United States

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.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

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

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.

invited talk

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

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

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