United States

This roundtable will consider the critical and necessary interventions of feminist and queer theory, method, and practice in contemporary conversations on prison abolition, state policing, and mass incarceration. As a collaborative effort with the Association of Black Anthropologists, the roundtable will showcase the work of leading feminist anthropologists and center pre-circulated guiding questions gathered from the wider associations’ memberships. The roundtable will consider how unified and intersectional analyses of gender, sexuality, race, kinship, the state, and capitalism shed light on contemporary and future anthropological theory and praxis surrounding abolition and social justice. Participants will each deliver short comments on how their work is informed by and engages with critical anthropological frameworks before delving into a collective conversation that proactively reflects on the broader trends, theoretical innovations, and possible future directions for feminist anthropology and the discipline more broadly.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Feminist Approaches to Abolition: A State of the Field Review

police/ policing

abolition

feminist 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

John Jackson (2005) animates a collective understanding of Blackness through the lens of performance studies focusing on the difference between authentic performances of Blackness and what he coins as racial sincerity- efforts and performances that intend to benefit the Black community. Sincere racial performances have everything to do with intention and the performer’s ability to (re)produce the real. This study focuses on how racial differences impact social interactions, both ethnographic and clinical, as a key theme that is often under-thematized in anthropology, and how racially sincere performances can (re)produce clinical encounters as a means of training mental health clinicians to broach conversations about racism.  The responsibility to address uncomfortable truths about race and power relations in therapy lies with clinicians but is often placed on clients. Harrison’s (1997) “decolonizing anthropology” urges the field to more responsibly tell the truth about its relationship to race and to wider communities, including racialized and medical communities. Viewing truth through the lens of racial sincerity requires facing difficult and uncomfortable realities, making space for critiquing intentions that are meant to benefit Black clients but may actually cause harm, and addressing the systemic inequity which is reproduced when clinicians place their comfort (failure to discuss race) above their responsibility to create space for clients to cope with racial onslaught.   Non-textual/multimodal formats (i) demand a different kind of ethical responsibility towards the security/confidentiality/safety of subjects and (ii) provide a distinctive angle on the truths of our social world. The ACT (Anti-racist Clinical Training) study in the state of Washington used theater-based methods to train white clinicians to broach discussions on racism with Black youth clients. This roundtable will explore social dynamics between the actors/directors/co-creators, how uncomfortable truths are dealt with in the rehearsal stage, the ways in which Black actors were called upon to reproduce sincere characters, and the actor-facilitator-audience interactions during improvisation. We ask: How did incorporation of Black researchers, practitioners, and actors in the data collection, analysis, scripting, and editing of the short films problematize the sincerity of performances of Blackness?  How might the filmed performances have contributed to the intentions and performances of clinician trainees during the live improvisations?   The roundtable will be chaired by Dr. John L. Jackson, Jr and includes co-PI Jasmine Blanks Jones, Postdoctoral Fellow with the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at The Johns Hopkins University, co-PI Noah S. Triplett, MS, Graduate Student in Child Clinical Psychology, University of Washington, Actor/Film editor Maryann Dreas-Shaikha, and invites the participation of the two featured Black youth actors and four practicing Black clinicians who served as dramaturgists and small group discussion facilitators for a scaffolded theater as pedagogy approach culminating in live improvisation where clinicians were able to practice having conversations about racism with trained Black actors. This roundtable offers implications for multimodal methods as creative approaches to addressing race and racism in cross-racial dyads with multiple levels of power and agency by documenting the processes by which the creators’ embodied practices facilitated greater discursive possibilities for themselves and their audiences.

“You wouldn’t understand, you are white”: Racial Sincerity and ACT (Anti-racist Clinical Training) through Performance and Film

What do artisans have to say about the goods they produce? And what truths are they conveying, intentionally or otherwise? Considering the embodied experience as a source of a given individual’s truth, this panel explores how informants convey their lived realities through the artisanal goods they produce. In particular, we pay attention to how such goods are described and by extension conferred an identity that distinguishes them from any other. Of concurrent concern is how craft speaks to larger embodied truths regarding questions of place, identity, and changing environmental, political, and/or sociopolitical contexts. Contributing to ongoing sustainability discourse, this panel considers how the idea of truth weaves throughout our comparative, multi-sited research projects. How do narratives of global phenomena differ within and across different research sites? Around what features do certain words, phrases, or conceptualizations coalesce around shared perceptions of realities as people and products adapt to forms of change? We present case studies from all over the world, including Colombia, France, India, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, the Pacific Northwest Coast, Romania, and the United States, as we consider these questions. Moreover, our individual papers speak to address additional concerns, including varying perspectives of climate change; similarities or differences in terms of crafting a given good; the availability (or lack thereof) of different materials, ingredients, etc.; and differences in sensory terminology, experience, and categories. As anthropologists, we must contend with parsing informants’ culturally relative and contextually specific experiences, while also negotiating them in search of generalizable truths. By turning to artisanal goods and the words used to describe them, we aim to make sense of the material and symbolic realities they inhabit.

Truth in Craft and Crafting Truths: Translating Sensory Qualities to Artisan Goods

This roundtable considers refugees’, migrants’, and displaced persons’ interaction with, perception of, and creation of “home” and “place” by addressing the ways that transnational relationships and processes can affect migrant and refugee identities and perceptions of home (Glick Schillar et al 1992). We consider the following questions: How do displaced persons and migrants create a sense of place, or engage in placemaking, in their current location? How do processes of emplacement affect relationships and experiences? How do they remain connected to, practically and affectively, their place of origin? How does immobility impact relationships to where they are “stuck,” to home, and to future places they imagine inhabiting? We will hold a discussion on the concept of “transnational locale” (Mountz and Wright 1996), the idea that spaces and times that are considered separate by possibly vast expanses of territory (the home, the hosting land, places transited through) are brought together into one conceptualization of place. The idea of an incorporated transnational locale has implications for relationships, politics, economics, and other spheres, and thus when applied lends insight to many aspects of displaced persons’ and migrants’ lives. The transnational locale, or placemaking, with regards to various iterations of “home” is a key theme we will address in our discussion. We consider how displaced persons create “home” by drawing upon different places and experiences during their mobility and periods of immobility, with each participant drawing upon their own research experiences. Deported, formerly incarcerated individuals in Mexico create dwellings and relationships based upon their carceral experiences. Refugee students from Iraq studying at a high school in Tennessee create an identity that incorporates both places, even as American educational institutions try to differentiate the two. Likewise, Chinese American college students in the US struggle to create a sense of self that incorporates both China and the United States, even as some aspects of their identity are imposed from outside. Syrian refugees who spent part of their “fragmented journeys” (Collyer 2010) in Greece but settled in other parts of Europe choose to become tourists in Greece due to their affective ties to that place and people there. The material belongings transported by refugees in Izmir and Lesvos tell a story of their past ties and longings and future hopes. And, Syrian refugees in Kurdistan assert ownership over a camp built by the UN. All participants interrogate transnational placemaking by migrants and refugees, and the ways that “home” is constructed from afar as a place one comes from and a place that one settles in, even for a short time. Collyer, Michael. 2010. “Stranded Migrants and the Fragments Journey.” Journal of Refugee Studies 23(3): 273-293. Mountz, Allison and Richard Wright. 1996. “Daily Life in the Transnational Migrant Community of San Augustin, Oaxaca and Poughkeepsie, New York.” Diaspora 5(3): 403-428. Schiller Glick, Nina; Basch, Linda; and Nicole Blanc-Szanton. 1992. “Towards a Definition of Transnationalism” in Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration, Schiller Glick, Nina; Basch, Linda; and Nicole Blanc-Szanton, eds. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1-24.

Transnational Placemaking: Refugee and Migrant Experiences of Home and Away

Scriptures are not simply texts people read reverentially (or not) as truth, but texts that seem to read readers back; the anthropology of scriptures aims to map the cultural processes by which a cultural master text operates as a node of power. Scriptures are imperatives to bear witness, to take action. How do anthropologists write about such texts and their publics in light of our discipline’s imperatives that we bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write, circulate and consume. This roundtable brings together anthropologists who consider the social life of the Quran in Arjun Appadurai's sense in Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Senegal and the US with religious studies scholars who work on religion and scripturalism in the US and who are arguing for a more expansive anthropology of scriptures, one that considers the the Quran, Bible, and a text such Alex Haley's Roots as examples of Black American scriptures. In the context of the global War on Terror, there are many instances in which the Quran has been at the center of legal and state-sanctioned "religious-reform" programs, ‘Third World’ development campaigns, and cultural diplomatic efforts. Arguments advanced in support of security and “tolerance” (Wendy Brown demonstrates the political promiscuity of the term) by state officials divide Muslims into what Mahmood Mamdani terms the good Muslim and the bad Muslim, linking terrorism not to all of Islam but only to those literalist strains originating in Saudi Arabia that have been exported throughout the world. Wahhabi Islam is often described as “fundamentalist Islam” or “Puritanical Islam” in the mainstream press despite the fact the movement has little in common with American Puritans. Such claims have their genesis in debates about the Bible and Christian fundamentalism and in Orientalist accounts of Muslims’ “mechanical” and “irrational” recitation and memorization of the Quran. The view that literal readings of the Quran are the cause and explanation for terrorism has shaped policies that have profoundly impacted Muslim populations around the world, tracked by the ethnographers presenting here. Beyond state efforts to police the uses and interpretations of the scripture, the Quran pervades global popular cultures, apprehended as a high art object or as meme fodder, as a pedagogical source or a banned book, a sacred relic and museum object or a target for racist abuse in which the text-object “stands in” for actual Muslim bodies. This roundtable asks anthropologists to think through their own stakes in their writing about the social lives of scriptures. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways, whether or not we share a scripture or a disciplinary canon?

The Social Lives of the Quran & the Anthropology of Scriptures

Two recent developments have made the fine line between care and surveillance central not only to anthropology but to politics and popular morality: the rise of smartphones and the response to Covid-19. The balance between care and surveillance has always been a condition of human experience. A working definition of God, for many religions, would be a being who sees everything and cares for everyone. Today, parents may regard monitoring children’s smartphones use as care, while the children may regard this as surveillance. The ways in which this fine line manifests in relation to the smartphone in different cultural settings is one of several key offerings of a current anthropological project called The Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA). Based on 10 simultaneous 16-month ethnographies, the project examined the way smartphones are used by older people. In many regions studied, an immediate response to frailty is to create a message group to coordinate care among relatives and friends. At the same time, older people have asserted their agency with a variety of discourses and digital practices that revolve around avoiding being a burden on others. Ethnographies in Kampala, Yaoundé and Japan document the use of smartphones to support older people while respecting their autonomy. The ethnographies also present how smartphones can facilitate older people as agents of care, alongside familial negotiations such as mother-daughter relationships in Milan. These domestic examples are now a microcosm for an unprecedented global development in both surveillance and care in response to Covid-19. Smartphone-based apps are being considered around the world for track and trace operations in the bid to suppress Covid-19. Problematising such developments are books such as Surveillance Capitalism and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which already exposed the capacities of smartphones to allow states and companies access to personal data. Combined with Big Data and AI, this seems to betoken a scenario of Big Brother-style total control. Yet a failure to use such smartphone apps is simultaneously now evidence for whether or not the state actually cares enough about its citizens to employ the requisite technology. The ethnographies discussed in this roundtable address these issues around surveillance technology in response to the pandemic in Brazil, China and Ireland. Anthropology is the ideal discipline to explore these issues because we are used to understanding the relationship between the microcosm - in this case, the fine line between domestic care and domestic surveillance, and the macrocosm • the fine line between care and surveillance exemplified by smartphone apps involved in the response to Covid-19 at a national and a global level. The aim of this roundtable is to exploit the discursive format to develop a comparative anthropology that can contribute towards broad anthropological insights through the application of specific ethnographic findings, in this case regarding digital responses to Covid-19.

Smartphones and the Fine Line between Care and Surveillance

In the contemporary world marked by rising sea-levels, frequent flooding and long-term droughts, the depth of water has become a key environmental and political concern. Thinking with depth as a concept, scholars of environment and infrastructure have studied a variety of sub-surface and extreme environments from aquifers to outer space (Ballestero 2019; Helmreich 2016; Olson and Messeri 2015; Klinger 2018). In the context of water, its material qualities•wetness and dampness in relation to land•has become a generative site from which to theorize about spaces above and below the surface (Steinberg and Peters 2015; Cons 2020). While there has been a lot of emphasis on the material qualities of subsurface environments, these are also important sites where cultural meanings are constituted and cannot be understood outside of the political contestations they are a part of (Anand 2011; Barra 2016; Carse 2012; Vaughn 2017). In keeping with the AAA theme of Truth and Responsibility, this roundtable centers the question of power and examines what forms of politics emerge when the depth of water is constantly shifting and contested. We ask: how might the fluid materiality of water complicate politics as usual and what new socio-ecological relations emerge in these muddled grounds? To live with shifting waters requires further socio-technical and everyday practices that alter depth. What entanglements between environment and infrastructures have emerged in the wake of slow and fast disasters that dramatically shift water depths? What technolegal interventions are used to manage depth and what debates do they inspire? Thinking with depth as laden with power, the panel also invites reflections on what temporalities and histories of water are politically meaningful to social actors. What forms of politics is at stake when the depth of water changes over time or is rapidly altered by human actions? How might we contextualize the depth of water in relation to sedimented histories of colonialism, racial capitalism and industrialization? The roundtable engages with the above questions by approaching water depth as co-constituted alongside histories and categories of social and political difference such as race, caste, and citizenship. We explore: a) how marginalized Dalit groups use geomorphological knowledge about water depth to remake place in coastal South India; b) the politics of climate adaptation infrastructure in coastal Bangladesh; c) how submergence of coastal land brings up new politics around property ownership in coastal Louisiana; d) the convergence of declining river depth with an exclusionary politics of citizenship in river islands (Chars) in Northeast India; e) land reclamation processes and digital visual culture that mediate urban politics in Lagos, Nigeria; and f) dramatic droughts and revival of canal water depth as tied to political identities in Omani borderlands. Overall, the roundtable seeks to build comparative analysis around the politics around water and infrastructure. Panelists reflect diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches ranging from media studies analysis, archival study, ethnography and environmental history.

Shifting Politics of Depth at Water's Edges

Anthropological knowledge has long been informed by the knowledge of “grandparents”. Since the beginnings of the field, anthropologists have often sought out the perspective of “village elders”, seeking out their knowledge as evidence of the truest and most traditional representations of cultural differences. In many cases, studying grandparents were part of projects of salvage ethnography- where knowledge elicitation and production were intimately tied to colonial and settler colonial regimes. These intimate encounters have brought forth an awareness of the politics of knowledge production in our ethnographic field site and in respect to our relationships and kinship with our intellectual forebears. But what do we make of the complex relationships with our actual “grandparents”? Who is studying the vast but sometimes much related milieu that anthropologists and their grandparents come from? Why are people of ex-colonies not also studying the societies of ‘the West’? Are those in the privileged position of the metropole free of becoming the subject of research by ‘non-Western’ anthropologists? And, in what ways are our relationships with our interlocutors complicated by our personal and intellectual lineages, genealogies of knowledge, and networks of relatedness? This roundtable seeks to understand and theorize the complex intersections that we as anthropologists have with our various sets of grandparents, from the ones we choose to study, to those that we cite, to those we are closest to. The various presentations from the following diverse set of scholars will hopefully start a contemporary set of conversations that highlight the dynamics of power, access and representation in studying and preserving the voices and experiences of our “grandparents”, from the field or otherwise. Barnett-Naghshineh and Pattathu both engage with questions of self-presentation and positioning in the field (both the field of anthropology and their ethnographic field sites). Based on their experiences, both scholars will highlight how a central anthropological challenge is uniquely complicated by their transnational backgrounds and how the complex kinship they have with their own relatives is enlivened by relationships in the “field”. Diaz considers how to manage the intergenerational links and legacies between her own kin with the biographies and ancestries of their interlocutors. She also interrogates the lasting effect of colonial and post-colonial trauma in shaping the stories we learn from our interactions with these elders. And lastly, Feliciano-Santos and Narayanan will describe their experiences positioned as “scholar” grand-daughters to grandmothers and female elders. Both these presentations will touch on issues of gender differences between “grandfathers” and “grandmothers” and how these gendered differences in elders and in their “grandchildren” legitimate the value of knowledge production and transmission in varying ways. As anthropology strives to diversify the backgrounds and intellectual projects of its scholars, this panel hopes to expand the ways that anthropologists have considered our positionality in the “field”, the limits of our own reflexivity in the ethnographic encounter, and how we reinterpret our scholarly training in ways that can be highly personal and transformative.

Searching for Our Grandparents: Kinship, Power, and the Uncomfortable Intimacy of Anthropological Knowledge

The objective of the roundtable is to discuss the future of anthropology within the K-12 environment with the ultimate goal of creating action plans that increase educational opportunities between anthropology, K-12 classrooms, and beyond. Bringing together educators from grade school and higher education, we seek to engage in conversation to produce realizable steps to promote anthropology as a valuable, marketable asset for K-12 students and schools.

Schooling Anthropology: Fostering pathways in K-12 between the field and the future

Vulnerability is generally depicted as a condition of exposure to harm and pain in which the subject needs protection. This concept has gained particular social and political relevance when implicated in human rights interventions, which are involved in processes of advocacy, institutional certification, and measurement. But what happens when vulnerability conflates in the classificatory schemes that circulate within migration policies? Anthropological knowledge has answered this question by extensively showing the pitfalls of the humanitarian understanding of vulnerability, particularly when dealing with refugees. Yet, the changing constraints and uneven, precarious conditions of mobility framing refugees’ everyday lives in current regimes of emergency require further ethnographic investigations. This roundtable is part of a broader comparative project that started in 2020•PROTECT. The Right to International Protection (https://protectproject.w.uib.no/wp4/). We developed our study considering UN soft laws about migration, such as the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees. These texts transnationally establish that displacement entails vulnerability, demanding that national governments develop public policies that are more in line with human rights. Yet, far from simply prompting an apolitical humanitarian reason, the logic of the Global Compacts has been arousing explicit arguments about populism and political consensus. The line separating humanitarian and securitarian arrangements has become increasingly blurred, and new questions arise. Whose vulnerability is at stake across borderlands when the time of exception brought about by the COVID pandemic is more openly revealing the worry about the contamination of a nationalized body? Which notion of vulnerability are the NGOs involved in search and rescue operations at sea pursuing and summoning? How can we understand the institutional tendency of making the certification of vulnerability more ethically sensitive? When operators in reception centers talk about vulnerability to define their precariousness, what is revealed? Which shifts occur when institutions propose individual resilience as the privileged response to vulnerability? Ethnographing when and by which actors vulnerability is evoked and politicized necessitates considering that the interpretative work on vulnerability is deployed differently following symbolic worlds, historical phases, and right regimes. This firstly leads to focusing on the understandings that convey universalist apprehensions, even the anthropological ones. What are the moral implications and social consequences of giving epistemological and ethical justice to the differences in which people understand and politically use vulnerability? How can we highlight the domination of the borderspace by humanitarianism without naturalizing this power? Should we ask which other ethical and political projects are at work? Which considerations of global inequalities can be strengthened by inquiring into the particularisms of the social and political life of vulnerability? As anthropologists who are inquiring into asylum in different world border areas, we propose these epistemological questions to improve the thoroughgoing analysis of the consequences of associating the power to move and inhabit with the category of vulnerability. Inspired by the critiques of anthropological involvement in the business of the “refugee crises”, this roundtable proposes a discussion for sustaining the public commitment of anthropology within the field of international protection.

Re-engaging anthropology with the social and political life of vulnerability in international protection

Despite much theorizing about “the secular”, religion remains a key nexus for defining the relationship between individuals and political communities. Modern nation-states are often imagined as secular projects that keep religion and politics separated. This separation is expected to protect freedom of religion by protecting religion from state interventions and by protecting citizens against religious impositions. But more recent theorizations of the secular have shown how secularism can also prevent such freedoms; that, in fact, the secular is a space in which the state determines what counts as legitimate religion in the first place. We might expect modern statecraft attempts to produce citizens as particular kinds of subjects equipped with particular secular sensibilities, attitudes, and dispositions. Yet, as the recent rise of right-wing religionists across democratic states make abundantly clear, in contemporary nation states religious identity is deeply conflated with national belonging. Indeed, around the world today, nation states mobilize religion in various ways as an exclusivist entry of belonging to a political community. Examples range from white Christian supremacists in the USA, to the Hindu nationalist agenda in India, to the growth of nationalist-Jewishness in Israel over other ways of being Jewish, as well as European Islamophobic discourses and practices that participate in producing “Europe” itself. This roundtable interrogates how religion is intertwined with, and increasingly instrumentalized in the production of citizens for political projects and in struggles for sovereignty. Taking into account the complications that arise from separating the modern category of “religion” from “nation”, then conflating those categories, we will look at the everyday processes by which people are produced as citizens with particular “religious” ways of being that coincide with state projects. Taking the religion-citizenship nexus as the starting point for our conversation, we want to probe the ambiguities, contradictions, silences, and acts of violence that these political projects and mobilizations engender in the making as well as unmaking citizens and the parameters of belonging. This roundtable asks how should we then think of “religious” identity in relation to sovereignty and citizenship today. We are interested in discussing ethnographically grounded contexts in which the parameters of belonging and the claims to belong in supposedly democratic countries come into being through religion-citizenship nexus in our contemporary moment as well as their relationship to the past. We are also interested in how particular religious subjectivities are produced in concert with state projects.

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