disapproval, however justified, of extractive relations unfairly represent interlocutors as desperate, ignorant, or morally compromised? Meanwhile, such relations continue to have outsized material consequences for the planet. Our panel foments a debate, initiated in a virtual workshop in 2020, on tensions between anthropology's implicit disciplinary values and the predominant ways humans relate with nature • including those we might not like or endorse. We invite scholars whose work traces how anthropology builds consensus around what those relations, meanings, and values should be. Papers may variously share political, existential, and ecological justice concerns motivating normative efforts. They may also critically respond to prescriptive orientations of scholarship that generate gaps, others, and erasures in ways that go largely unquestioned. We aim to make our disciplinary commitments and their potential consequences explicit, as the pursuit of "alternatives" and "outsides" to capital unfold • perhaps at the expense of ethnographic knowledge that could prove useful to diverse strategies of flourishing in uneven environmental futures. We invite scholars from diverse perspectives and contexts to grapple with these difficult questions. In doing so, we hope our panel reflects the plurality of voices and perspectives on this topic. Organizers: Serena Stein (Wageningen University and Research) Brandon Hunter-Pazzara (Princeton University Discussants: Sophie Chao (University of Sydney) Alex Blanchette (Tuffs University)

NORMATIVE ECO-RELATIONS: A Debate on Capitalism, Environment, and Disciplinary Exclusions

Truth has emerged as an important space of accounting for past violence and grappling with ongoing crisis and trauma. In the wake of state terror, torture, disappearances, and genocide, communities have turned to truth as a grassroots response and challenge to political violence, through practices of memory and advocacy for justice that resist the erasure of their experience. States have also engaged truth as a form of transitional justice, using truth commissions and other modalities of truth in the wake of human rights abuses and state terror. Yet, while truth has become critical to rebuilding civil society and democracy, it also represents a particular form of accounting, often existing in a constitutive tension with justice and the inherently contested nature of memory. This roundtable explores this plural and fractured nature of truth(s) relation to violence, witnessing, and survival. We also examine our own responsibility as ethnographers in relation to the production of certain kinds of truths and how anthropology articulates with other realms of knowledge in the worlds of law and policy. Thinking through the juridical complexities of truth and violence is central to the ways in which our subjects grapple with their pasts and desires for the future. Susan Coutin examines truth and legal violence for subjects living in the United States without permanent legal status and applying for an immigration benefit. Understanding transitional justice more broadly in relation to silence, erasure, and public truths in Argentina inform Natasha Zaretsky’s work, who suggests citizens' responses to violence become “acts of repair,” highlighting the fractured temporalities of survival. This also highlights the role of ethnography in understanding how our subjects make sense of violence over time. Such ongoing legacies are also examined in the work of Kimberly Theidon, who discusses children born of wartime sexual violence, drawing upon her research in Peru and Colombia. The ongoing struggle to make sense of a contested past shapes Peter Locke’s work who explores the politics of truth and trauma in ex-Yugoslavia, where accounts of recent history are still deeply divided, including various narratives of truth, violence, and victimhood, leading to uncomfortable encounters on the ground. Such encounters also reveal the pervasive intersections of power and truth at the heart of these questions. Alex Hinton examines these dynamics through his research on white power extremism in the United States in relation to his longstanding work on genocide studies. Dreisen Heath then explores the role of research and advocacy in her work at Human Rights Watch in addressing the legacies of racial violence in the United States, including the Tulsa Race Massacre, and how reckoning with the past and its ongoing impacts shapes the call for reparations. The discussion will be moderated by Victoria Sanford. This roundtable examines how we situate the impact and traces of violence in people’s lives, by exploring public truth-telling, testimony, trials, and the quieter spaces of everyday life • areas where the ethnographic imagination offers insights that further contribute to our understanding of the ongoing legacies of truth and violence.

Legacies of Truth and Violence

All environmental projects operate with a view to the future, whether implicit or explicit. Infrastructure projects, in particular, are both a useful lens for understanding these different views and can be powerful tools for foregrounding some future visions and sidelining others. In a roundtable drawing on research from Egypt, Indonesia, the United States, Palestine, Israel, and the Canadian arctic, we will use infrastructure as our touchstone to discuss how certain accounts of the future gain authority while others are discounted. The hopes and fears of both project architects and inhabitants of the landscapes being altered will feature centrally. We will engage with the ways in which infrastructure shapes expectations for future abundance and scarcity of resources. This will include discussion of the roles of mediation and obscuration that infrastructure may play, as well as potential path dependencies that shape decision-making around infrastructure projects. The roundtable will attend closely to questions of power, investigating how people in different positions of power use infrastructure to amplify their own or mute others’ visions of resource scarcity, abundance, and threat. We will explore the possibility that there are differences across types of infrastructures (electricity, water, roads, etc.), scales (of project and of governance), or locations (urban, rural, periurban, oceanic) in the extent to which certain actors can control infrastructural futures. Focusing on temporality, this roundtable asks: what time horizons are different actors operating within, and how might those shape the ways in which narratives of tradition, indigeneity, religion, and techno-optimism are deployed by residents, states, and international actors? Finally, panelists will discuss our roles as citizen scholars, asking how we can have conversations about risk, scarcity, and abundance that go beyond academia.

Infrastructure and Future Truths

In keeping with this year’s theme, “Truth and Responsibility,” roundtable participants explore the ways in which disability justice ideals and practices inform or could be integrated into aspects of their own work as anthropologists, whether in the spheres of activism and advocacy, pedagogy and teaching, and/or research. Although truth, justice, and responsibility are threads that have long existed in anthropology, there has been a dearth of effort to underscore the perspectives of disabled anthropologists regarding these commitments and/or to consider ways in which disability hierarchies and parity shape the contours of these endeavors. Disability justice is a grassroots movement led by disabled, non-binary artists and performers of color (Sins Invalid 2015). This movement offers a critique and antidote to the individualistic and neoliberal approach to disability rights prevalent in the United States. It emphasizes the voices of disabled people who have been omitted from the dominant disability discourse and incorporates intersectional, collaborative approaches to engaging in work and struggle that valorize interdependence as a guiding principle (Mingus 2017). In short, the question of how people should show up for each other is key to defining and structuring any undertakings devoted to disability justice (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018). This question of how people do or should show up for each other has been an abiding query posed by many anthropologists. It is reflected in studies concerning forms and norms of kinship, globalization and emerging inequalities, resistance and protest, shifting parameters and definitions of community, and contested understandings of what constitutes a moral life, to name a few. Yet despite these intellectual and material pursuits, the insights gained have not drawn routinely on the lessons disabled anthropologists or anthropology versed in disability studies scholarship and praxis could provide or the value of examining these issues through a disability justice lens. In seeking to bring disability justice and anthropological perspectives into explicit conversation with one another, this roundtable addresses the following: In what ways has the question of how people should show up for one another been reflected in the work of disabled anthropologists or how disabled anthropologists have approached their work? Has this concern been particularly magnified by the context of the COVID-19 pandemic or has this been a pressing framework in which disabled anthropologist have always evaluated and framed their work? How have the principles and practices of disability justice been explicitly embedded in the research formulations, fieldwork navigations, and methodologies of roundtable participants? How has broader anthropological scholarship regarding approaches to how people show up for one another illuminated these applications? Do participants perceive these perspectives as converging or in tension with one another? How might disability justice viewpoints and organizing strategies reveal certain truths about the current state of our anthropological profession and offer guidance regarding how to show up for one another and our interlocutors?

How Do We Show Up for One Another?: Learning from Disability Justice and Anthropology in Conversation

Ethnographers have been central to expanding understandings of the immigrant experience, including the Latinx experience in the United States. This work has importantly sought to challenge the xenophobic narratives that dehumanize (im)migrants and render nation-states as sovereign victims (Chavez 2013; Coutin 2005; De Genova 2005; Zavella 2011). Yet, while much of the scholarship to date has focused on the plight of Latinx immigrants in the United States, a growing number of Latinx migrants are migrating to a variety of different locations within and outside U.S. borders. Recent findings have examined the arrival of Latinx migrants in new immigrant destinations, the relationship between Latinx immigrants and other racial/ethnic communities, and the increased importance of transnational linkages as a multi-directional process (Guerrero 2017; Paz 2018; Vega 2015). Our roundtable builds on these robust anthropological understandings about migration and immigrant communities worldwide, by asking: How are Latinx (im)migrants part of the everyday interactions and institutions of societies? Relatedly, how do Latinx (im)migrant experiences vary across historical, geographic, social, and political contexts? We find that a broader discussion of Latinx (im)migrant experiences at the local, national, and global levels can assist in illuminating the nuanced, layered aspects of migration, mobility, racial/ethnic identity, and citizenship status for Latinx migrants and migrants to/from Latinx communities. Latinx migrants’ lived experiences are shaped not only by their journeys during the migration process, but also their interactions with community members in the locations to which they migrate. This is often evident in migrants’ negotiation of their relationships with immigrant non-immigrant residents in these locales leading at times to conflict and/or collaboration. Exploring the nuanced nature of Latinx migrants’ navigation of these relationships, our panel examines how these processes play out in Latin America, Spain, U.S. empire (e.g. the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands), and new immigrant destinations in the U.S. (e.g. the U.S. South and rural areas of the northeast). Our goal is to bring together discussions of Latinx migrants’ experiences in their new destinations and to provide insight into their relationships with other community members that acknowledges the complex nature of these experiences. In doing so, the these scholars illustrate how the frameworks of race, ethnicity, class, and language, shape how Latinx migrants understand themselves and the social worlds that they seek to build.

Global Approaches to Migration and Latinx Communities: Intra-Community Voices (Part 2)

In keeping with this year’s AAA theme, “Truth and Responsibility,” roundtable participants, who have varying bodymind embodiments, social positionings, and anthropological interests, explore and interrogate the diverse and multi-faceted factors that shape, constrain, and enliven their decisions regarding their engagement with the field. These considerations are revealing of many “truths” that we need to face and with which we need to grapple as a profession. Despite the reflexive turn in anthropological writing, it is clear that our profession persists in promoting images of and expectations for the “fit” and often “lone” ethnographer, an unshakable and abiding myth of the model anthropologist. Yet one “truth” the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed is that bodyminds are not fixed entities and nor are the contexts in which anthropologists conceptualize and conduct their work. For many with long-term or more recently acquired disabilities and chronic illnesses, these are not new revelations as their lives have required both adaptation and innovation. These insights can be valuable both to novices entering the field and those established in the field but wondering how to proceed under contingent and uncertain circumstances and/or as their own bodyminds face the inevitability of change. In seeking to erode the assumption of “fitness” as foundational to the fieldwork enterprise, this roundtable addresses the following questions: How has the understanding that embodiments are unstable, as well as the frameworks in which they do or could operate, contributed to novel and creative ideas and practices regarding fieldwork and ethnography? Are there ways in which the recent COVID-19 pandemic has generated original and useful practices with regard to these endeavors? What impact does the ideal or “fit” researcher have on the financial aspects of conducting fieldwork for the disabled and chronically ill? In what ways might fieldnotes retain vestiges of embodied memories? How does diversity in bodyminds disrupt, obscure, and build emergent connections that are key to the anthropological enterprise? What kinds of inequalities (among anthropologists and between field researchers and their interlocutors) are revealed by the realities of examining bodyminds in context? How can disability give rise to ingenious and liberating forms of ethnographic expression? How might these reflections, approaches and methodologies, both tested and emergent, provide possible solutions to those affected by financial hindrance, unforeseen or unforeseeable fieldwork constraints, and an inflexible disciplinary canon?

Disabled “Truths” in the Field: Challenges, Emerging Connections, and Innovations in Ethnography

Over the past twenty years, anthropologists have explored the opportunities and challenges of combining family and fieldwork (Flinn, Marshall, and Armstrong 1998; Korpela, Hirvi, and Tawah 2016; Redden 2008; Scheper-Hughes 1987). These discussions reflect a turn toward critical self-reflexivity and the increasing visibility of feminist mother/scholars in and outside of anthropology. For some, children bring greater legibility and opportunities for intimacy during ethnographic research (Kelman 2019; Levey 2009). Parenting can serve as a resource for the questions that researchers ask, the interactions they observe, and analysis after leaving the field. The coronavirus pandemic has heightened these dynamics, as schooling has literally been brought home (Lowenhaupt and Theoharis 2021). Yet parenting during fieldwork can introduce other challenges, including constraints in site selection and project design; difficulty balancing family care-work with immersive research; risks posed to the health or wellbeing of family members; loneliness and isolation; feelings of inadequacy; and ethical conundrums endemic to raising children in a landscape of deeply unequal resources (Drozdzewski and Robinson 2015; Muhammad and Neuilly 2019). These challenges are mediated by race, class, nationality, gender, and sexuality. They are navigated in contexts of enduring racial violence, anti-immigrant policy, and, most recently, a global pandemic with unequally distributed effects. As anthropologists have reconsidered what constitutes fieldwork and assumptions of a self/other dichotomy (see Narayan 1993), distinctions between “home” and the “field” have collapsed, raising a new host of ethical, methodological, and ontological questions and possibilities. This has always been the case in educational research, when our children may (or may not) attend the same schools and districts in which we work. In this panel, we draw on discourses of ethnography to explore our overlapping identities as mothers, researchers, and activists. We take inspiration from the Chicana M(other)work Collective’s examination of mothering as transformative labor and call for collective care among scholars of color, their communities, and their allies (Caballero et al. 2019; see also Collins 1994). Questions that we consider include: How do our identities as mothers shape not only the research we conduct in schools and communities, but the knowledge we produce? How do our research practices, participants, and products shape our parenting? We consider how our parenting affected and was affected by our studies of gender, migration, and transnational mothering; social movements and resistance; the feminized labor of Black and Latinx mothers; racial inequity in school policy and practice; and student pregnancy and sexuality education. Together, we will speak to, and move beyond, a burgeoning literature of “how to” books on work-life balance and doing academia as a mother (e.g., Connelly and Ghodsee 2011; Grant and Evans 2008) to consider the co-production of knowledge and families (Kelman 2019, 186). We see this panel as an opportunity to further conversations about the productive entanglements of parenting and scholarship, and to consider how framing mothering as a form of knowledge production can inform discourses of ethnography. It is especially urgent amidst the pandemic and the pressing need to advocate for intersectional justice through and beyond our work.

Co-Producing Knowledge and Family in Educational Ethnography

Understanding how and when children participate in food production plays a key role in debates regarding human life history theory, climate change, child agency, and health and nutrition. As communities around the world become increasingly interconnected, children’s participation in foraging is changing in intensity and nature. This is especially true in hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence societies, where changes in subsistence strategies reduce reliance on wild foods, in favor of agricultural products from various sources. Environmental changes, such as ecological degradation, the establishment of national parks, and migration to urban centers, reduces children’s access to natural resources. Other competing activities, such as school attendance, may limit children’s ability to participate in foraging, and can offer new types of reward. During this widely attended roundtable, we will discuss the implications of these changes to children’s foraging from several angles, including demography, nutrition, food security, access to formal and traditional education, conservation, and biodiversity. We will also discuss how shifts in subsistence affect children's physical and mental well-being. Finally, we will address policies which aim to support children’s foraging, and the implications of these programs for preserving traditional knowledge, promoting biodiversity, and child nutrition.

Children Foraging in a Changing World

In line with this year’s theme of “truth and responsibility,” we need new tools for doing rigorous anthropological research while maintaining accountability to the communities where we work. As researchers, we face complex, 21st century issues of globalization, climate change, racial justice, economic insecurity, and public health. We are tasked today with training our students to solve these big problems while adjusting to synchronous and asynchronous online teaching. In this roundtable, panelists will reflect on the obstacles facing instructors teaching methods courses and their efforts to overcome those obstacles.

Challenges to Teaching Anthropological Research Methods

This roundtable intends to have an open and honest conversation about the limits and possibilities of anthropological methods/analyses as forms of interventions and social transformation. We are frequently called to work within already-existing harmful infrastructures to create better biometrics, better trials, better institutions, better science. What are the feminist practices around using our methods and analysis for redeeming metrics/tools in toxic systems, and/or placing nuanced force towards the abolition of such systems? Long ago Emily Martin (1998) noted that an understanding of science as reductionist is sustained by treating it at distance, not carefully attending to the rich cultural worlds in which it is practiced. Following the feminist method of tracing how scientific charts, images, and terminologies are used, it becomes obvious that science(s) are capacious: lively, performative, partial, and indeterminate (Blell et al. 2021; Glabau 2017; Davis 2019; Benjamin 2019; Noble 2018; Mulla 2014;Taussig et al., 2013). While problems of racism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy are structural, political transformation often happens through direct, targeted action (Imarisha 2013). How then can we undertake direct actions that are not predicated upon reductionism-- that respond to everyday complexities? Where does reductionism (biological, statistical, molecular) afford strategic political possibilities? Where might it pose a dangerous trap? How do we add truths of ambiguity and indeterminacy, while also cultivating effective possibilities for social transformation? In this roundtable, we will discuss how to build a feminist anthropology of science that is politically powerful while based on the capaciousness of science.

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Plant-Anthropo-Genesis: the Co-production of Plant-People Lifeworlds

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