Roundtable - Cosponsored Status Awarded

Sponsored by: Association of Black Anthropologists

Cosponsored by: American Ethnological Society

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities

Primary Theme: Race

Secondary Theme: Resistance

(3-0500) Reclaiming Our Truths: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Challenges in Transforming Anthropology

The AAA meetings are a space in which to reevaluate and redirect anthropology. Each year, we ask similarly critical questions about anthropology, yet we see little meaningful change in the discipline (Parikh 2018). How does race shape our ethnographic work and our work within our respective institutions? Why does anthropology as a discipline continue to systematically devalue and delegitimize ethnic studies, or view those anthropologists who work on race as ethnic studies scholars instead of anthropologists? How has anthropology been helpful and/or detrimental to the progress of scholars of color and scholars of race and inequality? Why does anthropology continually address class and gender more frequently than race (Ahearn 2013)? As Ruth Behar once said, “Anthropology has changed, but not enough yet” (2009). What is perhaps most pressing to ponder is whether or not anthropology can be transformed, whether or not we want to transform it, or if the path forward is to build something completely different. To truly decolonize the colonial discipline of anthropology might literally mean to end the discipline entirely (Rosa 2017).

This round table offers a deeply personal and interactive space in to which to address these pressing questions by reflecting on our respective research and embodied knowledge on race and racialization as relates to personhood, citizenship, the body, language, media, political economies, and public space. By extension, we will also discuss our institutional labor and building in efforts to transform anthropology and the academy more broadly. In response to this year’s theme, we will focus on our continued resistance to the colonial and white supremacist practices in anthropology, and how we have worked towards creating projects (whether they are accepted as anthropological projects or not) that serve our communities in dynamic and reciprocal ways, thus exploring if/how we can be individual agents of change in the discipline. Practicing resistance, resilience, and adaptation is precisely how those of us on this round table have survived as anthropologists. We will address how championing this spirit of resistance might be the only way for anthropology to have a redeeming future.

Organizer(s)

• Deborah Thomas

  R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology
  University of Pennsylvania

• Aimee Cox

  Associate Professor
  Yale University

Chair(s)

• John Jackson, Jr.

  University of Pennsylvania

Presenter(s)

• Vanessa Diaz

  Assistant Professor
  Loyola Marymount University

• Jemima Pierre

  Associate Professor
  University of California, Los Angeles

• Shannon Speed

  UCLA

• Setha Low

  Professor
  CUNY, Graduate Center

Discussant(s)

• Aisha Beliso-De Jesus

  Professor
  Princeton University

• Jonathan Rosa

  Assistant Professor
  Stanford University