This panel will explore land, labor, and the constantly shifting relationships between the rural and urban. We hope to examine contemporary processes that inextricably link rural and urban even as they produce unevenness and separation between them. There are many, among them financialization and consolidation of farmland (Fairbairn 2020); real estate and development moving into formerly agricultural spaces and changing both economies and forms of land tenure (Berry 2000; Levien 2018; Rabie 2021); and powerful infrastructures of commodity production and circulation whose new geographies transform patterns of land use and control (Arboleda 2020; Cowen 2014; Khalili 2020; Plonski n.d.). The transformation of agricultural production and the displacement of rural populations that characterizes the expansion of capital accumulation (Marx 1992) shapes the contemporary trajectories of labor migration, employment, and unemployment (Elyachar 2005; Ferguson 1999; Neel 2018). Such processes cross urban and rural spaces in and across national borders (Buckley 2012; Chalcraft 2009; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) and have cultural, political, legal, and ideological impacts (Harvey 1990; Lefebvre 2003; Said 1993; Smith 1984; Williams 1973). We are interested in papers that think across the rural-urban divide and develop concepts appropriate to contemporary political, social, and environmental challenges. How do settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and fixed capital (Bhandar 2018; Coulthard 2014; Gilmore 2007; Rickford 2017; Robinson 2000) shape the distribution of land and labor as well as the law and ideology of ownership, rights, and community? How might we draw on traditions of anti-imperialism and agrarian political economy (Arrighi 1970; Mintz 1973; Stoler 1986; Wolf 1955) to understand contemporary struggles around dispossession and exclusion (Ajl 2020; Hall et. al. 2014; Li 2014; Levien, Watts, and Yan 2018). Such struggles include both organized movements (Edelman 1999) and collective forms of surviving, perhaps even flourishing, in places that might constitute interstices of capitalist ruins (Tsing 2015). We wish to explore how families, kinship, and social reproduction are changing (Crehan 1997; Katz 2001); the resources people draw on in times of dispossession and upheaval (Chang 2010; Sayigh 1979); and how emerging practices of growing food, organizing care, sustaining ecologies, and creating durable modes of belonging to place blur distinctions between rural and urban (Aistara 2018; Hoover 2017; Jacobs 2018; Lyons 2020).

Portland: Livability and Racialized Discourse in the Planned City

Land and Labor Across the Rural-Urban Divide II

technical paper

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.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“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.

Francesca Manning

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Portland: Livability and Racialized Discourse in the Planned City

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