Dear colleagues,


Some in Minneapolis for the AAA may be interested in our panel, Horizons of an Otherwise: Engaging and Evidencing the Politics of the Re*, at the fresh hour of 8 am tomorrow (Saturday morning). In light of the election, "now more than ever," we feel it is especially critical and exciting to spend a session reckoning with what alternative forms of political engagement are already underway.


Panel people include: Aditi Surie von Czechowski, Elisa Lanari, Emily Ng, Megan Raschig, Laura McTighe, Giovanna Parmigiani, Prof. Deborah A. Thomas and Prof. Lisa Stevenson.

Room 208A
8:00-9:45
Coffee provided!


Session Abstract
What is the horizon of struggle? What possibilities fill our seemingly dystopic political present? Where do we find them? How do we speak them? How do they speak to us?
At the impasse of the ‘end of history’, among the picked-over bones of liberal democratic humanism, the need to reconsider what might constitute ‘the political’ resounds across critical anthropological theory. A generation of scholars has pressed us to realize and dramatically reconceptualize how liberal tropes are smuggled into our analyses of grassroots political engagements -- through habituated conceptual proclivities towards heroic individualism, or latent teleological expectations of progress, or unchecked humanist tendencies towards abstractions like justice or dignity. They propose a range of re* approaches instead: reparative thinking, reckoning-with, reconfigured reciprocity, even responsivity, or recursivity.
And yet we are still left with a fundamental question: So, now what? What does it look like to take steps through this impasse, to dwell in it? To not simply call for a reconfiguration, but to actually reconfigure? To not just make a case for reparations, but to actually repair? We contend that this work is already unfolding on the ground in ways that are not only unrecognizable or “undiscoverable” through our latent liberal lenses and methods, but also at times illegible, among populations whose moral purchase on ‘political subjectivity’ is often already discursively foreclosed. The challenge before anthropologists today is to dwell in these becomings alongside, to resist the urge to name a telos that might never be, and to invite the sort of ethnographic sincerity that opens ourselves up to being transformed, or haunted, in the process. When our ‘informants’ are also our colleagues, comrades, and sisters and brothers, how are we called to reach into that re*, and what does this capacitate in our analyses?
Unsettling the division often staked between North American and Everywhere-Else scholarship, we aim to articulate the pacings and spacings of politics across diverse fieldsites, with particular attention to generative relationalities between ‘political subjects’ broadly writ. Our concerns are sustained along two intertwined lines of inquiry: What formations and horizons is political action taking, generating, growing? And through what relations of re* are we called to dwell in these impasses, bringing about an otherwise alongside? What conversations can we initiate from this tension, between reflecting on our post-political objects of study and refracting our methods and analyses of engagement? In what kind of language is “evidence” of the transformative capacities of these social projects speaking to us, and thereby rendered legible, “discoverable”? At grassroots sites of contestation or accommodation, among fledgling movements for change at multiple metaphysical scales, or simply projects of endurance, what heterologies take shelter in liberalism? How do liberal political vernaculars of, say, rights or revolution or resistance give rise to processes and conditions that exceed their frames? From these engagements with emergence and the something-more, how do we cultivate new ethnographic methods and modalities for perceiving and addressing formations of a political otherwise?




----

Megan S. Raschig, PhD



Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology

Universiteit van Amsterdam



Nieuwe Achtergracht 166 C5.10

+31 (0) 6 81 33 65 91

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