What forms of urban politics come into relief if we foreground cities as sites of excessive relationalities, rather than scarce rights? How might an ethics of mutuality prefigure the demand for rights in urban polities? Since the 1970s, approaches to social and economic justice in urban theory have coalesced around the theme of “the right to the city” (Harvey 2009; 2013; Lefebvre 1996). The problematic of rights brings into view important struggles to organize and protect public space (Low 2000; Peterson 2006), practices of appropriating street and market sites in order to make a living in the face of exclusionary policies (Bayat 2012; Bhimji 2010; Grant and Thompson 2015), and the more general possibilities of civic engagement and protest in cities as key sites in today’s financialized global economy (Leitner and Strunk 2014). Yet even as urban inhabitants mobilize a universalist discourse of “rights,” their understandings and enactments come nested in relations that far exceed abstractions of civil society and law (Chatterjee 2003, Simone 2004), relations that are situated in infrastructures and ecologies that accrue and retrace sedimented histories of belonging, othering, and coloniality (Anand 2017; Caldeira 2000; Escobar 2004; Quijano and Ennis 2000). This panel grapples with two problematics we read in the influential concept of rights to the city. The first problematic is the idea that social justice is universal, rational, and depersonalized•and that in cities, it necessarily involves access to public space and equality of urban residents. In practice, we observe that, even while claiming rights, urban residents claim and control urban space and resources through practices that are personalized, embodied, and networked through caste, ethnic, racial, and gendered geographies (Agard Jones 2013; Jamaal Wright 2020; Lee 2017; Roberts 2016; Sreenath 2019); exceeding conceits of modernist rationality and to demarcate forms of kin and community making that, far from universal, are situated in ecologies that register as Western universalism’s ‘imperial debris’ (Stoller 2013; Tsing 2015). The second problematic, which we understand as intimately related to the first, is the way ontologies of scarcity continue to underpin the notion of urban rights, even as urban scarcities come circumscribed in unruly relationalities and toxicities (Chalfin 2017; Fredricks 2018). In such framings, urban space, citizenship, and resources appear in terms of their lack: scarce resources to be distributed among coherent and pre-constituted publics. The panel invites thinking about other political ontologies emergent in urban spaces (de la Cadena 2014; Massey 2005; Tedesco 2014). It opens dialogue on how problematizing scarcity as a social construct invites other understandings of social justice that account for economies of excess, practices of mutuality, enactments of care and speculation, and other means of distributing resources and claims to resources (such as credit and debt) in cities today.

Toxic possessions: Some practicalities of dirt from Detroit

Ecologies of urban mutuality: reframing rights, scarcity, and accumulation in the city

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.

Nicholas Caverly

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Toxic possessions: Some practicalities of dirt from Detroit

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