Workshop

Hosted by: Council on Anthropology and Education

Of interest to: Students, applied researchers and non-anthropologists who are community leaders and activists and especially those who want to do something positive and proactive in lieu of just critiquing the existing democratic structures and personalities.

Primary Theme: Technical Skill Development

(5-0675) After Neoliberalism, What? A Workshop on How to Conduct Community-Based Research

Level of Audience: Beginning

Click here to register for this workshop and add it to your existing Annual Meeting registration.

AFTER NEOLIBERALISM, WHAT? A WORKSHOP ON HOW TO CONDUCT COMMUNITY-BASED RESEARCH (ANAMATANGI/GREG TANAKA). This 2-hour, techniques-based workshop will (1) present the work of local community members from East Palo Alto-based “Anamatangi” who have been addressing local problems through “community-based research” (after Guajardo, Guajardo & Casaperalta, 2007). The workshop will then (2) help participants to develop strategies for agency and self-development in their own home communities. Long racialized and under-resourced, East Palo Alto had for decades been the target of research by professors from nearby Stanford University. In each case community members—African Americans, Pacific Islanders and Latina/os—were left “feeling like guinea pigs.” When the researchers left, the local result was always the same: “Nothing for us changed.” In identifying issues currently facing their own community—and then attracting grant funding to address those issues—East Palo Alto is seeking to throw off “the learned helplessness” of the minoritized neoliberal community and “top-down democracy” of today—and model a more direct and “bottom-up democracy.” Interventions are presently directed to parenting, youth suicide, homelessness, environmental protection, media, and the use of music and dance to reclaim ethnic identity. Workshop participants will be urged to (a) identify issues that are troubling communities that are dear to them, (b) consider strategies for those communities to address the problems themselves, and (c) anticipate how they might “scale up” their future work and outcomes via replication nationwide.

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will leave this workshop with the skills and confidence to initiate and guide community based research in the communities that are dear to them.
• This approach will extend a world-wide movement to develop agency in local communities exemplified by the Himalayan Consensus in Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and India and in Llano Grande, south Texas.
• Participants will also learn how to translate the community’s passions for change into grant proposals to secure funding. Leaders of the workshop have raised over $50 million in outside funding.

Organizer(s)

• Gregory Tanaka

  Co-Presenter
  Anamatangi and Center for the Study of Democracy and Social Change, Mamadee Uhila, Rev Dan Taufalele, Violet Saena, Kitione Mokofisi, Mele Latu, Papa Sentar Uhila, Hon. Sharifa Wilson, Regina Walker-Jones, Erica Dominguez, Briana Evans, Tania Perez, Reyna Mendoza, Jennifer Lyons

Workshop Presenter(s)

• Gregory Tanaka

  Co-Presenter
  Anamatangi and Center for the Study of Democracy and Social Change, Mamadee Uhila, Rev Dan Taufalele, Violet Saena, Kitione Mokofisi, Mele Latu, Papa Sentar Uhila, Hon. Sharifa Wilson, Regina Walker-Jones, Erica Dominguez, Briana Evans, Tania Perez, Reyna Mendoza, Jennifer Lyons