Annals of Anthropological Practice最新文献

Funding agencies and institutions are increasingly requiring researchers to involve communities and make their work more broadly accessible. The problem is that researchers new to health equity research, and sometimes even people who have engaged in this work for a while, may not sufficiently appreciate the challenges and systemic institutional transformations that must occur to achieve equity. To make pretty words meaningful requires a return to the transformative power and potential that was originally imbued in the concept of equity. The implementation of pretty words as a process that requires a relational framework and a commitment beyond ink on paper is central to our intervention. This special section of Annals of Anthropological Practice opens up a critical dialogue about “pretty words,” or concepts like “community-engaged research” and “diversity” that win grants and check the boxes for inclusion, but risk becoming hollow without ongoing conversations between researchers and communities. As anthropologists who study health, we are both skeptical and appreciative of the “pretty words” that characterize our efforts toward developing interdisciplinary research that seeks to build equity and address community health concerns. The power of pretty words can only be activated through reflection that leads to action, but this requires a commitment beyond the institutional expectations and individual rewards of research as usual. The essays in this special section cover diverse topics, but all are conjoined in their pursuit of not just critiquing pretty words, but outlining meaningful ways forward to reclaim the radical potential embedded in these concepts.

Aspiring to the idea that praxis opens up possibilities for transformation, this commentary reflects on the work of contributing authors to consider interrelationships between pedagogy, research, and praxis of community-engaged work to create change through the academic enterprise without losing sight of goals to support often-underserved communities and populations that anthropologists study. This treatment situates the accounts of community-engaged research in the context of the NIH investment in clinical translational research and explores the notion of engaging the community beyond clinical trial accrual while recognizing the vexed subject position of anthropologists in the employ of academic medical centers. The commentary then reflects on key terms from the contributors, questioning the objective of getting back to normal, the lived experience of intersectionality, and the challenge of centering root causes as we work to remedy disparities/inequities. Acknowledging the power of NIH as a sociocultural driver of academic medicine, the commentary positions anthropology as a disciplinary vehicle for moving between the individual and the social registers, ending with a reflection on critique as a form of praxis.

In this piece, I explore the “pretty word” of intersectionality to contribute to existing discussions on its usage as an analytical framework and tool among social justice projects. Through my personal queer journey in podcasting, the coming-out experience, and traversing across various spaces, I highlight the importance of incorporating a relational, embodied, and geographic perspective within intersectionality. I reveal how this perspective can unsettle common assumptions about social identities, specifically a fixed view of racialized-sexualized identities and the location of oppressions and privileges. Through various situations, movements, and reflections, I uncover an emerging approach to intersectionality that exists in relation to different spatialities and temporalities rather than in isolation. I reveal the limits of common applications of intersectionality in health equity research while also recognizing the pitfalls that some institutions and social actors fall into while promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, including the reproduction of common ideas of victimhood and superiority. Ultimately, this article advocates for building new worlds by reworking the ways researchers and communities connect and relate with one another and themselves.

Terms like community engaged research and community-based participatory research risk losing their meaning and significance in health equity research. This article calls attention to potential overuse of such terms in applied health research with historically marginalized populations. Reflecting on essays that advocate for decolonizing research, this article considers ways to engage in research that does not enact epistemicide or the erasure of diverse ways of doing research and knowledge generation, as well as encourages the “deep work” of relationship and trust building. The author argues that research should be an ongoing and reflexive practice that works to dismantle the legacy of colonialism that has dictated, for too long, who does science and research and who generates knowledge.

Once a ubiquitous framework for assessing the capacity for recovery, perseverance, and success in the face of adversity, resilience has been met with growing critiques in its application. As a frequently used “pretty word” within health disparities research, resilience has come to signify how at-risk communities overcome hardship in ways this work argues overdetermine their labor, activist potential, and existence. This critique examines resilience through the lens of ethnographic research conducted among transgender and nonbinary healthcare providers who provide gender-affirming care within their communities. As a marginalized community experiencing transphobia and increasing structural barriers to life-affirming and life-saving healthcare, trans healthcare workers embody many tenets of resilience in how they are recast as medical authorities rather than victims. The aim of this intervention is to disentangle socio-cultural meanings and expectations associated with the application of resilience. This work argues resilience presupposes colonial and cis-heteronormative progress narratives in which trans people's capacity to overcome oppression renders their labor and advocacy as tied to perceived static conditions of transphobia. Through reexamining the use of resilience in health disparities research, researchers can better center communities in which they are engaged while avoiding monolithic representation and uncritical interpretation of oppressive systems.

Much has been written about decolonizing practices in the academy. This essay engages the conversation by focusing on the analysis phase of research to consider how research continues to be a process of colonization and epistemicide. Advances in community-engaged research (CEnR) ameliorate some issues of inclusion. Yet, institutional procedures and claims to methods that entrench a scientifically enlightened way of knowing continue to systematically exclude Indigenous knowledge and many other systems of knowledge. Indeed, Tuck and Yang's question about what is distinct and sovereign, remains. Drawing on the analysis phase of a CEnR project with Native Americans, we describe our process for centering Indigenous epistemologies. While data gathering and analysis were inclusive, we were not always successful in maintaining the community partner's sovereignty. This example demonstrates the challenges of institutions that long for us to forget that there are other ways of knowing, and the promises of relational thinking and being as anti-oppressive, though not yet decolonized research. Pausing to examine our practices during the analysis phase of research allows us to ask and enact different forms of relationality and reimagine how we come to know.

Economic inclusion is generally regarded as a desirable goal for historically marginalized communities, but a critical reading of this goal raises important questions: who is included and/or excluded? And what are the power relations that structure decisions about the form of inclusivity in any economic development process? In this essay, I reflect on my community-engaged research with Just San Bernardino (Just SB), a coalition of nine community-based and union organizations that formed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic to redefine initiatives toward genuine forms of economic inclusion. This research documented long-standing community frustrations and mismatched understandings of priorities among communities, grant-making organizations, and governmental agencies. The research led Just SB to develop a People's Plan for an Inclusive Economy and a companion People's Dictionary to lay the groundwork for a shared understanding of key terms and their goals. Reflecting on this grassroots research process, I suggest that economic inclusion has no monolithic definition, but rather must be grounded in multiple social worldviews if we are to generate meaningful change.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the university are increasingly valorized, but have we made progress in supporting diverse faculty and students? Synthesizing contributions in this issue that advocate for meaningful faculty diversity and genuine forms of care in the university, this essay reflects on why, even after decades of such diversity initiatives, higher education still struggles with the underrepresentation of minority scholars. Even as legal frameworks such as the Government Issued Bill (GI Bill) (in its seven iterations to date) have shifted toward greater inclusion and the Civil Rights movement opened new pathways that continue to expand today, we must go beyond counting diverse bodies in the academy toward meaningful practices that allow diverse scholars to thrive. Drawing on Moten and Harney's notion of the undercommons urges us to reflect and take action in our own teaching and research roles in the system to build spaces of radical refusal and collective dissent that challenge traditional ideas about the role of the university in society. Such a project requires centering students in their own learning, putting higher education within a larger late capitalism neoliberal context, and holding administrators accountable for their leadership and support of diversity initiatives. Collectively, such actions have the potential to move the university toward the sustained and genuine diversity and inclusion efforts we need to remain relevant.

This article critiques “care” within the neoliberal university through two questions: What is the meaning of “care” in a neoliberal university? How is the neoliberal university addressing the social and structural factors that prevent scholars from marginalized communities from succeeding in higher education? It condemns the superficial care promoted by the neoliberal university, which prioritizes competition, prestige, and productivity over genuine support. Participatory-action research challenges these practices by centering marginalized voices. The study included 10 participants (7 women, 2 men, 1 non-binary), all low-income, first-generation college students. Using PhotoVoice, a participatory-action research method, participants documented their social connectedness, sense of belonging, and mental health in graduate education. Their narratives revealed neglect and invisibility, highlighting the negative effects of limited resources, precarious working conditions, financial instability, food insecurity, and inadequate housing on their well-being and quality of life. The article argues that neoliberal universities perpetuate neglect and avoid addressing structural issues like structural racism and settler colonialism. It proposes self-reflexivity, intentionality, and collective resistance as transformative care practices essential for dismantling oppressive systems. These practices offer a revolutionary approach to resisting neoliberalism and fostering community-based care, healing the symbolic, psychological, and emotional harm caused by neoliberal policies. Transformative care is crucial to foster health equity and collective healing in higher education.

What if as researchers we do not share the same experiences or belong to the same structurally marginalized communities with whom we work, yet we recognize an urgent collective need to address health injustices? In this essay, I reflect on what it means for academic researchers to work in solidarity with communities. Drawing on my community-based research on opioid overdose and harm reduction, I think about solidarity as a form of pedagogy that does not rely on notions of similarity, but rather recognizes the incommensurability of differences as part of an interlinked struggle. This approach to building solidarity is grounded in social relationships, empathy, and reciprocity and calls for collective action. Reflecting on the importance of harm reduction and the relationships we develop with people who use drugs and bear the brunt of politically-induced suffering is not just an academic exercise, but a possibility for building life-sustaining solidarity. In the case of the ongoing overdose crisis that has devastated communities, finding new ways to reclaim and enact solidarity is critical if our goal is collective survival.