Roundtable at the 2020 AAA virtual conference: “(Re)writing Anthropology and Raising Our Voices from the Academic Margins.”
View the recording of our conversation here.
Participants: Kimberley McKinson, Edward K. Snajdr, Shonna Trinch, Erica L. Williams, Angela C. Jenks, and Justin Perez.
Abstract: The post-George Floyd world that we now inhabit urgently demands a willingness to boldly re-think the ways in which anthropology has been theorized, practiced, and taught in order to make the discipline more equitable for all. Still, often inherent in such an argument is an implicit assumption that it is from anthropology departments at predominantly white institutions (PWIs)—and in particular, the discipline’s select highly regarded graduate programs—that scholarship and pedagogy that will contribute to radically re-framing the discipline will emerge. This roundtable provocatively asks: what would it mean to (re)write anthropology from the academic margins, that is, from minority serving institutions (MSIs), historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), community colleges, and other traditionally under-resourced institutions that nurture primarily under-served undergraduate populations? Can such institutions and their students—thought to have less of a stake in these existential debates—be the authority? In this roundtable, comprised of anthropologists who work in and represent “non-hegemonic” institutions, participants will speak to intellectual projects and pedagogy that challenge what anthropology (and an anthropologist) can look like, how anthropology can be practiced, how it can be taught, and what it can contribute to a more just world. Panelists will show how the life experiences of their “non-traditional” students can allow for a fundamental re-engagement with the possibilities of anthropological theory and method. In seeking to raise the voice of anthropology at these institutions, this roundtable situates the academic margins as a critical site from which anthropology must be decolonized and re-imagined in the current political moment.