United States

In November 2021, the Colombian Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition (CEV) will release their final report on the Colombian armed conflict. This roundtable brings together anthropologists from diverse social, geographical, and institutional locations - including scholar-practitioners - to discuss the practical, methodological, and pedagogical implications of the CEV’s work and final report. It is one of the first truth commissions in the world to develop an explicitly intersectional methodology that aims to bear witness to the complexities of the internal armed conflict, across the axes of generation, ability, gender, ethnicity, and diverse psychosocial impacts, and which aims to lay the foundations for coexistence and the non-repetition of violence. The completion of the CEV’s mandate this year raises significant and timely questions for anthropological inquiry into truth, recognition, responsibility, justice, and knowledge production: What • and whose • truths will be foregrounded (and obscured) in the final report? What methods, theories, and ethics shaped the CEV’s praxis of truth-telling and recognition of atrocities and harms? Created as a “temporary” state institution with a three-year mandate, how do the temporalities of institutionalized truth commissions shape - and constrain - possibilities for recognition and healing? How have grassroots leaders, CEV officials, and local and international liaisons negotiated, reworked, and refused the constraints of state-society relations on the ground? What narratives about the past will the CEV’s report produce, and how will these be communicated to different publics, as the first ever truth commission worldwide with a ‘pedagogy’ mandate? How will the CEV’s narratives about truth be received, appropriated and contested by different sectors Colombian society? And what impact will they have on the possibilities for peacebuilding?  This roundtable will direct ethnographic attention to the CEV in order to lift out the emergent possibilities, lessons learned, and limitations of truth-telling for generating accountability, recognition, and healing justice. This will be a bilingual, Spanish-English roundtable discussion.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Contested Truths: Narratives, Hopes and Fears from the Colombian Truth Commission

truth and reconciliation

transitional justice

public anthropology

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

Ten years into South Sudan’s independence, the world’s newest nation-state is confronted by constant challenges, but alongside these uncertainties, new realities and potentialites have emerged. This roundtable, the first of its kind to exclusively focus on South Sudan in the history of AAA Annual Meetings, will bring together several scholars of South Sudan to discuss their insights on post-independence South Sudan. Discussing their own and each other’s work, their aim will be to suggest new lines of thinking that move beyond extant, limited framings of South Sudan’s situation as one of “crisis” and “failure.” Such notions, which characterize popular and academic understandings of South Sudan and postcolonial contexts more broadly, normalize neocolonial interventions while offering little sense of the lived realities, emerging dynamics, and complexities within such spaces. The discussants seek to explore how situations in South Sudan might be alternatively read as as processes of becoming, acts of re-making, or strivings toward future possibilities (Biehl and Locke 2017; Pink, Akama and Sumartojo 2018; Goldstone and Obarrio 2016). Drawing on the varied interests of the roundtable participants, the roundtable aims to explore the topics of medical humanitarianism, urban practices, peacemaking, displacement and return, gender dynamics and gender-based violence, and youth and education. Bringing together scholars from three continents discussing their recent and ongoing work on South Sudan, this roundtable will shed light on the stakeholders, designs, and mechanisms that are significant in the formation of a future-oriented South Sudan and illuminate ways in which domestic and international actors are engaged in this process. We are particularly interested in the liminal space(s) between uncertainties and hopes that carry political implications. Such a discussion will offer valuable insights for re-thinking precarity in challenged circumstances in postcolonial and conflict-affected spaces within Africa and across the globe. In keeping with the conference theme of 'Truth and Responsibility,' this discussion will also intervene in the long anthropological consideration of South(ern) Sudan stretching back to the long-debated colonial ethnography of E.E. Evans-Pritchard. With little sustained ethnographic work in South Sudan in the long period of civil war spanning the 1960s to 2006 (the work of Sharon Hutchinson and Jok Madut Jok being notable exceptions), this roundtable and its participants’ own work respond to a pressing need for a revitalized understanding of the lifeways and realities faced by people from cultural contexts famous to any scholar or student of anthropology. In reflecting on their own and each other’s research and insights, the participants will offer vibrant depictions of social and political worlds of South Sudanese people and people tied to South Sudan alongside new theoretical and methodological frames from which to un-think and re-think South Sudan.

Beyond "Failure": South Sudan in Focus

This panel considers the sharing of joy, humor, and pleasure as sensory forces that sway people’s lives, as well as how this is balanced against realities of suffering: affective, intimate, structural. We think about embodied experiences of joy and their material effects as born in and through art practices. In turn, we consider creativity in the ethnographic form • one building on and borrowing from different artistic and aesthetic repertoires • as an essential medium for reflecting and making sense of the balance between joy and suffering in everyday life, and in extraordinary times. Rather than studying happiness as a fantasy always out of reach and outside the self (Berlant 2011), we explore the joys that manifest in the ordinary, in the self, in the (literal and figurative) spaces between people. We conceptualize joy as inseparable from the social suffering in which the lives of our interlocutors are enmeshed, and we aim to understand how this tension finds expression through art. Against this backdrop, we consider how everyday life-affirming acts, self-care, and claiming the right to feel and express joy may surface as forms of “political warfare” (Lorde 1988) for groups whose lives are erased and disparaged by dominant narratives. Inspired by the work of scholars who call for “pleasure activism” (maree brown 2019) and “joyful militancy” (Bergman and Montgomery 2017), or as new forms of “desire” (Tuck and Ree 2016) within contexts of structural violence, this panel asks: How do people whose lives are treated as expendable or invisible affirm themselves as desirable and desiring? In what ways do they refuse to identify with the suffering that is frequently used to describe them and /or address suffering in new ways and forms? How can we think of joy and creativity as affective refusals to be defined by dominant structures and narratives?

Art and Ethnographic Form in Dark Times: Revisiting Joy, Considering Suffering

This virtual roundtable discussion builds off a series of conversations about the relationship between law and anthropology that was begun at the 2018 AAAs and has continued since, both in-person and online. We are a diverse group of scholars•representing different institutional affiliations, career stages, intellectual interests, and identity affiliations•who are committed to interrogating the place of formal law in contemporary legal anthropology. Even as anthropology continues to emphasize that which is adjacent to law (artifacts, institutions, performativity) recent events have highlighted the importance of substantive law in reinforcing and resisting racial inequality, democratic stability, and widespread health disparities. Consequently, our roundtable will consider whether the anthropology of law has any space left for the content of rules, constitutional, common law, or statutory as they may be; rules that matter to the very interlocutors whose artifacts and institutions we seek to study.

What's Law Got To Do With It?: A Forward-Looking Retrospective

How do images as forms of truth, evidence, theory and memory inform Indigenous peoples’ and nations’ relationships to landscapes? How does (at)tending to the visual reveal or complicate power dynamics and animate Indigenous acts of refusal (Simpson 2014), reclamation, resistance or resurgence (Simpson 2017) in settler colonial contexts? This roundtable takes up Lisa Stevenson’s (2014) insight that, “We do not always want the truth in the form of facts or information; often we want it in the form of an image.” Stevenson proposes that images are able to hold uncertainty and contradictions without having to resolve them; they can sustain ambiguities of meaning that go beyond singular facts. Moreover, images and sight can nourish connections to the dead, opening up ways of caring in the aftermath of loss and violence. In this roundtable, we are interested in applying these concepts regarding image to investigations of violence and care in our respective field sites, extending them to relationships to lands, waters and airs. Drawing on Stevenson’s expansive definition of “image,” this roundtable considers works of art, photography, aerial footage, films, memories, maps, and media representations. We ask: in studying Indigenous peoples’ and settler states’ relationships to environments, how do imagistic presences inform and intervene in their praxes and imaginaries of care for waters and lands? While many ethnographic works incisively examine issues pertaining to Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonialism (Cattelino 2008, TallBear 2013, Simpson 2014, Todd 2018), this roundtable seeks to approach these themes through the lens of images. We focus on how images inform, support, or hinder processes of (re)mapping homelands and territories (Goeman 2013), reclaiming knowledge and artistic practices (Harjo, Navarro, and Robertson 2018), remembering and caring for the dead (Stevenson 2014), enunciating impossible testimonies (Agamben 2002, Song 2010), creating and world-making (Pandian 2015), interpreting landscapes (Povinelli 2016), queering capitalism through cultural storytelling, and opening up horizons of possibility (Pandian 2019). Further, we collectively ask: how do images (re)activate ways of imagining or being in relation to lands, waters, airs, ancestors, and the dead? Lastly, we explore how images inform, complicate or mobilize our ethnographic fieldwork and writing, and how we attend to the uncertainty, density and opacity of images as they appear in our field sites.

Truth in the Form of an Image: Knowledge Making, Caring Creations, and Seeing Violence Differently in Settler Colonial Contexts

The purpose of design is to impact the world. The question is not whether to do impactful design. The question is what its impact will be. When anthropology is joined with design it moves toward becoming a transformative practice in ways that have been missing in the past. What new ethical issues and potentials does design + anthropology raise? Anthropology and design have both distinctive and overlapping relationships with truth and responsibility. The practice of anthropology has evolved over time from a descriptive and interpretive science to one that increasingly engages in transformative action. We envision anthropology as forever a “discipline-in-the-making” as Tim Ingold has put it. Anthropology evolves with the social life which is its concern. Design is a process and practice through which continually evolving theory and methods intentionally transform what exists into potentiality for what could be. Complementing Ingold, designer Meredith Davis stresses the fluidity of design in relation to changing socio environmental conditions. Despite these parallels, the fields do differ. Design is more worldly than anthropology. It exists mostly outside academia in commercial applications. And while design is intended to change the world, anthropology has traditionally lacked a transformational mindset and failed to provide training that equips anthropologists to act. Transformational change has happened largely on the sidelines of the discipline’s recognized practice. The shift of anthropology toward engaging in transformational change raises new ethical concerns and gives old issues a new twist. Anthropology has long faced ethical criticisms related to its long relationship with colonialism, and today the field faces charges that it is failing to address contemporary concerns with social justice and systemic racism. As anthropology engages with design, design offers little in the way of ethical guidance. In trying to respond to social concerns, designers encounter pressures driven by corporate strategies, brands, and the realities of keeping businesses profitable. Critiques of design are neither new nor few. Victor Papanek critiqued waste and urged social responsibility half a century ago in his vigorous critique of industrial design. Last year, Mike Monteiro raised similar criticisms of ethical lapses and the need for social responsibility in digital design. What does truth and responsibility look like at the complex intersection of the two disciplines? What should we expect from the merger of anthropology and design? This panel will explore the conference themes of ‘truth and responsibility’ at the intersection that panelist Chris Miller has defined as “design + anthropology”: the integration of the theories, principles, and practices of design and anthropology, creating a new, rapidly evolving transdisciplinary melding of two fields of praxis. Drawing on their experience as researchers, practitioners, and educators at the intersection of design + anthropology, this panel will discuss the potential of this new field to cultivate transformative practices that allow us to contribute to a more ethical common future, and the hazards we might encounter along the way.

Truth and Responsibility in Design + Anthropology

The discipline of anthropology and its practitioners have long sought to interface with people and populations of African descent•and have sought to define the constitution of Blackness itself•within and without Africa. In response, Irma McLaurin posits black feminist anthropology as an intervention, one that “interrupts/disrupts the elitist, sexist, racist dynamics” of anthropological knowledge production (2001: 2). McLaurin conceptualizes the mediation of knowledge to occur between white and black researchers, but what happens to this mediation, when the researcher and the researched upon both live under blackness’ sign? The problem space of this panel is what black critic/theorist Hortense Spillers calls the “intramural”: the relations among those racialized as black that emerge from “what happens when messages that originate elsewhere are assumed as a symptom of [one’s] own becoming” (Spillers 2018: 26). The papers on this panel each tinged with ambivalence, and each authored by a black woman explores the tension between the hermeneutic demands of blackness and the embodied experiences of black women to ask pressing questions about the imbrication of violence and care that produce conditions of black life (and black death). We attend to age, ability, gender, sexuality, and class as units of analysis and spaces of rupture and relation in the intramural. Drawing from our own ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa and the United States, we explore the what “truths” of the black experience-- are lost/mystified or recovered/translated through a black feminist mediation.

Translating the Violent Field: Blackness, Black Women, and Ethnographic Practice

There has been growing interest in the craft of anthropology, perhaps a resurgence or resonances of earlier waves of aesthetic and ethical consideration. Most recently, we've seen the blossoming and subfield solidification of literary anthropology. Attention to textuality and writing has changed the discipline in far-reaching ways. It has enriched understandings of and capacities for narrating ordinary life and textures of experience. This roundtable builds upon the attention to craft to ask somewhat more explicitly political, critical, artistic, and methodological questions about what makes a work of anthropology "edgy." We consider such themes as formal experimentation in writing and other media, the anthropological study of harsh, disturbing, and dark realities, dangerous or controversial ethnographic projects, fieldworker involvement in illicit activity, the ordinary and ambiguous ethics of fieldwork, the gendering and queering of edge, and edges and edginess of activist anthropology and documentary and reportage genres. We critically query the rationales and payoffs of edge work and the problematic figure of intrepid ethnography. We also consider the intellectual and political potential of provocation, experimentation, and equivocation of method and genre for edgy anthropologies of historical and contemporary worlds. This roundtable is inherently committed to and exemplary of an anthropology centered on values of diversity, equality, and critiques of power. It focuses on anthropology's margins in multiple critical senses (representational, geographical, methodological) and examines the empowering uses of diverse representational approaches for incisively studying social power and cultural identities. The roundtable also brings together an incredibly diverse group of scholars who represent multiple kinds of social locations and identities (race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, rank, institutional type).

The Edge of Anthropology

Seeds are transgressive. Gathered within them are potentialities, of becomings, of symbiotic eco-systems, and of generative, flourishing futures. Seeds transform as they grow, and they are always connected to their environments. They are humble; learning is how they live. Like seeds, the Association for the Anthropology of Policy (ASAP) is metabolizing, learning from and responding in solidarity against the literal and figurative violences whose past year manifestations are rooted in intersecting global racisms, capitalisms, and systemic inequities: a deadly pandemic, the state repression of peaceful dissent, and the impunity of nationalistic terrorism, to name a few. At the same time, we lift up as balm, inspiration, and duty the multiple everyday struggles that we witness, participate in, learn with, and commit ourselves to. We are growing a near-future and long-term anthropology of policy that is grounded in justice and liberation, an experiential experiment in challenging legacies of systemic oppression in ASAP, AAA, and anthropology more broadly. As a practical starting point, we take ASAP’s initial commitments on Anti-racism, derived from the Raising Our Voices 2020 cross-sectional event: citational justice; inclusive curricula, representation, recruitment and retention; mentoring and support; and alliances, activism and organizing. As a dispositional departing point, we embrace the humble and persistent (and transgressive, beautifying, and generative) seed. Our guiding questions are: What can an inclusive, transformative anti-oppressive and liberation-oriented anthropology of policy and anthropology more broadly look like? How does transformative anthropology “do” authentic reflection, reckoning, and rearticulation in its intellectual traditions, research methods, teaching, genres of production, professional pathways, and other practices, including and surpassing the acknowledgement, recognition of our own responsibility, and transcendence of racist, oppressive and colonial histories and presents? How can we nurture and celebrate alternate sensibilities that attune us to an anthropology that not only embraces but embodies a humble, inclusive, transformative, and liberation-oriented sub-discipline, discipline, and associated professional practices and pathways? Seeds need nurturance. Let us gather together through this roundtable and continue the work started by many others before us. We especially encourage participation beyond the panel members so as to creatively aspire through our discussion in our principles and praxis towards an anthropology otherwise.

Seeding the Change: Anti-racism and the Anthropology of Policy Otherwise

How might more-than-human arrangements of care enact counter-hegemonic, reparative, or novel forms of relation? Approaching such configurations as potentially radical projects of world-remaking, this panel seeks ethnographic case studies that explore the possibilities for life otherwise emerging through diverse practices of care. We understand care to be the material, bodily, and relational work of providing for other beings and entities (Mol 2008). As anthropologists have noted, projects of care can bolster systems of domination, depoliticize structural inequalities, and enact ongoing violence (cf. Stevenson 2014; Ticktin 2011). Yet care can also take on resistive forms, becoming a form of “experimentation in how to relate to others” (Parreñas 2018: 7) that enables possibilities for disruption or transformation. We foreground care practices that create or sustain competing logics, instead of (or in addition to) furthering established forms of colonial, biopolitical, and/or economic domination. This panel takes as a central premise that beings are always entangled in one another's existence. Humans live in co-constitutive webs of relation with a wide range of other entities, material and immaterial (cf. Todd 2017). Care is a central site for enacting obligations with and toward others, including in ways that open up space for vulnerability, repair, mutuality, and other modes of “living as well as possible” in troubled times (Haraway 2016; Parreñas 2018; Povinelli 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; TallBear 2019). As such, we suggest that care is one possible means for crafting shared responsibility, in ways that may exceed dominant political and economic imperatives. The analytic of care, importantly, makes room for the processual and contingent labor of world-making. Acknowledging critiques that some approaches to ontology have been apolitical, essentializing, or appropriative (Bessire and Bond 2014; Todd 2016), we see care as central to understanding how life otherwise is continually made through the uneven relational work of tinkering, attunement, and adjustment with others. While not operating entirely outside systems of power, caring practices may offer contingent possibilities for relations that are “off-kilter, even illegible” (Matza 2018: 25) to dominant norms. Care, as such, has political potential (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). It is a site for actually existing as well as future possibilities for living with and living well. Papers on this panel cover a range of ways of relating with more-than-human worlds, including with animal and plant species, as well as with animate matter and technologies.

Relations of possibility: More-than-human arrangements and the politics of care

Social disconnection has emerged as a particular form of precarity, the logical endgame of an individualizing neoliberal trajectory exposed, in particular, by the COVID-19 pandemic. Older adults around the world often have been disproportionately subject to this disconnection; although, we would argue, this is a phenomenon individuals face across the life course. Yet, even as inertia pushes toward isolation, inherent interdependencies and the futures they make possible are revealed. In this panel, we present ethnographic research from different points in  the life course, from young to older adulthood, to document sustained and novel forms of social disconnection being experienced and to draw insights about imaginaries made possible by embracing our interdependence.    Within anthropological scholarship, there has been long-standing interest in the relationship between aging and sociality (or its absence) resulting in various forms of social disconnection and isolation. Anthropologists have worked to articulate the dimensions of social disconnection by describing and distinguishing between not just loneliness, but social isolation, solitude, and marginality (Biehl, 2005; Lamb, 2008; Coleman, 2014; Mikkelson, 2016; Danely, 2019). This literature provides insightful commentary on social processes and relationships and highlights the interdependent nature of social disconnection.    This panel investigates various forms of social disconnection with the intention to highlight the fact we understand disconnection in relation to the (imagined) body politic. Panelists draw upon research with a range of participants across multiple contexts: older adults in the Netherlands, experiencing social distancing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; queer and trans older adults in long-term care in Canada; young adults on the autism spectrum who engage in furry fandom; prisoners in within the health care unit in a US prison; head and neck cancer survivors in the Midwestern US, and older adults in nursing homes and their families in Memphis, TN.  In doing so, we maintain that different relationships to sociality (e.g., loneliness, solitude, social distancing) are not mutually exclusive, but instead are dynamic and simultaneous. Alongside these relationships, this panel explores the affective, relational, technological, social, and political-economic dimensions of social disconnection. How do institutions construct and organize solitude and other forms of social disconnection? What kinds of work does social disconnection do for our current political economic configurations? Under which conditions do forms of social disconnection emerge, shift and/or circulate across different contexts? How is social disconnection experienced and understood across the life course? What forms of solitude(s) emerge within social relationships? In light of the spread of COVID-19, how do loneliness and solitude(s) emerge as the new form of sociality/belonging and social organization?

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Contested Truths: Narratives, Hopes and Fears from the Colombian Truth Commission

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