apologies for cross-posting!


Hi everyone,


I have another AAA CFP that some of you might hopefully find interesting. It is entitled "Ethnographies of Global Health: What do ‘following methodologies’ look like?" (please see abstract below). If you're interested could you send me an email to let me know you're interested and then we can chat about submitting an abstract? We are really interested in phd students currently conducting some kind of 'following' ethnography, as we'd really like to bring together students, postdocs and profs working through these ideas.


Please feel free to email me your idea at [log in to unmask]


AAA Panel Proposal: Ethnographies of Global Health: What do ‘following methodologies’ look like?





Organizers: Laurie Denyer Willis (LSHTM) and Coll Hutchison (LSHTM)

Chair: Emily Yates-Doerr (University of Amsterdam)

Discussant: Clare Chandler (LSHTM)





Over the past three decades, anthropologists that follow people, things and ideas - migrants, sugar, policy, mushrooms and microbes to name just a few - have opened up the so-called singular ethnographic field site. They have helped to reveal the practices that make and define our field sites and objects of study, as well as the conditions for knowing them. This has emerged from methodological and conceptual experimentation with how we co-produce, document and delimit ethnographic presents.  Central to this has been the pleasure of thinking with and within plural and multi-sited (dis)entanglements of humans and more-than-humans (Jensen 2012; Kirksey &  Helmreich 2010; Marcus 1999; Tsing 2009, 2015). This emphasis on movement requires careful attunement to the sensory, conceptual and discursive practices that intertwine the object or idea being followed, both spatially and temporally (Mol 2014). Such a mode of attunement, allows us to notice not just the consistency of an object across and between sites and situations, but also differences, when its consistency, stability or flow are not given, leaving room for uncertainty, difference and contingency. Thus, the aim of following may not be to know ‘an object’, but to document particularities and similarities as they emerge through connections, tensions and disconnections in specific sites, situations and practices (Yates-Doerr 2015). This panel is concerned with exploring the diverse arts of ethnographic following and the sensory, conceptual, discursive and reflexive practices that following entails.



We are particularly aware of the spatial metaphors and images we rely on when we follow in the anthropology of global health - the networks, assemblages, pathways, and rhizomes that haunt us as we plod through the sometimes literal field, and then the amount of work we do as anthropologists to make it look like it all hangs together, effortlessly or not, as we follow the flow of ‘an object.’ Rather than assume constant flow, we see that following methodologies can also reveal the “patchy unpredictability” (Tsing) of flows and entanglements.  Following, then, must also account for the intensive and non-terrestrial in global health - affective, atmospheric, and emotional space, and the ways they (possibly) never quite flow together. How, then, do cartographic or geometric metaphors potentially constrain the ways we do, think about and imagine our co-production of ethnographic presents and engagement with non-terrestrial field sites? Can we experiment with alternatives metaphors and descriptive practices?



This requires a fine-tuning of what modes of attention we engage (and disengage) with when we are following: listening, reading, smelling, seeing, touch, but also those enabled through technologies such as mobile phones, computers, and x-rays, for example. This highlights that how we come to attend to what we are following is as much a question of temporality as spatiality. In fact the two are intimately imbricated: following requires careful attunement - of our senses and apparatuses - to the temporality and spatiality of what we are following. To ignore temporality risks uncritically valourising a particular ethnographic present over others, and how it has come to be constituted. Thus, following might demonstrate that rather than effortless flow, things can be patchy, disconnected, uneven, as well as fading in and out of existence. We are then in a place to comment on the continuity, flow and connection of feelings, microbes, policies, mushrooms, patients and chemicals, just as much as their inertia, disappearance, discontinuity and patchiness.



This panel is particularly interested in papers that document methodologies of ethnographic following, their challenges, relevant examples in the field of global health and STS, and bodily practices and attunement involved in following. Specific questions include:



Where does one start? From words, material objects, places, people or nonhumans? In the practice-focused semiotic-material view, can we even conceive of these as independent entities to follow in the first place?

What bodily senses are involved in coming to know what we are following and do they open or foreclose  particular avenues of investigation? How do we augment or modify our senses to inform our ability to follow? I.e. engagement with methods from other disciplines, typically not associated with ethnography

Is what we are following always something in motion? Is the unity and stability of what is followed a given in the act of following? Is the unity and stability of the follower a given in the act of following?

What does an unconnected following entail?

When does a following ethnographer become a leader, trailblazer, pathfinder, trendsetter?

Who and what is the human that is followed?



References:

Jensen CB. Anthropology as a following science. NatureCulture. 2012;1(1):1–24.

Kirksey SE, Helmreich S. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology. 2010 Nov;25(4):545–76.

Marcus, George E. "What is at stake–and is not–in the idea and practice of multi-sited ethnography." Canberra anthropology 1999;22.2: 6-14.

Mol A. Language Trails: ‘Lekker’ and Its Pleasures. Theory, Culture & Society. 2014 Mar 1;31(2–3):93–119.

Tsing, Anna. "Supply chains and the human condition." Rethinking Marxism 2009;21.2:148-176.

Yates-Doerr E. Intervals of confidence: Uncertain accounts of global hunger. BioSocieties [Internet]. 2015 [cited 2015 Jun 26]



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