*** Apologies for Cross Posting ***
 
 
115th Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, “Evidence, Accident, Discovery”, Nov.
16-20, 2016 Minneapolis
 
 
 
*Accidental Findings and New Evidence: Precarity of/in Intimacies, Migration, and Tourism*
 
 
 
Organizers:
 
Valerio Simoni
(Graduate Institute, Geneva) 
 
Susan Frohlick
(University of British Columbia, Okanagan)
 
 
Panel Proposal
 
Anthropologists have focused on how unstable job markets and deskilling under neoliberalism have
negatively affected workers, that is, how precarious labor is related to precarious life (Allison 2012). Building on these insights, this panel shows the interest of adopting a broader view of precarity as pertaining to material, social, and existential states of insecurity, dis-belonging, and dis-connectedness related to mobility. More particularly, our focus is on the role of family, kinship, relatedness, love, sex, desire, erotics, and (non-)“normative intimacies” (Berlant 2007) as bound up with border crossings for tourists, migrants, refugees, expatriates, lifestyle migrants, and other mobile subjects, and on how precarities as subjective and affective dimensions of life are emergent from these intimate mobilities. Yet it is not only the “ethnographic truths” of precarity that are of interest to this panel but also the means to grasp them. 
 
Precarity, in migration and tourism, is relevant to the methodologies that anthropologists rely on to gain knowledge of intimate social worlds and life projects. Notions of evidence shape “access” to immigrants whose privacy is already stretched by immigration regimes and trajectories, as intimacies are a currency for anthropological truth telling. Evidence, accident, and discovery appear, too, in the sort of “truth-seeking” dynamics in which anthropologists’ participants can get entangled or are confronted by in the precarious situations of crossing over, or across, borders. Institutional bodies and border agencies scrutinize and police relationships in search of deceit, looking for evidence, so to speak. Finally, in traversing physical and moral boundaries, the protagonists of such intimate relations are often themselves involved in processes of discovering, ascertaining, and working over the precarity of their bonds and connections. In all these cases and dimensions – from ethnographic endeavors, to institutional instances of control, to those directly engaging in cross-border intimacies—much effort seems to be spent on the necessity to delineate the kind of relation one is having.
 
This panel draws attention to what it is that comes to count as evidence of a type of intimate
or familial sociality, and what are the discoveries afforded by different relational and intimate framings. The notion of discovery is also critical for thinking through how intimacy holds potential to generate “accidents” in the sense of accidental findings, which then provide new evidence. Building on these premises, we encourage a view of ethnographic approaches to intimacy and mobility that takes precarity not only as an empirical reality or conceptual analytic, but also a methodological principle, so that accidents enable us, and our research participants, to remain sensitive and attuned to emerging nuances and processes of differentiation, and to question and move beyond taken-for-granted, dominant views of intimacy and relationships. 
 
 
Please send a 250-word abstract to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]
by Tuesday, March 15, 2016.
 
 
Valerio Simoni, PhD.


- Research Fellow(SNSF)The Graduate Institute 
Geneva, Switzerland
- Research Associate
Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA-IUL)

Lisbon, Portugal
http://graduateinstitute.academia.edu/ValerioSimoni
 
Recently published:
2015. Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

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