United States

Critical research spaces on university campuses range from laboratories, centers, institutes, studios, and bureaus. As many know, occupying a physical space on campuses for qualitative research is often in short supply. However, when such spaces do exist, there is little knowledge shared concerning how they thrive, grow, and adapt. These built research environments range from small rooms that have been renovated to centers intentionally built from the ground up. Knowing how the space, and those who direct them, foster collaborative and creative ethnographies are often overlooked in how we come to think about the infrastructure that supports multimodal ethnographic research. This roundtable takes as its starting point the dynamic role critical research spaces play as essential instruments in anthropological research. In order to do this, this panel will be virtually facilitated from each participants’ own research space (or with those present at the convention center). This discussion will engage with ideas around what informs designing, leading, managing, and maintaining these spaces in the ever-shifting landscape of ethnographic research, community-based research, digital publishing, and the morphing goals outlined in institutional strategic plans. Questions such as how does the site-specificity of a research space inform the types of work it supports, and vice versa. Additionally, this discussion is a space to think through the imagined and physical spaces themselves, their policies, protocols, and politics that all too often become invisible. In order to foster an exchange of ideas, the goal of this roundtable is to bring together active researchers who lead critical research spaces to discuss ethics, inclusivity, technologies, infrastructure, and politics. Directors from the following critical research spaces will lead this roundtable discussion: Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania (Deborah Thomas) Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology, Center College of Design in Pasadena (Elizabeth Chin) Ethnography Studio, Rice University (Andrea Ballestero) Bureau of Ethnography, University of Texas, Austin (Craig Campbell) Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab, University of British Columbia, Okanagan (Fiona McDonald, Susan Frohlick, and Garth Evans) Berkely Ethnography Lab, University of California, Berkeley (Daniel Fisher and Jason Price)

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Critical Research Spaces: Lab, Studios, Centers and the production dynamic anthropologies

research/research methods

ethnography

collaboration

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

While formal language interpretation within institutional settings is bound by strict protocol, the larger social context in which it occurs is largely rendered inert. Can communicative justice occur when interaction across language borders is thus abstracted? There are solid case studies contrasting what is expected of interpreters and what it is they actually do and encounter. Discussion also exists of what, under varying circumstances, is understood by culture, cross cultural or intercultural in the settings where language interpretation takes place. Frank comparative discussion of what may be the elements central to the development of communicative justice in language interpretation is nonetheless missing. Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs brought to the fore the discussion of key structural and political economic factors at bay in communicative justice, in addition to having coined said term (2016). If a critical form of language interpretation that pursues communicative justice were to exist, what would it need to reveal that is currently under the radar? What would it call for, when, where, under what circumstances? Would communicative justice in institutional settings even be possible? This roundtable invites medical, legal, linguistic, cultural, and world anthropologists to inquire into and join in the analysis of the various communicative inequities that arise in language interpretation and the central elements these pose.

Critical Language Interpretation: Communicative Inequities in Medical, Legal, and Community Settings

This interdisciplinary roundtable will examine the changing nature of work in the contemporary moment. Bringing together expertise in a variety of sites, from the US to Congo-Brazzaville, to India, Costa Rica, and Ecuador, the panelists will consider alternatives to “traditional” full-time employment, how different groups of people are rethinking the meanings and practices of work. In the US, even before COVID 19, there was ample evidence that the ways people worked were not working any more•and never worked for many segments of the population. Individuals across the economic spectrum grappled with growing uncertainty as employment opportunities shrank, wages stagnated, and benefits evaporated. COVID further transformed this landscape, as individuals lost jobs, shifted to the gig economy, or exited the employment market to care for children and family members. Women, and especially women of color, were the hardest hit, exposing long-lasting cultural fault lines. Similarly, in other parts of the world, the notion of work as full-time, decently paid, locally conducted and consumed, unionized, and stable never held entirely, and the pandemic’s economic ravages have rendered this ideal ever more untenable. Our roundtable will take up this shifting terrain, asking if this crisis might also represent a moment of opportunity, one in which people are seeking out new forms of work that make better sense to them•economically, pragmatically, and emotionally•than seeking “traditional” full-time employment. What has been theorized negatively as post-Fordist precarity could also be seen as a moment of opportunity to move beyond industrial-era forms of waged labor. We will discuss some of these new ways of designing work, asking why they appeal to workers, what rewards and risks they entail, how profitable they are, and finally how they might compel us to redefine the very meanings of work and success. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and personal experience, we will discuss the many ways in which individuals are re-imagining and recreating the concept of work, and how these can be both exploitative and empowering, grueling and fulfilling, a symptom of rising insecurity and also a conscious strategy to recreate security in new forms. How might these new forms of work impact worker identities; employment status; gender roles, families and communities; and the legal protections available to workers? In the current moment, questions about how to support and protect workers, the relationship between “work” and “home,” and how to rethink the ties between formal employment and social protections take on added urgency. Panelists include scholars from multiple disciplines (American studies, anthropology, folklore and ethnomusicology, sociology) at varied career levels, teaching at public and private colleges and universities in the US and Britain. This diversity in both disciplinary perspective and career level, along with participants’ different national and ethnic backgrounds, provides a more expansive vantage point from which to analyze the many ways individuals define and value “work.” This majority female panel also emphasizes how women are often at the forefront of redefining, extending, and revaluing the very meanings of work.

Creating Alternative Forms of Work

Recently, a number of countries in Latin America have seen monumental acts of citizen actions calling for more democratic forms of governing. These acts have primarily focused on presidential politics related to neoliberal policies, term limits, gender-based violence, and Indigenous peoples’ rights. In this panel, authors focus on ethnographic materials to complicate popular understandings of democracy within recent Latin American political contexts. Participants focus on Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico to explore the ways citizens of these countries conceive of democracy, employ protest, and often challenge assumptions based on identity, subjectivity, and political affiliation. In using ethnographic examples, each presenter draws upon voices on the ground in order to understand macro-level political processes. In doing so, we draw attention to the ways democracy is enacted beyond the voting box, in spectacular manifestations, media circulations, and performances of sovereignty.

Beyond the Vote: Popular Understandings of Democracy in Latin America

Since the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines have been promoted as an important tool for ending the global health emergency. Even while controlled clinical trials were measuring the medical efficacy of vaccine innovation, anthropologists were calling for increased focus on social efficacy of novel vaccines. The fact is that vaccination campaigns have always been a project of public cooperation. A vaccine can only be as effective as public willingness to participate and the community’s ability to access the resource. The technological breakthrough that COVID-19 vaccines represent, however, has tended to garner more attention and resources than has the social enterprise of vaccination. Anthropologists have been studying vaccine confidence for decades. This research has demonstrated that multiple factors influence a person’s perspectives on, and acceptance of vaccines (i.e. individual and group influences; contextual influences • historical, political, and institutional; and vaccine development and safety). Just as contagious as the pathogens that vaccines are trying to stop, are the personal perceptions, emotions, and beliefs that transmit within the social environment. Contextual influences • from historical maltreatment from the medical industry to issues of systematic racism • affect issues of trust vs mistrust, as well as material access in a vaccination campaign. Transparency in the vaccine development process , including safety monitoring systems and personal experience with adverse effects, has major effects on the credibility of vaccination efforts. Both within countries and across the world, the pandemic has had disproportionate adverse impacts. It is critical that COVID vaccines be delivered in a fair and equitable fashion to remedy these disparities. While each country has been leading its own vaccination delivery efforts, the reality is such that in order to stop the pandemic, we must reach community immunity among the global population. Rich countries have received reasonable pressure to waive intellectual property rights over COVID vaccine, and to prioritize vaccination of vulnerable adults worldwide over that of their own less-vulnerable children, to ensure an equitable distribution of the resource across the globe. This round table brings together anthropologists who have been working closely in local communities, nations, and the world on the COVID-19 vaccine roll out from a social efficacy and equity perspective. The roundtable aims to have all participants engage actively in a conversation about appropriate response efforts. This round table discussion will be conducted in an open forum fashion in order to encourage as much dialogue with the audience as possible.

Anthropological contributions to COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout

This roundtable unpacks the current challenges facing higher educational institutions, civil society organizing, and Indigenous survivance in Nicaragua since the civic uprising in April 2018 and subsequent government repression and paramilitary violence since that time. A couple of the roundtable contributors will be discussing higher education in Nicaragua at the crossroads of neoliberal constraints and government limits on university autonomy in national and transnational perspective as well as the general human rights situation in Nicaragua; other contributors will share research about the challenges facing Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, an isolated region of the country with significant natural resource exploitation, outbound emigration, and vulnerability. In addition to contributions from Luciana Chamorro, Wendi Bellanger, Jose Idiaquez, Josh Mayer, Andy Gorvetzian, Jim Quesada and Serena Cosgrove, our roundtable will include discussant comments from Jennifer Goett; she'll provide comments on presenters' research against the backdrop of ongoing crisis in Nicaragua.

Analyzing the Ongoing Challenges in Nicaragua since the Civic Uprising of 2018: National and International Perspectives

In her forthcoming book ‘Sonorous Worlds’, Yana Stainova studies the lives of classical musicians against a backdrop of everyday violence in the urban barrios of Venezuela. Focusing on El Sistema, a nation-wide, state-funded music education program, the book argues that music, as a form of enchantment and artistic practice, simultaneously channels and exceeds forms of state power and social control. In doing so, it develops a conception of “musical enchantment” that acts as a key contending force of political aspiration in the wake of the decline of socialist governments in Latin America.  Stainova’s book shows us how in the face of social exclusion, forced migration, and humanitarian crisis, the daily labor of musical practice elicits worlds of creativity and imagination that help young people cope with and challenge their everyday material realities, and harness the singular potential of art in order to reimagine their futures. By doing so it makes three key interventions in debates in the anthropology of art, ethnomusicology, and the everyday life of the state. First, it reverses the traditional conceptions of western classical music as elitist “distinction”, revealing how it may act, instead, as a democratized form available to the urban poor. Second, it demonstrates an alternative route to self-expression vis-à-vis the Latin American state that transcends logics of socialist “repression” and neo-liberal “aspiration”. Third, it offers a picture of aesthetic life that is both tied to and distinct from coordinates of socio-political history. Through its overall focus on artistic practice and enchantment, ‘Sonorous Worlds’ also provides a method by which to theorize the successes and failures of political projects through the lens of everyday transformations in people’s lives. In this Roundtable, discussants are invited to consider the resonances that this book might have with their own regions of thought in relation to questions of state and everyday violence, formations of wonder and enchantment, and the relation between institutional power and artistic practice.

Sonorous Worlds: Musical Enchantment in Venezuela | A Book Discussion with Yana Stainova

In decolonial determinations to resist the modern ontological separation of nature from culture, people living in Andean Community countries increasingly recognize natural and cultural forces to be inextricably interrelated under the principle of the pluriverse (Blaser and de la Cadena 2018, Escobar 2019). After years of struggles led by Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and campesino communities, mobilizations by new social movements, and citizen activism, constitutional reforms affirmed the plurinational and intercultural natures of the region’s polities. Across the Andean Community region, communities articulate human rights and responsibilities ‘from below’, giving voice to political ontologies in which the agency of non-human actors features in the assertion of collective life projects. To what extent and how do such posthuman articulations reconfigure territory and the rights of humans, nature, and other beings? In this roundtable, our discussion is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples living in different coastal, Andean, and Amazonian regions of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Presenting research informed by ontological, multispecies, and posthuman approaches, discussants will recount how local communities are enacting life projects that rely on intimate relationships between human and non-human agents including plants, ecologies, and territorial animacies. We will show how across the Andean Community, ecocentric initiatives are maturing to advance agendas to reclaim territory, ensure the continued vitality of agrobiodiversity, and enact new models for biocultural rights governance.

Posthuman Rights Struggles and Environmentalisms from Below: Pluriversal Life Projects

The past two decades have seen a substantive change in the way that the ethnography of Jews and Jewishness has been conceived. In this “new Jewish ethnography,” anthropologists working on every continent approach the study of Jews and Jewish topics in ways that complicate the category of “Jew,” and bring profound insights to anthropological theory writ large. The current generation of ethnographers comes to the study of Jewish themes through our scholarly interests in core areas of anthropological theory and praxis, problematizing understandings of identity and practice through explorations of a diasporic, transnational, multiracial, multicultural “imagined community.” Further, we recognize the complex representational valences of Jewishness and the way these symbols are deployed, including in the absence of Jews. Increasingly working in the global periphery, ethnographers of Jewishness find that Jews in a wide range of contexts make use of the surrounding cultural idioms and reigning ideologies to make sense of their experience. In this new work, Jewish identity is understood as something experienced and practiced, contingent, syncretic, dynamic, and constructed • people engaged in complex subject formation • affirming that Jewishness is neither singular nor inherently “Jewish.” This roundtable brings together multiple generations of anthropologists, with institutional bases in four countries, and research in several geographical regions, to evaluate the state of the field and explore the intersecting themes that our research engages. These themes include: reconsiderations of the notion of “peoplehood” in light of contemporary genetic research and virtual community formation; the afterlives of research post-publication; multiple forms of cultural mediation through virtual engagements and representations of Jews in film and television; the relationships between fiction and ethnography (in writing and visual media); shifting racial-ethnic landscapes in which Jews are represented as people of color and/or uber-white or (re)cast themselves in racially disruptive terms; reconceptualizations of Jewish heritage through revitalization of Jewish languages, music and food traditions; contradictory forms of Jewish political engagement and the political uses of Jewish symbols; and the paradoxes of being “at home” without a “homeland,” where the “in-gathering” of the Jewish people is electronic, especially in the time of COVID.

Jews and the Idea of Jews: Ethnographic Disruptions

Over the past year, Lebanon has endured compounding financial, political, and social crises that have forced anthropologists, whether due to personal hardships or changes to field sites, to change their orientation to the discipline and practices of ethnography. Following the popular mass uprising of October 2019, Lebanon has witnessed a continued economic collapse, political instability, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the massive explosion at the Beirut Port in August 2020, all of which have impacted the way that anthropologists engage with their research topics and interlocutors. All of this has led to unpayable university tuitions, the loss of salaries of faculty and staff, and increased precarity for ethnographers••and local researchers in particular••working on the ground. Further, Lebanese security forces continue to use excessive force, try civilians in military courts, and prosecute activists for speech acts, stifling the forms of resistance and cooperation available to both local and foreign researchers. Despite Lebanon’s comparatively small size, its contested landscape has long helped anthropologists to understand the necessity of historicizing sociopolitical categories like “sect” in order to stress their modern politicization and mobilization in the midst of competing nationalisms. Lebanon has also offered a window into the ways in which gendered discourses of citizenship come to produce particular and limited understandings of the nation and citizenship. In recent decades, Lebanon had served as a place of tenuous refuge for well over a million Syrian, Palestinian, and Iraqi refugees, further increasing the presence of international researchers seeking to untangle networks of kinship, political economy, and access to health and education in forced exile. Indeed, regional displacements and disasters have centered Lebanon as a particularly generative location for research into crises, their histories, and their aftermaths. Building on this year’s meeting theme “Truth and Responsibility,” this roundtable explores the ways that the intersecting crises in Lebanon have altered anthropological orientations to ethnographic research. Participants will consider the ways that the needs, aspirations, and lived realities of our respective interlocutors•as well as our own positionalities•have changed or evolved in the context of Lebanon’s compounded disasters. What forms of justice and solidarity can anthropological research foster in the absence of accountability for ongoing economic breakdown and political repression? How can international anthropologists support and stand in solidarity with those primarily affiliated with Lebanese institutions? And how can insights about anthropological practice gained in Lebanon travel in a world witnessing an alarming rise in ecological disasters, xenophobic nationalist rhetoric, unbridled neoliberalization of educational institutions, and mass, involuntary migration?

Ethnography, Compounding Crises, and the World to Come: What Can Anthropology Learn from the Case of Lebanon?

Practicing anthropologists, at one time or another, have read the various codes of ethics published by organizations like the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA), and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). All of them are exemplary codes of ethics, but we ask, are they enough to help early-career anthropologists navigate the complexities of business?  To address this question, the session brings together a diverse group of practitioners from product management, user experience (UX), consumer research, marketing, and data science. Many of us have started our own practices while others work for organizations. Regardless of our backgrounds, we all have experiences where our semantic understanding of ethics bumped up against the realities of the job and our own needs to provide for ourselves and our families.  These experiences and how we navigated them is the basis of this roundtable. Each participant will discuss a case study in which they were unintentionally thrust into an ethical conundrum and will explain how they responded in the context of their professional practice. We will specifically cover what was the ethical issue, how did we try to address it, and what was the outcome.  As the audience will learn, sometimes we were successful in righting the injustice, even at the cost of the engagement, and sometimes we were not. Regardless of the outcome though, all of us believe that these experiences have helped us to navigate future ethical dilemmas, and while we do not condone any of the unethical practices that occurred, we appreciate the teaching value of our lived-experiences over only having a semantic understanding of the ethical codes.  To that end, we aim to honor the value of established ethics codes and final book chapters, but also to call attention to the real-world complexities of applying these texts to ethically challenging situations in practice, and to share with the audience experiences that can enliven their understanding of these texts.  The session is important because more students are going into the field as practicing anthropologists than ever before, and likewise, more anthropologists will be facing ethical issues as we have. Furthermore, given the rapid advancements in technologies like automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and genetics, many practitioners are going to be thrust into positions in which they will need to decide what role they wish to play in reshaping our economic systems and humanity.  There are new ethical challenges ahead of us, and though the tried and true ethical guidelines of the past will remain relevant as the basis of our understanding, we need to keep updating the conversations we have about applying these codes to the changing nature of business. Our careers depend on it, but most importantly, so do the people we ultimately represent.

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Critical Research Spaces: Lab, Studios, Centers and the production dynamic anthropologies

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