United States

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.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Don&#39;t Forget to Like and Subscribe: Anthropology Content Creation as Public Outreach

science communication

podcast

digital humanities

Colleagues and Friends:

I am very happy to welcome you to the 14th annual Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, and to the first virtual edition of our meeting. I want to highlight the important work the CAN meeting chair, **Roger Thompson** and co-chair, **Alyson Fournier**, did to put together the great program we are offering this year. Moving to a virtual format required a complete re-design of the program, and both Roger and Alyson did a splendid job in providing us with an appealing and well adapted program for our first virtual event. I wish to thank them for this very important effort.

Highlights of this year’s scientific meeting include invited speakers **Michael Hausser, Franck Polleux, Gwyneth Card, Magdalena Götz**and Brain Prize winner **Huda Zoghbi**. Plenary and parallel symposia, proposed by our members complete our diverse [scientific program.](https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/program-2021/)

The 2021 Advocacy session, chaired and organized by CAN advocacy committee chair **Karun Singh**, will feature a special lecture and question period with Member of Parliament and past Science Minister **Kirsty Duncan**. This will be followed by a short overview of CAN’s advocacy activities over the last year. We invite you to participate in this session for insight from Dr. Duncan on the workings of Parliament Hill, and to learn more about what CAN has been doing to promote neuroscience research in Canada.

We are also excited to host **Lisa Willis** in the Equity Diversity and Inclusion session, organized by EDI committee chair **Jibran Khokhar**.

A special highlight of our meeting will be the lectures by award-winning young neuroscientists. We are please to host the CAN 2020 Young Investigator Award winner **Mihaela Iordanova**, and CAN 2021 Young Investigator Award winners **Aaron Phillips** and **Tabrez Siddiqui**. Highlights will also include presentation by the top three winners of the CAN-CIHR-INMHA Brain Star Award winners, **Claire Gizowski, Nuria Daviu Abant** and **Lukas Tamayo-Orrego**.

Independently organized satellite symposia complement and complete this exciting program, check them out here: https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/2021-satellite-symposia/

Some of the most engaging sessions are always the poster sessions featuring the work of our trainees, so make sure to log in to Gather Town during the poster sessions to chat with the presenters.
We hope you enjoy this program, and look forward to welcoming you, virtually.

Shernaz Bamji

President of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/b9aea25343a87d5aac3b9367dc780974.jpg)



Please head to https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/registration-2021/ to register. 

CAN-ACN 2021

14th Canadian Neuroscience Meeting from August 23rd-25th

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

panel

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.

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.

Disinformation in Pandemic: Re-thinking and Re-building Trust (in Institutions)

Faced with intersecting mass extinction, climate change, illegalized mobility or growing inequality, it becomes increasingly clear that the world we live in today cannot be understood through the dichotomous categories of normality and crisis anymore. Rather, close attention to particular tactics, agencies, but also vulnerabilities in navigating the radically uncertain world is needed. Volatility as a social and ecological condition, we propose, might provide an analytic lens to trace what life in such a world means and does to its inhabitants • even more so, we hold, when we think with people and ecologies from the margins, where volatility has long been the order of the day. To make volatility fruitful as an analytical tool for anthropology, we must first abandon the connotations that volatility is either something problematic or a means to an end. Whereas the former is a product of ideals of control and predictability that evoke and legitimize projects of dominance and exploitation, the latter is part and parcel of venture capitalism and other manifestations of accumulation by dispossession. In this roundtable, we aim to discuss how anthropology can approach and inquire volatility rather as a way of life that includes both social and ecological circumstances and people’s agentive ways of dealing with and reproducing them. As a way of life, volatility is both more than an external, political or ecological constraint and a functionalist adaptation to uncertain transformations; it goes beyond notions such as ‘crisis’ as bounded periods, ‘variability’ as restricted fluctuation between upper and lower limits or ‘resilience’ as a snap-back to an equilibrium. It might be more akin to what Taussig (2020) calls ‘the mastery of non-mastery,’ which combines vulnerability with flexibility, defined here as uncommitted potential for change (Bateson 1972) and building on skill, openness, and ‘attentionality’ (Ingold 2017). Together we will trace the analytical as well as the political usefulness of volatility, explore its weaknesses and limitations and work out its commonalities with and delineations from related phenomena such as ‘change’, ‘rhythm’ or ‘rupture’. And we will seek to relate volatility as a way of life with volatility as ways of resistance, endurance, creativity and care, as conceptualized for instance as ‘survivance’ (Vizenor 1999), ‘the art of not being governed’ (Scott 2009) or of ‘living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing et al. 2017), or ‘response-ability’ and ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016). Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chandler Publishing Company. Ingold, Tim. 2017. ‘On Human Correspondence’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (1): 9•27. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press. Taussig, Michael. 2020. The Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown. University of Chicago Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Anne Swanson. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press. Vizenor, Gerald Robert. 1999. Manifest Manners. Narratives on Postindian Survivance. University of Nebraska Press.

Conceptualizing Volatility

What counts as ‘true language’ and what ‘responsibilities’ such a language entails are intensely debated questions in the history of linguistic thought. In this roundtable, we explore this interface between language, epistemology and politics through the lens of conlangs • ‘constructed’, ‘artificial’ or ‘invented’ languages • among which Esperanto and Klingon are the best known. Since the late nineteenth century, conlangs have served to pin down truths and responsibilities at moments of political, economic and environmental crisis in capitalism, socialism, nationalism and colonialism. At numerous watershed moments, conlangs have been instrumentalized as maps and tools of political action, attesting and contributing to struggles over how to gain control over what counts as social reality • and therefore over who will determine it. There are two intertwined ways in which conlangs are linked to such struggles. One is in the search for the very essence or core of language itself (a project taken up in other ways, most prominently in academic linguistics). Here, the idea is that conlangs by nature may tell immanent truths masked by ‘natural’ languages corrupted by messy or devious speakers; or, conversely, that by virtue of being constructed, a conlang is inherently alienated from natural truth, or worse, inherently the source of lies. The other is in the consideration of conlangs as apt for articulating and sustaining visions of alternative worlds (Heller, 2017). Their social existence is often entwined with visions of coming amelioration, future redress or even utopian redemption. These visions have proven to be effective resources for political thought and action. For more than a century, conlangs have been placed in the service of various ideological projects, religious enterprises and ethical doctrines. The promise of conlangs to enact radical change continues to be asserted in contemporary science fiction, in the open-source software movement, and in fandom, role playing and gaming communities.  In this roundtable, we offer a series of case studies to illuminate how practices of creating and using conlangs serve to formulate and enact visions of truth, responsibility, action and social change. Guilherme Fians analyzes alliances between Esperanto-speakers and hackers, built around a shared interest in the democratization of language and intellectual property. Courtney Handman examines the relationship between language invention and the invention of morality, discussing the subtle links between racism in colonial New Guinea and technophilia in contemporary US society. David Karlander explores the interfaces and exchanges between language innovation and academic linguistics. Brigid O’Keeffe reflects on debates on language diversity at the Communist International (Comintern) in the 1920s, during which Esperanto was dismissed as a ‘utopian luxury’. Sho Konishi explores the connections between Esperanto and anarchist science in Imperial Japan, discussing anarchists' support for the symbiosis of nature and culture and the evolutionary theories behind Esperantism. Christine Schreyer shows how Na'vi conlang learning has galvanized a commitment to ‘green ideals’ • epitomized in environmentalism and indigenous rights • in the Avatar fandom community. Monica Heller and David Karlander introduce and moderate the session.

Con/Lang, Art/Lang, Alt/Lang: Making truth, taking responsibility on the terrain of language in moments of crisis

Scholars across political anthropology have engaged the concept of responsibility as a local and analytical concept that stitches together legal and moral systems (Cooper 2018; Dave 2014; Davis 2012; Garcia 2014; Jain 2006; Kelly 2011; Lambek 2010; Nelson 2009; Trinka and Trundle 2014; Wright 2018). Much of this work focuses on responsibility as a form of liberal governance and ideology; a demarcated set of individualised causal relations through which the potentiality of justice under liberal law emanates. Ethnographic work has also shown the vast complexities of negotiations around the meaning of responsibility in different contexts. But what happens to our understanding of responsibility when we think through notions of complicity: a sense of our mutual involvement with others in the perpetration of harm? This panel asks what forms of ethical relation might overlap and depart from an analytical and empirical focus on responsibility. It offers a consideration of complicity as an ethical, social and political relation that can run through, across or adjacent to claims of responsibility. We ask what ethical imperatives and relationships are brought into view when we foreground complicities across different scales? What are the limits of a concept like complicity? And how might turning to complicity help us to make better sense of the everyday negotiation of ethics and politics across ethnographic sites? Participants on this roundtable pose the above questions across ethnographic sites to develop a comparative perspective. Seema Golestaneh offers the case of Islamic mystics’ insistence that they are a completely apolitical entity within Iran to consider how claims to the apolitical can complicate notions of complicity. In analyzing the labor and work of people with profound disabilities participating in Christian institutions within contemporary Uganda as the basis for projects of person-making, Tyler Zoanni meditates on the uncomfortable position of the complicity of his analysis with a politics and ethics of disability that is patently repugnant before the gaze of liberal disability projects. Tobias Kelly considers British pacifists’ rendering of complicity as moral deficit during the Second World War as a provocation to think through the ethics of mutual entanglement and mutual responsibility. Working through the ethical quandaries of staff and clients in Californian mental health courts, Jessica Cooper wonders whether a discourse of complicity might avail a vantage of ethics less tethered to liberalism than that of responsibility. Lori Allen develops distinctions between complicity in the sense of being an ethical accomplice to those who are oppressed and complicity in the service of status-quo power in relation to scholarship on Palestine and the censorious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. As discussant, Angela Garcia will lead a conversation illuminating the synergies and tensions between participants’ perspectives, bringing the roundtable towards a broader, empirically-minded engagement with complicity.

Complicities: Ethics and Politics at the Edges of Responsibility

Although movement between the United States and Latin American countries is often perceived to move unidirectionally from south to north, transborder ethnographies of education and im/migration offer nuanced insights on the common---yet unrecognized---multidirectionality and multiplicity of how families navigate the intersections of im/migration and education policies across textured landscapes. As members of a Latinx diaspora with multiple physical and relational ties across nation states as well as uneven access to legal structures that contribute to differences in how they navigate the place and space of their lives and learning (Dyrness and Sepúlveda 2020), family members differ in how they live or perceive transborder experiences, or their experiences crossing physical and metaphorical boundaries across nations, institutions, and languages (Trinidad Galván 2014). In this roundtable we explore children as transborder thinkers/knowers who draw upon their own truths and experiences of multiplicity from living, learning, and working within and across varying national systems in ways that embody an in-betweeness of both countries, that pushes against rigid mononational expectations, often in search for a new hybrid possibility (Anzaldúa 1987; Dyrness and Sepúlveda 2000; Mignolo 2000). We discuss the possibilities and limitations of how these experiences can lay the groundwork for pedagogical possibilities that make visible relationships of power and inequity and critically expand whose knowledges are positioned as valuable (Anzaldúa 1987; Cervantes-Soon and Carrillo 2016; Giroux 1988). Our live virtual roundtable is designed to foster an open dialogue. After a brief welcome (5 minutes) each panelist will contextualize their scholarship as it relates to the theme of children as transborder thinkers/knowers at the intersections of im/migration and education policies (5 minutes per panelist). Panelist 1 will reflect on Central American families’ experiences with and strategies for accessing schools during migratory journeys in Mexico, with added challenges during COVID. Panelist 2’s scholarship is situated in Mexican public schools and explores how U.S. documentation status and transborder experiences shape children’s educational trajectories within contexts of forced repatriation. Panelist 3 explores how transnational youths’ in-betweenness of knowing and being, specifically Anzaldúa’s sense of Nepantla, both proscribes and creates possibilities of achievement upon return to Mexico (with frequent senses of wondering about returning yet again to the U.S.). Panelist 4’s research focuses on the aftermath and consequences of separation and detention at the border for immigrant children’s educational experiences in public schools in the United States. The final panelists’ scholarship looks at transborder students’ classroom-based experiences when they move to their parents’ home country of Mexico. The moderator will then facilitate a 45 minute dialogue among panelists with questions such as: What can we learn by centering young people as transborder thinkers? What are the possibilities or limitations of creating spaces for these knowledges within schooling? How have shifting im/migration policies shaped children’s transborder experiences? The discussant, a leading scholar in this field, will then offer reflective comments on the dialogue (10 minutes) before opening up the roundtable to a discussion among audience members and panelists (20 minutes).

Children as transborder thinkers: Im/migration and schooling beyond the mononational gaze

With few exceptions, menstruation has surprisingly played a small role in most anthropological studies of women’s lives. Nevertheless, the near-universal experience of menstruation not only shapes menstruants’ lives on a day-to-day basis, it also affects economic, political, religious, environmental, and other societal realms. This broad impact makes the personal experience of menstruation also a political and public one. Sex education, menstrual product access and advertising, and discourses on gender roles all influence the embodied experience of menstruation. In effect, institutions such as government bodies, hospitals, schools, and businesses collectively create a public script that the menstruant is expected to follow. This roundtable examines what happens when menstruants’ personal lived experiences do not follow social expectations, with a focus on three themes: religion, education, and medicine/biology. Around the world, menstrual blood is seen as a powerful and dangerous body fluid, with the ability to spoil crops, break tools, and enhance--or bewitch--love interests. Earlier scholarship often focused on the polluting qualities of menstrual blood and, by extension, the female body. Such negative discourses are inscribed in foundational religious texts such as the Bible, the Buddhist Blood Bowl Sutra, and the Qur’an. In many traditions, menstruators are prohibited from entering places of worship/divinity, praying, and participating in religious rituals. Rules about menstruation are also imparted through (in)formal education from teachers, family, and peers. In many societies, the modes and amount of education on menstruation are often highly gendered, and in multiple ways. Boys are less likely than girls to receive formal education on menstruation. Likewise, mothers are often expected to be a source of information on menstruation, with fathers left out of the conversation. More broadly, menstruation is often framed in terms of reproductive capacity and culturally shaped gender roles • especially the notion that women should birth and raise children. School teachings on menstruation often present a simplified version of biomedical knowledge. However, it has become increasingly obvious that biomedical understanding of human female reproductive systems is far from complete and lags behind other fields, to the detriment of many menstruating people. Both medical and general understandings of menstruation can be improved by accounting for a broader range of physiological and cultural experiences surrounding periods. Speakers in this roundtable will approach these varied issues in diverse ways that draw on medical, cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology as well as public policy. We examine peoples as diverse as progressive Muslim groups in North America and online; rural and urban women in Michoacan, Mexico; and young Japanese women in Tokyo. Together our presenters will address religious limitations on activities during menstruation; the relationship between menstrual education and consumer choices about menstrual products; the biological variability of the menstrual cycle and its connections to other physiological processes; and people’s experiences with ‘irregular’ (non-monthly) menstrual cycles and dysmenorrhea. We show that experiences and understandings of menstruation shape people’s quality of life, their religious and sociopolitical identities, their views on fertility and motherhood, and their ability to participate fully in society.

Challenging the Typical Menstrual Experience: Inter-subdisciplinary Approaches to the Anthropology of Menstruation

Can Anthropology become a discipline that cares? In this roundtable, we aim to consider this urgent question after a year of intersecting global emergencies laid bare the stakes and consequences of our failures of care. The care/work experiences of anthropologists during the last year underscore that our discipline and the larger project of higher education are often not only uncaring, but also inflict harm and injury on the very people who comprise it and who seek to find shelter - if not a home, in these institutions. The crises of COVID-19 and of racism exploded and collided, revealing yet again how the practices of anthropology in particular and of the academy more generally are rooted in long histories of racialized, gendered, and classed inequality and oppression, which they--and we--continue to reproduce. In what ways are all of us invested in the very systems that are causing harm to ourselves and each other? This roundtable prompts a reflection on the hard truths of care/work. Too often, the giving and receiving of care are taken for granted as necessary, thus not always supported, reciprocated, rewarded, or rewarding. It is often cloaked. Indeed, the experiences of care can be coercive and violent. In the current rush to “be like before,” it seems especially important for anthropologists to ask: what lessons have we learned from our year of crisis that can become the foundation of a better “after” for care? In this roundtable, the chairs and organizers frame the discussion with findings from their five-year study of the experiences of anthropologists in the academy. Next, presenters will draw from their own research and scholarship in the anthropology of care as well as their diverse experiences of personal and professional care/work, especially during the last year. We pay particular attention to intersectionality, our disciplinary histories, and structures of higher education in the United States. Our discussion will build toward imagining more careful structures and caring futures for selves, households, departments, our discipline, and the academy itself.

Care/Work in the Academy: Our Responsibility to Care

The demands of contemporary capitalism are pressing against the infrastructural limits of cities, stalling traffic and bottlenecking roadways. From so-called global cities dominated by financialization, to back office hubs supercharged by Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Metros, jitneys, and aerial cable cars have become foundational systems connecting labor residing in ever more distant peripheries to jobs located in ever higher skylines by circumventing ever more congested roadways. Yet despite the importance of these transit systems to the workings of major cities across much of the world, their stations, trains, and buses have too often been overlooked as mere sites of locomotion rather than as complex social fields integral to the formation of urban life and subjects. This panel brings ethnographic attention to bear upon mass transit systems through a discussion that will shuttle beneath the streets of Bucharest, Delhi, and Taiwan; wind along the surface of Mexico City; and rise above the streets of Bogota, for example, to explore the following: How is the relationship between mass transit stations and the street imagined and effected? What kinds of populations turn towards mass transit systems and which do not or cannot? How are these systems materially staged and what kinds of rider experiences are they designed to support? What kinds of relationships and experiences take shape within trains, buses, and cars? How do these systems contribute to street life more broadly? What projects of belonging do mass transit stations facilitate, from connecting riders to city centers to imagined global middle classes to visions of modernity? Given the volume and mobility of ridership, what methodological challenges do mass transit stations, trains, and lines pose for ethnographic analysis? This panel’s discussion, ultimately, explores mass transit systems in order to bring greater analytical clarity to the study of contemporary urbanism.

Bypassing the Street: Metros, Jitneys, and Aerial Cable Cars

With the advent of Trump’s wall and its resulting effects on human lives and communities, walls on nation-state borders have become a prominent focus in the world today. At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, globally there were only about 15 border/security walls in place or under construction. In contrast, today there are more than 70 walls, with additional ones being proposed. Members of a special AAA Task Force set up to study the global proliferation of border and security walls will discuss the resulting impact of the walls, including the displacement of native peoples; increased militarization; forcing migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers to take more dangerous routes; the division of communities and families; an increase in violence and death; environmental impacts, and the adverse effects of wall construction on archaeological and cultural heritage sites.

Border Walls: Open and Hidden Agendas

After Reality: Ethnography and the Pursuit of the Real, part 2 This companion virtual roundtable to the Part 1 in-person panel offers a discussion of how reality figures into ethnographic practice. Five anthropologists engage each other in conversation, drawing from their distinct thematic and geographical fields, including affective relations with anime characters in Japan, spectral presence in North American spiritualism, miracular imaginaries amid disaster in Colombia, the social lives of economic statistics in post-austerity Greece, and the emergent notion of reality from therapeutic and psychiatric practice in Poland. They explore intersecting themes of fictionality in the production of ethnographic reality, truth as an effect of encounter, the irruption and securing of reality, and reality as that which places demands on us. Contemporary concerns about truth and responsibility seem to index an instability in the cultural production of reality itself. Intersecting technopolitical and biosocial upheavals are disrupting the conditions under which the real is constituted. Across various domains, the procedures underpinning the real and the claims it warrants are being both exposed and remade: from the rise of inflationary media (Castillo and Egginton 2016) and the virtual in technology and biomedicine (Boellstorff 2008; Whitehead and Wesch 2012) to the nonhuman ontologies of scientific practice (Barad 2007) and indigenous multinatural perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 2015; cf. Todd 2016). At a time when the ways of producing the 'reality effect’ in social life are changing, the panel seeks to explore the shifting parameters of the real through the lens of ethnography. It also aims to examine how our discipline, with its moorings in the concrete, practical and experience-near, itself engages and evokes the notion of ‘what is.' Reality is a longstanding key concern for ethnography, in terms of both its objects and method, its narrative styles and the very stakes of the anthropological encounter. It is also, and increasingly, a troubled and troubling term. We contend that the real has a history of its own. A history, on the one hand, of the specific modes of its social production and the slippages of reality’s grip at moments of crises or around edges of epistemes; on the other hand, a history of the ways reality has been approached and rendered in anthropology, including in phenomenology, thick description, constructivism, or experimental methods of research and writing that affirm or challenge ethnography’s own ‘realism’: the authority that comes with having ‘been there’ in that real that ethnographic description purports to immerse the reader in, yet cannot fully capture (Jackson 2005; Stewart 2007, cf. Barthes 1986). The roundtable suggests that the production of reality, in social life as in writing, is intrinsically bound up with relations of power and the specific structurings of the worlds we inhabit, study, and seek to build (van de Port 2011; cf. Yurchak 2006). As such, reality is precisely a matter of not only truth and responsibility but also of the imagination.

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