Amidst a widening global wealth gap where racial orders of mobility come into stark view, minoritized individuals strive toward a materially and socially “better” life. Anthropologists and allied scholars explore the rise of new middle classes that include individuals historically marginalized by race (Coe and Pauli 2020, Klein et al. 2018, Shakow 2014, Vallejo 2012). Celebratory accounts of such apparent economic mobility suggest that it may lead to the softening of racial and class prejudices, enabling meaningful social mobility, inclusion, and the chance to join the ranks of those living the good life. Our existing frameworks frequently characterize these yearning efforts at class mobility as incarnations of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), whereby hopeful strivers unwittingly pursue fantasies of the good life that ultimately do them harm. Alternatively, such efforts are examined as acts of transformative aspiration (Appadurai 2013) and “becoming” (Biehl and Locke 2017) that suggest the development of new subjectivities and possibilities beyond present social orders (James 2019). Moreover, these studies of rising middle classes’ yearnings coincide with scholarly concern around how minoritized/marginalized individuals cope with “new” forms of precarity arising from the collapse of Fordist labor regimes and the rise of micro-entrepreneurship and anti-poverty efforts that, ironically, lead to increased poverty (Hardon et al. 2019, Kar 2018, Muehlebach 2011). Emphasizing contemporary modes of precarity, and how people make do, runs the risk of ignoring long-standing racialized orders of capitalism and colonialism that have always constrained minoritized populations’ mobilities, but not their dreams of the good life (Castellanos 2020; Millar 2017; Weston 2012).  This panel pushes our collective anthropological imaginations to reconceptualize class mobility as racialized. We do so to better understand how people made marginal by race and class define and fashion a good life and self in material, relational, and moral registers (Fischer 2014, Gregory and Altman 2018). Toward this aim, we think with our varied interlocutors’ sensemaking of the intersecting gendered, raced, and classed structural inequalities that shape their chances of class mobility as well as their perceptions of their own mobility’s possibilities. Accordingly, this panel grapples with the following questions: How are modes of entrepreneurship, financial inclusion, financial ruin, and white collar work themselves racialized and imbricated with moralized perceptions of the valued minority person that circulate locally and globally? How are these orders of racialization altered or anchored by individuals’ movement into or out of a ‘new’ minoritized middle class? How are our interlocutors theorizing their own experiences of racial and class-based marginalization or belonging? How do they conceptualize the good life to which they aspire--including the material evidence of their triumphant successes or painful failings? At the heart of this panel, and our individual projects, is attention to the intersecting modalities of power and privilege asserted and re-worked amid struggles over racialized class mobility. This panel seeks to work against the epistemological violence that can occur in academic research and writing by centering the sense-making practices of our interlocutors as co-theorists of their own experiences of racial and class-based marginalization and mobility.

Dirt and Debt: The Racialization of Default in Brazil

Money Lightens?:  Global Regimes of Racialized Class Mobility and Local Visions of the Good Life

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.

Kathleen Millar

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Dirt and Debt: The Racialization of Default in Brazil

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