Roundtable - Cosponsored Status Awarded

Sponsored by: Association for Feminist Anthropology

Cosponsored by: Association of Black Anthropologists

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

Primary Theme: Labor

Secondary Theme: Teaching

(4-0950) WoC'ing in the Academy: Women and Non-Binary Anthropologists of Color at Primarily White Institutions

This roundtable aims to be a mimetic engagement, in form and thematic focus, with the 2013 article, “Sitting at the Kitchen Table: Fieldnotes from Women of Color in Anthropology,” authored by Tami Navarro, Bianca William and Attiya Ahmad. Crafting place for the kitchen within the disciplinary ‘home-space’ of the 2018 AAA meeting, we continue to reflect on four concerns of the original authors: “pre-existing raced, classed, and gendered understanding of what constitutes a ‘professor,’ “the disproportionate amounts of affective labor” required of WoC faculty, anthropology’s “ongoing fascination with [and juxtaposition of] binary ‘difference,’(444)” and profit-generated attention to diversity; all of which can disadvantage scholars of color as it regards academic hiring practices, tenure reviews, and curricular use and citation practices around their scholarship. As organizers of the roundtable, we pull these themes forward to discuss how they raise the stakes, specifically, for women and non-binary faculty and students of color, who navigate the disciplinary, academic, and everyday expectations at institutions whose faculty, student, and administrative body are primarily white, in areas and regions that are primarily white, as well. We stress the whiteness of the institution and the region to explore the ways that our subjective, structural and spatial locations are entangled. In other words, we hope to have a frank discussion about the ways that bodily vulnerability may join academic and intellectual isolation in these spaces and how, if at all, we use our ethnographic training and anthropological ethics as daily practices of mediation and meditation. Some of the urgency of our discussion is framed by the contemporary political moment in which the intellectual thought and teaching practices of women and non-binary scholars of color are targeted negatively and, sometimes, with threats of violence in public and digitized domains. The organizers strongly encourage students, both graduate and undergraduate, to join in this conversation with faculty members. We recognize the institutional power differentials that distinguish the student and faculty experience, but very few of us will escape stigmatizing forces that are engendered and racialized within patriarchal systems. We look forward to intentionally speaking together and speaking back

Organizer(s)

• Kim Cameron-Dominguez

  Assistant Professor
  Lewis & Clark College

Chair(s)

• Kim Cameron-Dominguez

  Assistant Professor
  Lewis & Clark College

Presenter(s)

• Rucha Ambikar

  Assistant Professor of Sociology/Anthropology
  Bemidji State University

• Mariam Durrani

  Assistant Professor
  Hamilton College

• Monica Rodriguez

  Doctoral Candidate & Adjunct Instructor
  Wayne State University & Ferris State University

Discussant(s)

• Tamisha Navarro

  Associate Director
  Barnard College

Presenter(s)

• Grace McMickens

  Undergraduate Student
  Lewis & Clark College

• Rita Walters

  Assistant Professor
  Ferris State University

Chair(s)

• Angela Guy-Lee

  Adjunct Professor
  Ferris State University

Presenter(s)

• Angela Guy-Lee

  Adjunct Professor
  Ferris State University