United States

Across geographical contexts, youth from marginalized communities are often rendered objects of moral and political concern (Comaroff &amp; Comaroff 2005). Seen to be in socially and economically precarious positions, these young people are often the targets of various humanitarian and policy interventions. These interventions are frequently aimed at improving their educational outcomes and supporting their meaningful participation within society as productive citizens. Implicit within these projects are highly contested, ever-shifting, and deeply politicized understandings of education, schooling, and success, many of which are entangled in utilitarian, neoliberal, white supremacist, and colonial visions of the world and marginalized youths’ proper place within it. This panel brings together papers that examine how marginalized youth engage, negotiate, and contest normative visions of their education and the types of futures that their formal and informal schooling are envisioned to generate. Drawing from a wide array of geographic contexts and institutional settings, these papers build upon works that have probed how racialized assemblages have disciplined humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans (Weheliye 2014), and youth as a category that is constantly remade in sociopolitical practice (Durham 2004). Whether through their participation in formal and elective educational settings, their embodied protests on university campuses, or their use of social media to organize and disseminate knowledge, this panel examines how young people from marginalized backgrounds strive to reassert their status as fully human. We ask, how do youth stake their own political claims in educational processes amidst persistent global inequality? How are youth unsettling normative discourses about education, schooling, and success, and making space for the knowledge paradigms and epistemologies that allow them to articulate their own truths and envision alternative futures? In exploring these moves, this panel seeks to generate insights about how young people are engaging in and beyond a world that denies/defies their humanity.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Contested Education: Making Space for New Knowledge Paradigms and Alternative Futures

marginality

epistemology

education

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.

Across geographical contexts, youth from marginalized communities are often rendered objects of moral and political concern (Comaroff & Comaroff 2005). Seen to be in socially and economically precarious positions, these young people are often the targets of various humanitarian and policy interventions. These interventions are frequently aimed at improving their educational outcomes and supporting their meaningful participation within society as productive citizens. Implicit within these projects are highly contested, ever-shifting, and deeply politicized understandings of education, schooling, and success, many of which are entangled in utilitarian, neoliberal, white supremacist, and colonial visions of the world and marginalized youths’ proper place within it. This panel brings together papers that examine how marginalized youth engage, negotiate, and contest normative visions of their education and the types of futures that their formal and informal schooling are envisioned to generate. Drawing from a wide array of geographic contexts and institutional settings, these papers build upon works that have probed how racialized assemblages have disciplined humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans (Weheliye 2014), and youth as a category that is constantly remade in sociopolitical practice (Durham 2004). Whether through their participation in formal and elective educational settings, their embodied protests on university campuses, or their use of social media to organize and disseminate knowledge, this panel examines how young people from marginalized backgrounds strive to reassert their status as fully human. We ask, how do youth stake their own political claims in educational processes amidst persistent global inequality? How are youth unsettling normative discourses about education, schooling, and success, and making space for the knowledge paradigms and epistemologies that allow them to articulate their own truths and envision alternative futures? In exploring these moves, this panel seeks to generate insights about how young people are engaging in and beyond a world that denies/defies their humanity.

technical paper

Can the Talibe Speak?: Black Muslim Youth and Educational Futures

Dreaming otherwise in girled development projects: Temporal refusals and pedagogies of collective care

Imperial Formations of Tourism and Youth Futures in the Dominican Republic

Migration Prevention and Education: Guatemalan indigenous youth, occidental knowledge paradigms and the pursuit of opportunity

This paper takes a theoretical approach towards viewing climate change via a queer lens. By taking in multiple queer perspectives (the affirmational pessimism of Edelman (2004), the negating pessimism of Munoz (2009), and the affirmational optimism of Hall (2014) and Lear (2008)), this paper proposes that the Earth's future is queered through climate change. Arguing that the Earth has been made into a sinthomosexual through human action, we propose the Earth is inherently queer through the long and short-term effects of disasters, pollution, deforestation, and rising sea levels. However, we also suggest that the Earth's queer future is not all bleak, as the optimistic and unique perspectives that radical queer and crip scholars use may aid in battling the devastating effects of climate change by not only queering how we understand climate change, but how we respond to it as well.

Contentiously Queer: Subverting the Norm and Engendering Marginalization

In the United States, spatial ideologies are central to understandings of LGBTQ+ marginalization. Especially salient to these ideologies are political calls for the production of ‘safe spaces’ for queer and trans people and communities and a corresponding ethic of LGBTQ-affirming care. At the same time, notions of LGBTQ+ safe space have been critiqued for reinforcing racial stratification and contributing to notions of queer and trans people as fragile subjects in need of protection. This paper draws on eighteen months of ethnographic data from one local organization providing social and medical services to Black LGBTQ+ youth in metropolitan Detroit to interrogate tensions over ‘safe space’ in a post-industrial, economically disinvested, and gentrifying urban setting. This paper traces organizational efforts to launch a permanent supportive housing program prioritizing the safety of LGBTQ+ youth, and especially transgender women of color, through a complex public-private partnership between state and non-state institutions. In developing these plans, practitioners, youth, and organizational partners expressed contradictory concerns over the relative “safety” of de-populated, disinvested, and environmentally hazardous spaces, on the one hand, and centrally located, well-resourced, and environmentally sustainable spaces on the other. These concerns reveal tensions over visibility, state surveillance, environmental amenities, and urban gentrification in the production of so-called ‘safe spaces.’ Moreover, they suggest that the work of producing safety for LGBTQ+ youth entails complex entanglements between potentially hazardous physical and social environments and spaces envisioned as ‘safe’ and protected, as well as ethical negotiations navigating, maintaining, or disrupting spatial boundaries between safety and violence.

Between Surveillance & Green Gentrification: The Spatial Politics of Safety among LGBTQ+ Youth in Metropolitan Detroit

Queer Futurisms and Climate Change

This paper is a reflection on ethnographic research I conducted on queer kinship and relationalities in South Africa between 2015 and 2016. I consider the place where anthropological studies of same-sex lives and ties meet the speculations of feminist science fiction to elaborate on a concept of queer life-shaping. Queer life-shaping articulates how my interlocutors created and negotiated natal and chosen kin constellations out of desire, love, and responsibility, and as an extension of who they are. As such, life-shaping draws on the radical yet everyday labor that is Black queer world-making, narrowing in on shifting webs of family that are guided by the loving and intentional work of lesbian parents, motherly lovers, young star-crossed couples, and dutiful descendants of ancestors that I witnessed and wrote about as part of my broader research on knowledge about female-bodied same-sexualities in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. The paper compares and contrasts ethnographic excerpts of queer life-shaping with the imaginative queer reproduction techniques described in the feminist sci-fi novels that followed me through fieldwork. I argue that interlocutors’ narratives of queer life-shaping and the reproductive possibilities found in these speculative fictions allow for a rethinking of the line between anthropology and art, and of globalized struggles for same-sex rights in the contemporary.

Speculative fictions, same-sex families, and Black queer life-shaping in South Africa

Anticipation is ubiquitous, and yet anticipation itself tends to be an under-theorized and rarely thematized aspect of social life (Stephan and Flaherty 2019). This is nowhere truer than with respect to the intersubjective, interpersonal, and interactive aspects of anticipation. Far from being an invariant structure of subjectivity, anticipation takes on markedly different forms depending upon the interpersonal relations within which it unfolds. Positioning anticipation as a culturally and contextually variable means of relating to and affecting others, these papers each think through how anticipation is social and intersubjective in one or more of three forms: instances in which the anticipatory object is another person's (or people's) acts and experiences; cases where anticipation is a joint activity; and relationships in which one or more persons are making an effort to anticipate on behalf of others. Each of the panelists focuses on a particular ethnographic scene of anticipatory effort, engaging with the specific social understandings of or collaborations with particular others at play in the anticipatory processes involved -- including ethical and emotional labor in interaction, imaginative perspective-taking, care for others through planning and preparedness, and efforts to create systems and institutions that will withstand present threats and provide for future needs. The goal of this panel is to think through how anticipating others becomes focal through these contexts to engage with the questions, What forms of interface between people are allowing or hampering efforts to anticipate with? What mechanisms (directly embodied or distributed within the social and material field) undergird efforts after social anticipation? How are different social relationships and roles implicated in or instilled through anticipatory activities? Responding directly to this year's AAA theme of "truth and responsibility" this panel aims to consider the foundational role of anticipation in relations with others. Among other points of consideration, anticipation is essential to many forms of responsibility to (and for) others. Likewise, acting on another's behalf may require fidelity to their present and future interests. And yet again, anticipation undergirds all projects to affect others (Schutz 1967 [1932]) -- and thus prefigures any efforts to make something true for another. Truth itself, in William James' (1995 [1907]) influential formulation, had the function of "leading" to (further) future understanding -- an observation that underscores the difficulties social anticipation may face when individuals or groups appear not to share a social reality or common aims. Together the papers will aim to catalyze an ambitious conversation within anthropology on the social aspects of anticipation. Works Cited: James, W. (1995 [1907]) Pragmatism. Dover. Schutz, A. (1967 [1932]) The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press. Stephan, C. and D. Flaherty (2019) "Experiencing Anticipation: Anthropological Perspectives". Cambridge Journal of Anthropology.

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