United States

This mentoring event is a collaborative conversation in which we think about transforming pedagogies and what we are transforming pedagogies towards as an anthropological community. Whether a student or a practiced educator within academia or beyond, the consideration of pedagogies is a practical and conceptual exercise we all engage in no matter our experience with teaching. These learning spaces should not be divorced from everyday life, but deeply situated in our community commitments. In this discussion, we center transformation and believe that it has to take place, although we do not wish to define what that transformation should look like in advance. This event aligns with the efforts of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy’s anti-racism working group and supports our responsibility to advance academic justice and equitable representation in educational practices. Questions that precipitate and motivate this event: - What do multi-media and multi-sensorial pedagogies look like and allow? - What is the responsibility of education to teach knowledge or to create spaces for learning? How does the purpose of education relate to pedagogical practices in the classroom and beyond? - Does collaboration necessitate homogenization? How do you build a pedagogy that embraces openness and collaboration across/with difference? - What does/could it mean to have a common “language” in order to learn together? Potential goals for the conversation: - We endeavor this conversation to be an opportunity for cross mentoring. - We are interested in delving into the ways pedagogies create space for reflective, collaborative work that is open to multiplicity (of learning styles, of accessibility, of positioning ourselves, of critically engaging with/in our situated communities, of expressing ourselves). - We encourage thinking deeply about the methods and challenges of transforming and the implications of our pedagogical practice as anthropologists working in and outside of the university. - Contributions to building resources for: (1) inclusive curriculum and citational justice via resources and concepts; (2) inclusive andragogical/pedagogical practice in the classroom; (3) equitable and accountable evaluation; (4) classroom language and intersectionality. All are welcome and encouraged to participate in this mentoring event. We envision this as the start of a conversation about transforming pedagogies in anthropology. The notes from this event will be compiled into resources available to this group with the opportunity for wider circulation.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Transforming Pedagogies in Anthropology

advising/mentoring

pedagogy

collaboration

This  conference will explore the intersection of technology and service, the lessons learned through the past extraordinary year, and the value of change management. In light of the challenging times, we are coming together virtually to share our work under the theme 'Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration'.

The UC Libraries Forum will serve as an opportunity for UC library colleagues to meet virtually, share, learn and find opportunities for new collaborations and projects across the UC system. Presentations and conversation will note existing collaborations and spark ideas for new ones. This forum builds on and extends the scope of UC DLFx 2018 and 2019 beyond digital initiatives to all library employees to include themes such as research data, scholarly communications, the current-COVID academic library and others.




This event requires a registration to attend. To register, please click [here](https://ucl2021registration.paperform.co/) if you have not aleady done so.

Please register for UCLF 2021 to be able to enter the conference on Underline.io. Attendance is free, but registration is required.  We will contact you when the complete information about the conference and schedule becomes available. You would then need to login to Underline.io to be able to see the full content and build out your schedule. In case you do not have an Underline account, please create one. Thank you. 


UC Libraries Forum: Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration

This  conference will explore the intersection of technology and service, the lessons learned through the past extraordinary year, and the value of change management. In light of the challenging times, we are coming together virtually to share our work under the theme 'Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration'.

The UC Libraries Forum will serve as an opportunity for UC library colleagues to meet virtually, share, learn and find opportunities for new collaborations and projects across the UC system. Presentations and conversation will note existing collaborations and spark ideas for new ones. This forum builds on and extends the scope of UC DLFx 2018 and 2019 beyond digital initiatives to all library employees to include themes such as research data, scholarly communications, the current-COVID academic library and others.

live discussion

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.

Authoritarian movements are on the rise worldwide. At the same time, we see a proliferation of new articulations and new styles of authority, as well as vehement debates on what authority should look like (e.g. in the field of parenting, governance, and (pious) religion). In response to these developments, this panel combines the analytical frameworks from the anthropology of religion, the state and pedagogy to explore a grounded anthropological theory of how authority is ‘done’. The anthropology of religion, and Islam in particular, has conceptualised authority as an ethical relationship in which disciplinary techniques and “aesthetics of persuasion” allow for the shaping of a more virtuous self (Agrama 2010; Fernando 2014, Mahmood 2005; Meyer 2010; de Witte, de Koning and Sunier 2015). The anthropology of parenting, education and therapeutic care, instead, point to broad shifts in pedagogical ideals of authority in line with the global dissemination of neoliberal and psychology-based models of personhood emphasising egalitarianism, emotions, and non-violence (Faircloth 2013; Kaneh-Shalit 2017; Wilce and Fenigsen 2016). Last, the anthropology of the state and governance have shown that state authority, including bureaucratic or institutional authority, is inherently performative and provisional (Jauregui 2016). It requires constant boundary work and carries possibilities of violence (Aretxaga 2003; Babul 2012; Bear 2011; Hansen and Stepputat 2006). This panel explores two themes that tie these fields together in their appreciation of authority not as something ‘had’ but as something ‘done’. The first theme consists of the distributions and relationalities through which authority, provisionally, emerges. The second theme is that of the shifting and heterogenous nature of registers of authority and the polyvalent ethical subjectivities and sensibilities such registers invoke and enable. Both themes highlight that enactments of authority straddle and unsettle, rather than confirm, dominant conceptual divides, such as the religious and the secular, formal and informal, state and non-state (Fader 2009; Kloos 2019; Lammer 2019). The papers in this panel combine insights from the anthropological fields mentioned above to ask new questions about contemporary contestations over, and new enactments of, authority in various contexts across the globe (the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Europe as well as mediascapes and big data). What aesthetic, affective and ethical genres and practices are performed and (re-)combined to create persuasive authoritative relationships? What ethical subjecthood and desired attuning between 'author' and 'authorised' do enactments of authority seek to effect? How are enactments of authority distributed, assembled, and renegotiated across scales, spheres, and actors? The papers address a wide range of dimensions, actors, and manifestations of authority, from the anti-authoritarian ideals of new parenting models and 'reality game' universes, and the shifting genres of Islamic authority, to the distributions of authority in big data and through extra-judicial violence, and the affective brokerage performed in development and urban governance networks. Together, they showcase what an anthropological theory of ‘doing’ authority might look like.

Towards an anthropology of authority: doings, distributions, desires (Part II - The subjectivities that authority generates)

From Texts to Acts and Back Again: Doing Authority and Islamic Gender Norms in Malaysia

Overkill 2.0: Provisional Authorities and Violent Subjectivities

Parenting the Republic: Blurred genres, compassionate authority and the question of order in postcolonial Paris

Shifting landscapes of authority among Muslims in Europe.

The Relational Aesthetics of Anti-Authoritarianism: Enacting Freedom in Post-Industrial Gelsenkirchen

In everyday life, government institutions engage in a wide variety of functions that can be described as providing ‘care’ to the populace. However, there is often a gap between the ‘rhetoric of care’ espoused by institutional spokespeople and the realities of how care functions in people’s everyday lives (Pinto 2014; Stevenson 2014; Biehl 2005), producing tensions of uncertainty, doubt, anxiety, anger, creativity, and even humor. Through diverse methods such as archival research, ethnographic encounters, and multimodal discourse analysis, our papers investigate this gap between institutional certainties and everyday doubts generated in the space of care. In both Canada and Peru, for example, there is a particularly stark contrast between government rhetoric on Indigenous relations and the lived realities of Indigenous peoples (Huayhua 2014; 2016; Niezen 2013; MacLachlan 2013). In medical and legal discourse there is often a discontinuity between the registers spoken by experts and by service recipients that can serve to increase distrust and anxiety at the expense of the effective distribution of care (Dumit 2012; Mol 2002; Conley and O’Barr 1998). Medical mechanisms of visibility, which try and often fail to produce knowable subjects must make repeated efforts to shore up certainty against the inevitable dissolution of diagnostic and narrative fact (Fleck 1979). While this work helps to create subjects that can be diagnosed, treated, and recorded, it often does so at the cost of silencing patient’s disorderly truths (Pinto 2014). Discourse analyses (Wortham, Reyes 2015) of political speech, like those produced during the COVID19 pandemic, reveals the ‘dissonant discourses’ used by government spokespeople, riddled with uncertainties and contradictions. Often these tensions get glossed over in discourse through the use of metaphor (Charteris-Black 2011; Lakoff 1991), leaving the public without a language for their everyday struggles. These tensions between institutionally produced facts and everyday uncertainties are diverse and instructive. Uncertainty can function as both a debilitating aporia (Derrida 1992; Bubandt 2014) and a creative force (Cooper, Pratten 2015). Using this lens, we note how an aura of institutional uncertainty underpins all of social life, constantly threatening dissolution (Boltanski 2011). However, we also examine how uncertainty is not just an inert atmosphere, it is also generated in contingent social relations (Whyte 2015; Berthomé et al 2012), in inscrutable relations of power (Bonhomme 2012; Allard 2012; Lepselter 2016), and even in hopeful and doubtful modes of practice (Whyte 2005; Cooper, Pratten 2015). At its core, this panel seeks to ask how people live their everyday lives in the shadow of uncertainty by way of institutional power (Foucault 1980) and how the analysis of institutional ‘truths’ in the delivery of care can provide both contiguities and disruptions in our attempt to understand intersecting dimensions of contemporary life including indigeneity, health, and justice.

The Tyranny of Care: Institutional Truths and Everyday Uncertainties

Everyday Interaction and Care in a Southern Peruvian Clinic

Multimodal Metaphor and the Metapragmatics of Truth: Justifying and Enabling Political Action and Responsibility in New York State during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Towards an anthropology of authority: doings, distributions, desires (Part II - The subjectivities that authority generates)

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