UMass Amherst Team Presents at American Anthropology Association Annual Meeting
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A team of UMass Amherst faculty and doctoral students presented at the American Anthropology Association's annual meeting held November 20-23, 2024, in Tampa, FL. The meeting, centered around the theme of “praxis,” aimed to reimagine, create, question, and debate an anthropological praxis in research and work that supports the ethical and equitable treatment of communities we work and live in.
The UMass Amherst team, organized by Professors and frequent collaborators Aline Gubrium (Community Health Education) and Betsy Krause (Anthropology), included 5 doctoral students: Fiona Almeida and Camille Collins Lovell (Community Health Education); Gabriela Quijano and Lara Sabra (Anthropology); and Karl Lyn (Afro-American Studies).
In a panel session titled “New Ethnography of Encounters: Creating Interdisciplinary Networks of Praxis and Learning,” the group of researchers highlighted ethnographic praxis through the work of interdisciplinary scholars who, feeling lost and at a loss, came together during the pandemic and formed an Ethnography Collective across eight departments in four colleges at UMass Amherst. Subsequently, the group hosted events, created a curriculum, and established a Graduate Certificate in Ethnographic Research. Participants in this network reflected on interdisciplinary encounters of praxis to reimagine their disciplines.
The papers presented on the panel critically examined the praxis of ethnography from diverse contexts and disciplinary lenses from the nexus of Afro-American studies/political anthropology, public health/medical anthropology, sociocultural anthropology/critical disaster, and carceral studies. Their experiences as emerging ethnographers explored the potential of ethnography as transformative praxis as well as political project.
Fiona Almeida reflected on transitions in praxis from a career in non-profit global health to a doctoral program in community health and focuses on encounters with ethnographic sensibilities via her facilitation of a student-led group. Gabriela Quijano, completing fieldwork on (post)disaster economic recovery in Puerto Rico while also recovering her own fieldwork post-Covid, considered two sides of praxis: socioeconomic repair and fieldwork repair. Karl Lyn, conducting fieldwork on the everyday political lives of young adults in Los Angeles, assessed ethnography as a tool to grasp the complexities of social and political life, agency, and possibility in Black communities. Camille Collins Lovell, grappling with tensions in training between public health and medical anthropology as she conducted fieldwork with migrant Vermont dairy workers, conceptualized reciprocal exchanges as micro praxis between researched and researcher, farmworker and fieldworker, undocumented and citizen. Lara Sabra, extending praxis to questions of representing incarcerated women's voices and life worlds in Lebanon, credited ethnography with a multimodal and improvisational methodological approach to reconcile uncertainty and ambiguity with state invisibility and neglect.
Founded in 1902, the American Anthropological Association is the world’s largest scholarly and professional organization of anthropologists. The association is dedicated to advancing human understanding and applying this understanding to the world’s most pressing problems.