United States

Land &amp; Labor Across the Rural-Urban Divide I 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).

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

What is the City to Rural Youth? Heterogeneous Transgressions of Rural-Urban Divides in Morocco

space and place

land

labor/labour

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.

Land & Labor Across the Rural-Urban Divide I 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).

technical paper

The global pandemic has acutely underscored the shortfall of educational policy in solving larger social, economic, and digital inequities in the Americas for decades; inequities which continue to hit Indigenous students the hardest. The physical conditions of domestic spaces, food shortages, health inequalities, and economic precarities are some factors that have made it impossible for school-based education during the pandemic to be the same for everyone. We also recognize that in Indigenous education it's necessary to identify the diversity of contexts and situations, of relationships between Indigenous actors with the state and the many practices of community resistance developed across time. As ethnographers and educators who have participated in and collaborated with Indigenous educators, students and communities before the pandemic, we come together to dialogue about the present-day negotiations and tensions experienced around Indigenous education across a range of contexts and to reflect on our responsibilities as anthropologists. This roundtable seeks to bring together a diverse group of established and young scholars of educational anthropology to discuss the many experiences of school-based education of Indigenous students in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic across the Americas. The roundtable opens up a multilingual space for intergenerational dialogue within the field of educational anthropology, and is organized by two 2020-2021 CAE Concha Delgado fellows.  In line with the meeting’s theme, we seek to highlight how anthropological research, as well as anthropologically informed pedagogy and practice has met and can meet the present demands of Indigenous education. Particularly, participants will comment on how school-based Indigenous education has been transformed during the pandemic, and highlight the many ways in which educators, students and families have negotiated these changes, bringing to the fore the protagonism of diverse actors. We will also discuss the tensions deepened in this scenario, as well as emerging ones. Discussants’ commentaries will draw on ethnographic, critical, decolonial and Indigenous perspectives as they reflect on what equity, diversity and accounting for power relations means from pre-school to higher education experiences. The roundtable will begin with two rounds of commentaries (totaling 60 minutes) to be followed with engagement from all participants with audience questions (35 minutes). The questions guiding each of the round of commentaries are the following: 1. How has school-based Indigenous education - including teachers, community authorities and students - faced the closing of schools and negotiated the educational alternatives proposed by governments? How have you been involved in Indigenous education during the pandemic (including maintaining existing relationships and partnerships and developing new ones)? 2. What insights have you gained/developed regarding your role as an anthropologist of education in this context? What can we learn from these insights in order to engage in anthropological research, pedagogy and practice that can craft and support Indigenous education in our current contexts and coming years? This roundtable welcomes a diverse audience, including researchers and practitioners, and seeks to visibilize Indigenous education experiences in the pandemic as well as reflect on educational anthropologists’ roles and responsibilities with the various communities and individuals we work with.

Indigenous education during COVID-19: negotiations, tensions and anthropologists' responsability across the Americas

We have intentionally chosen this polysemic title for our roundtable on the ways that contemporary American racial reckonings are being refracted, transposed, ignored, and even denounced in contemporary Europe. In keeping with that polysemy, our roundtable seeks to explore the empirical experiences of Blackness in both Western and Eastern Europe, activist attempts to make Black lives matter in neoliberal and increasingly white supremacist contexts, and the ways that the BLM movement has been translated into or resisted in specific European cities and nation-states.  We think this is extremely important conversation to have among European anthropologists, many of whom are increasingly divided over the relevance of both critical race theory and the concept of “Blackness” in European contexts. And indeed, with some important exceptions, the impression is that recent anthropological literature on Europe written by anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic has focused much more centrally on two other ways of talking about difference•migration and religion•rather than race, let alone Blackness. What are some of the important empirical differences between Europe and the United States that might motivate such choices? What are the possible advantages of bringing “race” more generally and Blackness in particular back into European discussions about both migration and religious difference? How might critical engagement with race and Blackness shed light on the enactment of and subjection to other European forms of white supremacy? And finally, what are the frameworks, strategies, and tactics used by contemporary European activists as they fight for greater inclusion in in a variety of European contexts? To what extent is race or Blackness a mobilizing force?

How do Black Lives Matter in Europe?

Special Event for AAA 2021 organized by CAE and MES The recent Israeli assault on Palestinians across all of the geographies of historic Palestine made visible to the international community the linked systems of structural oppression that cross all of the geographies of historic Palestine. This session is focused on the particular conditions of growing up Palestinian in the context of Israeli settler colonialism. Israel’s violation of the rights of children through direct military assault on children, and a vast system of detention of children without due process is horrendous and well-documented. Moreover, for decades, Israel has systematically violated the right of education by closing Palestinian schools and universities as a disciplinary mechanism. Palestinian citizens of Israel are subject to segregated schooling. This session brings scholars who work directly on issues affecting Palestinian children and youth across the geographies of historic Palestine together with scholars who consider similar issues in other contexts of settler colonialism and apartheid. This session is intended to highlight issues that are particular to the conditions of Palestinian children and youth, and their education, that should concern us as both anthropologists of education, and more broadly as ME anthropologists.

Growing up Palestinian: Childhood and Adolescence in the Israeli Settler Colonial Context

Multinational corporations and states are driving a process of commodifying and categorizing land. At the same time, the material and social realities of landscapes resist this cooptation. Our panel explores the frictions between different visions and values of land. This panel focuses on the technocrats and bureaucrats who mediate environmental and legal frictions over land. We draw on a range of sources • Indigenous land rights cases, forestry concessions, land remediation plans, and urban planning agendas • to explore how these mediators (re)produce the meaning of land. We also explore why frictions remain despite these policies and procedures. Environmental remediation planners use predictive models, but the realities of ruined landscapes escape those carefully crafted plans. Legal mediators attempt to demarcate Indigenous lands from extractive concessions, but those boundaries inevitably overlap. City planners designate “illegal” vs” legal” urban settlements, but the people who live in those settlements resist those designations. We look at how material realities and local actors disrupt the commodification and categorization of land. We draw on historical archives and ethnography to explore how technology, planning, and law mediate these frictions. What are the roles of local power structures, the state, and multinational corporations in determining land’s use and value? What are emerging counter-narratives? How do these narratives develop and become inscribed on the land itself? Ultimately, we ask what these histories and contemporary realities tell us about the persistence of frictions over land and how those frictions will define land in the future.

Grounded Frictions: Land re(mediation) and (re)production

Fugitive Dust: relational geographies of land remediation

Land Conflict and Mediation in Colombia's Coal Zone

Meaning, Land and The People: Land politics in an urban poor neighborhood of El Salvador.

Planning, Mapping, and Resisting Panama's Wild Darién

“Don’t put this in your book.” “I know I shouldn’t say this, but...” Cautions like these are preludes to the fieldwork confessional, a pervasive and ambivalent genre that opens up a world of partial secrets. With such exhortations, our interlocutors tell us who to believe, who to discount, and what to keep off the record. They enact relational demands and place conditions on the ethnographic project • but rarely in straightforward ways. Working with moments when tacit knowledge is marked as such but then shared nonetheless, our panelists consider what these disclosures put at stake, contextually and conceptually. Confessions both constitute and complicate social ties, sometimes tightening relations and sometimes testing them. Yet other confessions press closeness onto unconsenting hearers. Together, we ask how ethnographers ought to respond to such obligations, both in the field and on the page, and in the context of vastly different disclosures: whispers of violence done and violence lived, of intimacy, hate, doubt, and covert information. Papers move from the performances these speech acts prompt, to the proximities they impose, to the forms they do (and don’t) take at our desks. Our particular focus is on how truth gets negotiated in the gap between the act of confession and the outcome of ethnographic writing. In exploring the sticky relational processes through which ethnographic truths get formed and forced, represented and resisted, these papers complicate the invitation to bear witness, take action, and speak truth this AAA. What does it mean to tell the truth when the confession itself winds through secrets, lies, codes, jokes, and a range of known unknowns? When might truth-telling present an obstacle to action? When does it rise to the level of an ethical breach? How do the constraints of scholarly writing shape which truths get uttered and which stay lodged in the throat? How might omission, euphemism, allegory, or even fiction constitute modes of truth? And are there ways to incorporate inadmissible knowledge into our work without breaking confidentiality? Acknowledging that, sometimes, truth and responsibility are incompatible (e.g., Simpson 2014), we query how anthropologists are to proceed once put on notice. After the first hour • comprised of five short papers, each organized around a different prelude to the fieldwork confessional, and brief discussant remarks • we invite the audience to participate in a conversation about the stakes of secrecy and exposure in ethnographic research.

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What is the City to Rural Youth? Heterogeneous Transgressions of Rural-Urban Divides in Morocco

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Indigenous education during COVID-19: negotiations, tensions and anthropologists' responsability across the Americas

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