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Studying food has long been a way for anthropologists across subfields to gain insight into labor organization, daily life, and identities. More recent studies of food have focused on inequalities in food systems as well as on movements • such as those towards food justice and food sovereignty • that seek to build equitable food systems. These movements are often radical in how they work towards subverting capitalist and colonial forms of labor and economic organization. Through studies of food systems both past and present, anthropology is well-positioned to imagine and support the creation of radical food futures. We see our discipline’s potential contribution to such movements in three ways: understanding the structures that create the current food system, reimagining a more equitable system, and contributing to the construction of that new system. This roundtable brings together anthropologists from across subfields whose work has contributed to one or more of these areas. Topics discussed will include why anthropology is relevant to food movements, how to effectively and ethically make research impactful, and how anthropology can help build more equitable food futures.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Imagining Radical Futures of Food: Perspectives from the four fields

agriculture and agrarian systems

food and nutrition

engaged anthropology

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.

panel

Black and Brown students have continuously been overrepresented in segregated special education classrooms throughout the United States (Collins & Camblin, 1983; Losen & Orfield, 2002; Blanchett, 2010). Likewise, large numbers of children with migrant experiences from Turkey or the former Yugoslavia attend segregated special schools in Austria (Statistics Austria, 2020). Minoritized multilingual children and Roma youths are also more likely to find themselves in special needs tracks throughout Germany, the Czech Republic and Romania (Klemm, 2015; New & Merry, 2010; FRA, 2014). Although special education services can offer helpful support to some students (particularly those with cultural capital), families at the intersection of race/multilingualism and dis/ability, and those from migrant backgrounds who are considered outside of the national narrative of belonging are more likely to be labelled special needs, leading to their exclusion and disenfranchisement of the right to quality education. Eugenics discourses of the 19th and 20th centuries impacted the development and professionalization of special needs education across multiple contexts. For example, the Nazi regime explicitly referenced studies by U.S. anthropologist Henry H. Goddard, cementing the belief that character traits such as “feeble-mindedness” were hereditary and provided a “scientific” rationale for sterilization to “halt the deterioration of the Nordic/Aryan gene pool” (Goddard, 1912). In the United States, “eugenics as segregation’s science” contributed to upholding the “separate but equal” doctrine in education (Dorr, 2008). Hence, this panel explores the legacies of the “Eugenic Atlantic” (Mitchell & Snyder, 2003) in education systems across Central Europe and the United States to stress the transnational quality of racialized exclusions from mainstream education. We consider the cross-fertilization of eugenic ideas tied to explaining and conjuring policies related to people with disabilities in the education sector. We draw on DisCrit as a critical lens through which we analyze how presumably deficient bodies are co-constructed through the tandem of dis/ability and race (Connor, Ferri & Annamma, 2016; Erevelles & Minear, 2010). Our panel contains five contributions that shine a light on the enmeshment of eugenics discourses and special needs education in the respective country contexts. The first paper explores the Romani minority in Romania during and after the Holocaust, looking at the eugenicist threads that wove their way through communist and into post-communist social policies (Michelle Kelso). The second paper examines contemporary segregationist practices that affect Roma students at the intersection of Race and Dis/ability in Czech and Slovak schooling (Deborah Michaels). The next paper examines “the inability to learn” as a core eugenic concept and its continuities in special needs discourses in Germany, Austria and the United States (Josefine Wagner). Moving towards the American context, paper four explores U.S. schooling and the impact of eugenics in the manufacture of intelligence and the intersection with notions of learning (Elizabeth Mendoza). The final paper draws on DisCrit (Connor, Ferri & Annamma, 2016) to retrace the entanglement of mental deficiency and race to argue that challenging the legacy of this shared history of ableism and racism requires both an intersectional analysis and a coalitional politic (Beth A. Ferri).

Eugenic Discourses in Special Needs Education

Dis/Crit and the Overrepresentation of Roma Youth in Special Education in Central Eastern Europe

Eugenic Threads in Romanian Communist and Post-Communist Social Policies

From the "Inability to Learn" to Learning Disability: Eugenic Continuities in Special Needs Education

How Smartness Became White: DisCrit & the Feeblemind

Given that ethnographers are immersed in the life and work of their interlocutors through prolonged participant-observation, ethnographic research inherently involves collaboration. As such, relationships between ethnographers and their interlocutors are more enmeshed, dialogic, and ambivalent than modes of “data collection” in other research paradigms, which may involve the presumption of a unidirectional relationship between the researcher and their object of study. This collaborative nature of ethnographic research may be more conspicuous, as well as epistemologically and ethically complicated, when the activities in which ethnographers are collaborating involve the work of knowledge production. This roundtable discussion examines the tensions, challenges, and possibilities of epistemological modes of ethnographic participation, in which ethnographers collaborate with interlocutors in knowledge-producing activities beyond the ethnographic project itself. This may include practice-oriented research, clinical research, social movement activism, and political and ideological labor. Gathering graduate students engaged in collaborative ethnographic research across various field sites, this roundtable seeks to pose and address a number of interrelated questions: How, and with what social effects, are ethnographers engaged in collaborative research interpellated or construed as researchers? What are the ethics of navigating and communicating the bounds (or boundlessness) of ethnography? When ethnography is one of many knowledge-producing practices occurring at a particular site, how might the ethnographer negotiate their positionality in relation to other participants, especially when those projects follow different epistemological traditions and serve divergent goals? To what extent are ethnographers implicated in the epistemological, methodological, political, and social tensions we are examining, and how do we navigate these multiple, and sometimes incompatible, accountabilities and commitments? What are the ethnographer’s obligations -- personal, professional, and ethical -- to their interlocutors and host organizations? When “research collaboration” beyond the ethnographic project is expected, how does the ethnographer navigate the ethical and pragmatic considerations of producing knowledge with and about their interlocutors? Finally, how have the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for virtual ethnographic practice further complicated questions of collaboration and positionality? Presenters of this roundtable will reflect on their experiences conducting ethnographic research in settings involving multiple knowledge-producing projects. Our various field sites and objects of study include: a social service nonprofit strategically engaging in research, evaluation, policy advocacy, and LGBTQ social movement work in Detroit (Berringer), a social work organization in mainland China conducting “practice research” (Chen), a research team engaged in a clinical trial to prevent opioid overdose among individuals exiting jails in the Midwestern U.S. (Claypool), a collaborative virtual ethnography of media and advertising in Cuba (García), hospital-based clinical team science in the United States (Jackson Levin), a powerlifting gym in the American South where embodied collaboration contributes to contemporary fascist ideological formation (Mulvey), and a coalition of various professionals, organizations, and government actors convened to avert a census undercount in Chicago (Norwood). The chair of our roundtable, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, has been engaged in a long-term multidisciplinary collaboration with engineers and environmental health scientists in the United States and Mexico, towards the development of a new method of ethnographic collaboration: bioethnography.

Ethnographers as Collaborators: Tensions Producing Knowledge in the Field

Anthropogenic changes to the Earth’s climate are increasing the frequency and intensity of natural hazard events, creating intractable environmental changes, challenging scientific assumptions and, thereby, prompting new responses to the governance of different biomes. If, to a certain extent, environmental forces and entities such as weather and forests need to be stabilised as objects of knowledge in order to become sites of action or intervention, then this situation presents both new and old epistemic challenges for those who predict and those who seek to conceptualise prediction.  This session brings together a range of contributions focused on sites and scenes of predicting, forecasting, or providing foresight that stage ecologies of prediction in fluid and uncertain worlds. This phrase - ‘ecologies of prediction’ - is a pun on philosopher of science Isabelle Stenger’s propositional call for an ecology of practices, which itself points to the heterogeneous ways in which knowledge practices both describe and make “what matters to them matter” in contexts of degradation, destruction or change (Stengers 2015, 112). Conceptually, thinking with ecologies of prediction means retaining this sense of heterogeneity and urgency while recognizing that predictive knowledge claims emerge and circulate within various ‘ecologies’ • epistemic, social, political, and material formations of agents. This session explores how these predictive ecologies take hold and will ask: how do they make anthropologists, publics and others think differently about environmental threats? What sort of commitments allow them to ‘hit their mark’ or diverge from adverse or destructive events in fluid situations? Without resort to general rules of ‘truth’, and along with Stengers, we approach these ecologies both as they are, “as they may become” in relation to climatic and social changes. References: Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism: Open Humanities Press.

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