Dontre Hamilton. Alfred Olango. Lavall Hall. Laquan McDonald. We say their names and are reminded of one recurring theme in the on-going discussion about racialized police brutality: the deadly confluences between mental health crises and the lethal force that meets them in police responses. Continue reading
The editors of Anthropoliteia are happy to continue an ongoing series The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus Project, which will mobilize anthropological work as a pedagogical exercise addressing the confluence of race, policing and justice. You can see a growing bibliography of resources via our Mendeley feed. In this entry, Anne Galvin discusses how teaching with memoir introduces many voices and points of view in her classroom.
I attended graduate school in the 1990s and, like many anthropologists in training, spent much of my coursework considering questions of “positionality.” At the time, taking stock of anthropology’s relationship to colonial projects, as well as our own sometimes privileged positions and biases, shaped disciplinary debates and new methodologies. Reflexivity – the practice of being transparent about one’s own situation and possible bias – was one way anthropologists responded to the problem of position. It turns out these considerations are far from academic in 2017 as we work to build more effective engagements between anthropologists and movements for racial justice and develop inclusive classroom pedagogies. Continue reading
Near the intended end of the party, my friend announced the peculiar reason for my being in America at the present time and invited the company to tell them their frank opinions on the Negro problem. For a moment a somewhat awkward silence descended upon our party, a queer feeling that our relation of human understanding was broken. (Myrdal 1944, 33)
Years ago, I had an unsettling experience while helping to teach a course on ethnographic methods. Focusing on the concept of neighborhood in Baltimore, the course was designed to train students in basic methods while at the same time honing their curiosity and ability to formulate anthropological questions. The goal was to give the sense of ethnography as, on the one hand, comprising longstanding and relatively stable procedures while, on the other, entailing a creative process that overturns and transforms itself as it moves along the contours of a field.
Ayanda Mabulu at DF Contemporary
Screen grab from post by SPDbodywornvideo CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by Meg Stalcup
The editors of Anthropoliteia are happy to present the latest entry in on ongoing series The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus Project, which will mobilize anthropological work as a pedagogical exercise addressing the confluence of race, policing and justice. You can see a growing bibliography of resources via our Mendeley feed. In this entry, Sameena Mulla discusses Aimee Meredith Cox’s Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship.
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