United States

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.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Smartphones and the Fine Line between Care and Surveillance

digital and virtual anthropology

internet

surveillance

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

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.

Obeying God for the Nation: Religion, Citizenship and Struggles for Belonging

Associate with the in-person session, “Time of Death,” participants in this roundtable will discuss the methodological challenges and possibilities, including ethics, of research on death, mourning, grief, and memory during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has brought into relief the tension inherent in studying rituals mediated through digital platforms. Rather than reproduce a narrow notion of ethnographic “being there,” how might we conceptualize the embodied ways in which we interact and perceive senses from afar using technologies such as Zoom or Twitter (Gray 2016)? How might the challenges of carrying out digital fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic shed light upon the complex “media ideologies” (Gershon 2010) through which people navigate between different channels to honor the dead, express grief, collectively mourning, or voice political claims? Alternatively, how might we reflect on our own media ideologies as researchers and negotiate the hierarchies that shape which channels or forms of communication anthropologists deem most productive for anthropological research? And, given that social relations and personhood are increasingly constituted in both online and offline worlds, how might methods employed during the pandemic extend or change beyond any end date of the COVID-19 pandemic? Finally, the roundtable participants will explore the ethics of witnessing loss and grief, whether in a Zoom interview, a Facebook memorial, YouTube video, or in-person, as well as the experiences of those who are forced to labor in the face of great tragedy.

Methodological and Ethical Challenges of Research on Death, Mourning and Memory during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Social movements and lovers face the same conundrum: How do you keep the flame alive? The upheavals of first passion can be difficult to replicate over time. Yet repeatedly tapping into that feeling of truth and transcendence is key for a movement’s success (Marcus 2002). Just as protests and their aspirations repeatedly face repression, criticism, or even violence, so too are protestors confronted with setbacks and frustrations that complicate efforts to maintain a sense of change and possibility. The challenge lies in remaining engaged and keeping the faith despite feeling disaffected towards the status quo (Montoya 2018, 103). How can social movements keep their members committed and passionately involved as well as draw in new members over long periods of time? For James Baldwin (1962), this kind of passion wedded with responsibility stems from love. Similarly, many Native American and Chicanx activists in the US, as well as some Armenian activists, romanticize love as a “mode of revolutionary consciousness” (Shirinian 2020, 323). In postrevolutionary Egypt, notions of familial love helped ensure the survival of anti-harassment groups fighting sexual violence and other movements. Whether revolutionary or postrevolutionary, passionate or companionate, love enshrines a long-term readiness and commitment to fight alongside others, and with them, in order to thrash out solutions. While research so far has focused mostly on mobilization strategies and feelings of anger and resentment as motivations to participate in protests (Ayata and Harders 2019), in this roundtable, we ask about revolutionary love and the affects and emotions entangled with it. Some of these can be difficult, violent, or contradictory, like fear of loss, heartbreak, and melancholia (Segal 2016). To act out of fear is the opposite of acting out of love. By contrast, love and hate can be more difficult to tease apart. Moreover, love may run deeper than solidarity and political alignment, while potentially fuelling these, as it expresses kinship, belonging and caring for other beings, beyond utilitarian and formalized ends. Expanding the meaning of „the political“, and in contrast to politics in the strict sense, it fosters respect and trustful relationships. How does this love evolve and what kind of special rituals and routine practices do protesters adopt to keep their fire burning? How is it demonstrated, cultivated and protected against intrusion, tension, and setback in the long run? And what effects does this long-term engagement have on protesters (e.g. on their identity/subjectivity, social relations, lifestyle, vigilance)? Revolutionary love is not innocent or irresponsible. Rather than reproducing intersecting inequalities, it aims to transcend them. While it forges new relationships and visions for society, it can create tensions between protestors and their relatives and friends, e.g. in Sudanese struggles across intersectional hierarchies. We will therefore discuss how love and its related affects are (re-)defined, cultivated, practiced and expressed in various kinds of protests, including feminist/queer movements, social uprisings against authoritarian regimes and protests against racism and coloniality. By attending to these questions, we also reflect on how revolutionary love contributes to the re-imagination of anthropological debates and practices.

Keeping the Fire Burning: Protests and Revolutionary Love

Loss is a human experience we all face. The grief following a loss is always woven with who you are and where you are in the world, in your life, and in your body. Loss of pregnancy or a child is a trauma that Christa Craven explores in her book • but when that loss is embodied by queer and same-sex couples,’ loneliness finds other places to dwell. While loss is painful, Craven considers what reproductive loss feels like when LGBTQ people experience miscarriage, stillbirth, failed adoptions, infertility, and sterility. She asks us to consider queer loss and queering loss. Relying on the use of interviews, Craven offers thoughtful reflections and analyses on reproductive loss from over fifty interviews with LGBTQ people included those who carried the pregnancy, non-gestational and adoptive families. The families represent a range of racial/ethnic, socio-economic, religious and national backgrounds. Panel participants will reflect on the intervention of Craven’s work and explore how that work shapes their own thinking about queer family-making, life, loss, and grief.

Engaging with Christa Craven's Reproductive Losses: Challenges to LGBTQ Family-Making

In a saturated media landscape, how do outreach-minded anthropologists find a foothold in the minds of the public? This roundtable seeks to bring together creators working across the breadth of the discipline to discuss strategies, successes, and pitfalls of public outreach through digital means, such as podcasting, video production, social media, and more. Anthropologists often contend with a disconnect between the research they conduct and the way that their work is understood by the public. The trend of distrust in the sciences and openness to pseudoscientific theories can be counteracted by humanizing the past and the scientists who study it. Podcasts, YouTube videos, and other freely accessible media are uniquely suited to engage public audiences with storytelling as a form of democratized production. The intimacy that these formats create between host and listener/viewer allows anthropologists to bring their audiences with them “into” the field or their subject. The structure of the discussion will include, but is not limited to: A review of individual projects’ approaches to their subject matter; adapting material for varied audiences; the value of podcast hosts as parasocial “companions” aiding in learning and unlearning; the four-field and interdisciplinary nature of content creation, role of this content in combating academic gatekeeping. We especially wish to address the value of (and strategies for creating) accessible, engaging, non-academic or academic-adjacent media in counteracting the perceptions of the human story that fuel pseudoscience and other racist or harmful ideologies. Podcasting and other media creation move beyond academic publications, and even beyond articles written for popular consumption to provide flexibility in the kinds of narrative that can be told. By assembling a diverse group of voices with multiple approaches to creating anthropology-based content as public outreach, we hope to demonstrate that there is no single way to “do” public-facing anthropology. We also hope to share and develop ideas for the continuation and improvement of content creation for the public.

Don't Forget to Like and Subscribe: Anthropology Content Creation as Public Outreach

We aim to think about disinformation and trust debates together in this session. Disinformation literature has grown rapidly in the last couple of years but it is predominantly centred around platform economies and content related networks. By bringing trust into the equation and by presenting novel ways and fields of trust building, we aim to extend the meanings of the post-truth era beyond the current discussions revolving around such dichotomies of fake and authentic, emotion and rationality, and new and old media. By doing this, we aim to brainstorm constructive ways to tackle disinformation that go beyond platforms and discursive terrains as we know them. These will include socio-technical infrastructures, science communications, blockchain based trustless networks. This brainstorming may serve to consider how trust for institutional forms can be re-built within a new and complex media ecosystem after a long duration of critiquing and effectively destroying expert paradigms.

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