Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students

Primary Theme: The Political

Secondary Theme: Materiality

(5-1130) Revisiting 'The Network Inside Out': Form, Substance, and Practice among Institutions

This session takes up the ethnographic puzzles and analytic quandaries raised by Annelise Riles in her 2000 "The Network Inside Out" in order to refract them against recent disciplinary trends that examine the relationship between materiality, discourse, and affect. In her influential book, Riles sought to address the methodological problem of how to "render the familiar accessible ethnographically" (2000, 6), by turning the locus of her ethnography, the "network," inside out. This panel brings together ethnographic research on international organizations and meetings that examine how engineers, scientists, lawyers, diplomats, and bureaucrats (and other actors) produce material realities through their "informational practices" of institutional activity with respect to loss and damage, climate narratives, greenhouse gas emissions, and nuclear governance. Additionally, these papers will also illuminate how material realities constrain the institutional efforts of the organizations (and our collaborators) to act in the world.

By bringing into dialogue work on the questions of scale (Carr & Lempert 2016) and the ever elusive location of praxis which has vexed anthropologists since "globalization" made "multi-sitedness," these contributions will address what it means to study the practices of people who work through techniques of spatial and temporal proxies (e.g. modeling glacial melt or remote sensing activities). Further, touching on Riles' descriptions of the "awe" felt by her interlocutors in the process of crafting a consensus document for the Beijing Women's conference, we too will take up the affective dimensions of institutional activity and examine the pleasures and frustrations generated by aesthetic form and network practices.

Presenter(s)

• Naveeda Khan

  Associate Professor
  Johns Hopkins University

Organizer(s)

• Jessica O'Reilly

  Assistant Professor
  Indiana University, Bloomington

Presenter(s)

• Jessica O'Reilly

  Assistant Professor
  Indiana University, Bloomington

• Magnús Sigurðsson

  Ph.D. Candidate
  Rice University

Organizer(s)

• Anna Weichselbraun

  Stanford University

Chair(s)

• Anna Weichselbraun

  Stanford University

Presenter(s)

• Anna Weichselbraun

  Stanford University

Discussant(s)

• Annelise Riles

  Associate Provost
  Northwestern University

Presentations:

• 4:15 PM - 4:30 PM

  The Aesthetics Forms and Dystopic Conjurings of "Loss and Damage"
  Naveeda Khan – Johns Hopkins University
• 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

  The History of Climate Narratives, as told by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
  Jessica L. O'Reilly – Indiana University, Bloomington
• 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

  Play with Form and Content in Internal Meetings of the UNFCCC Secretariat
  Magnús Örn Sigurðsson – Rice University
• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

  No Accents, No Affects: Producing the "Civil Voice" of the IAEA
  Anna Weichselbraun – Stanford University
• 5:15 PM - 5:30 PM

  Discussion
  Annelise Riles – Northwestern University