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invited talk
Feeling Latinx Histories of Environmental Injustice
keywords:
humanism
migration
methodology
In her path-breaking book, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart, Ruth Behar encouraged anthropologists to consider questions of representation, authorship, subjectivity, emotion, and genre. Her work dovetailed with scholarship by Faye Harrison that encouraged us to seriously consider how anthropologists might decolonize a discipline that was once routinely reinscribed disparate power relations between observer and observed. In the twenty plus years since the publication of these key texts, anthropologists have pushed the boundaries of representation, rethinking how we observe and witness changing cultures and, perhaps more importantly how we participate and how we are affected by the communities in which we study. The papers in this panel explore what it means to vulnerable observers in this historical moment where anti-Latinx sentiment has reached a fever pitch. Rhetoric deployed by former President Trump launched policies and vigilantism that has further marginalized and subjugated migrant and racialized Latinx communities in the United States. As anthropologists who have been bearing witness to the violence of this moment, the papers in this panel seek new ways to both represent Latinx communities to stand alongside our interlocutors.