After a short hiatus, we’re back with a new bite-sized overview of a key concept in anthropology: feminism. I spoke to Dr Christa Craven about the foremothers and groundbreakers in feminist anthropology, and about the politics of citations.

Click here for resources, links, additional background, and Teaching Tools connected to the podcast.

Episodes on Sovereignty and on Scientific Racism are also available at the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a collaborative experimental film project with interlocutors who identify as LGBTQ+ and are asylum seekers or asylees. Our aim has been to take journeys through local “gaybourhoods” or “villages”–areas renown for being LGBT-friendly. We discuss what thoughts and memories these spaces evoke while moving through them, allowing our conversations to meander in step with, and in response to the built environment.

I shared initial findings at the recent EASA “Media and Mobilities” workshop, and am honored that our work has been featured as part of the “Representations of Displacement” series on the excellent AHCR-ESRC-sponsored Refugee Hosts project website. We’re in great company: entries in the series each address the politics and (un)intended consequences of particular tropes and mediums for representing experiences of displacement, and most offer compelling and creative alternatives in an effort to “disrupt humanitarian narratives”. The collection is vital reading for those of us engaged in creating and/or perpetuating images and imaginaries in this realm.

Great to see my research getting a platform in the popular press. Thanks to Oscar Lopez for taking the time to conduct an in-depth interview, and to understand the nuances of LGBTQ+ immigration to the United States.

Read the article: “For LGBTQ Refugees in the United States, ‘Visibility is a Two-Sided Sword'”

My aim in writing this article was to contest the myths and fallacies behind claims that modern Pride events must be corporate-sponsored, apolitical, and pro-military / pro-police. I am proud to see that it has been well received (shared on Facebook over 1.6k times and one of the most-read across Rewire in the past month).

You can read the full article here.

Edited volume. Proposal deadline: 31 July, 2017

[Click here for PDF]

Co-editors: Dr. Siobhán McGuirk, Georgetown University (sm3276@georgetown.edu) and Dr. Adrienne Pine, American University (pine@american.edu)

Overview: While the power to grant or deny asylum to people remains overwhelmingly within the purview of States,[1] we approach the actors and institutions forming around asylum systems internationally as “the asylum industry.” Our position engages analyses of commodification and industrialization in multiple, related spheres under neoliberal capitalism.

Call for Contributors: The proposed collection will unite international academics, activists, journalists, artists, and people directly impacted by the asylum industry to explore how current practices of asylum align with the neoliberal moment more broadly, and to present visions for alternative systems and processes. We are looking for contributions in a variety of forms, for example:

• research papers (3,000-4,000 words)
• journalistic articles (800-1,000 words)
• photo-essays, data visualizations, political artwork, and other creative formats (e.g. diary entries; graphic novella; cartoons; poems, etc.).

Continue reading →

Following the call published by the anthropology magazine Savage Minds, my colleagues and I in the Women and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University will host an #AnthReadIn event on Friday 17 February, 12.30-2pm.

We’ll be reading Chapter Nine from Hannah Arendt’s On Totalitarianism (which you can find here), alongside Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (which is available here).

Join the conversation on social media under #AnthReadIn.

I teach at two schools in Washington, DC. One has taken recent action to stop celebrating the legacies of former slave traders, held a series of events and dialogues intended to open spaces to debate ongoing racial prejudice on campus, and elevated of African American Studies from Program to Department status. These moves are welcome, but ongoing efforts to inspire lasting cultural change are still required . The other institution has recently been the site of racist abuse on campus. Students are rightly outraged, and leading calls for meaningful action. The administration is responding, treading a similar path as other U.S. universities, by announcing plans for improved trainings for faculty, staff, admissions teams and students; improved support for relevant student services; and required courses on African American history for incoming undergraduates.

As teachers, we must support these efforts and continue to make space in our classrooms for honest, open dialogues on pressing social issues, including but not limited to racism. We must respond visibly and vocally when members of our student body face discrimination, and fell let down by their institutions.

At a recent on campus rally calling on the administration to act definitively, a student held aloft a placard that read, “Silence is Violence.” This Open Letter to Students of Color At American University is intended to let our students know that we, the faculty, will not be silent. I, along with the other signatories, intend to carry this message into our classrooms and faculty meetings, taking tangible steps to making our campus welcoming to all.