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- Convenors:
-
Timothy Neale
(Deakin University)
Alexander D'Aloia (The Australian National University)
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- Discussant:
-
David Giles
(Deakin University)
- Format:
- Roundtable
- Sessions:
- Friday 26 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
This roundtable explores emerging genres of public engagement, and the ways we might cultivate anthropological publics and publics attuned to anthropological thinking. Contributors draw on experience with a range of platforms, including podcasts, blogs, events, public commentary and social media.
Long Abstract:
Are public anthropologists trying to find a public, make a public, work for the public, or just work in public? Who do we think our audiences are, and by what channels do we reach them? Taking the session title as a maxim, this roundtable will discuss various understandings of public anthropology emerging today, and how we might yet cultivate anthropological publics and publics attuned to anthropological thinking. Further, we will explore the ways in which emerging genres of public engagement—such as podcasts, open-access journals, open letters, Anthropology Day, Anthropological Twitter, and so on—inflect both our publicness and our anthropology. The discussion will reflect on the collective, institutional, and personal possibilities of putting anthropology in public and the ambivalent alignment between these possibilities and the "impact agenda" currently affecting the discipline in Australia and elsewhere. Contributors will draw on their experience practicing public anthropology through a range of methods and platforms including podcasts, blogs, open events, commentary writing and social media.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 26 November, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
For the roundtable, I will talk about online spaces beyond social media posts, both the discussions they generate and the interest in anthropology they spark. I argue that there is a public out there with the potential to be fascinated by anthropology, we just need to better facilitate spaces.
Paper long abstract:
For my contribution to the panel, I will reflect upon experiences of The Familiar Strange in generating conversations about anthropology outside the academic space, with particular emphasis on our online presence beyond simply posting to social media. These conversations often don’t reflect the discipline or sub-discipline boundaries that we normally recognise in academia, and the questions asked by the public are often quite different to those we as anthropologists want to ask.
To bring anthropology to a wider audience, we need to not only engage with these conversations, but encourage them. For anthropology to be a household word, it needs to be something people feel as if they are knowledgeable enough to talk about.
Social media has created new spaces in which the general public can engage with anthropology. It is often treated as simply more publicity—another channel to advertise on. However, when used effectively, spaces such as Facebook groups can become spaces in which people engage in wide ranging conversations with each other, not just with the anthropologist. I contribute to the discussion by asking who these people are, what they talk about, and what the challenges are of sustaining these engagements.
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, I would like to entertain the proposition that the discipline of Anthropology and its residents need to cultivate new publics, receptive to its diverse forms of expertise. I will float some ideas about how to go about this cultivation, offering advice I should take myself.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I would like to entertain the proposition that the discipline of Anthropology and its residents need to cultivate new publics, receptive to its diverse forms of expertise. The discipline is public-poor (isn’t it?). Our environment, within academia, is increasingly hostile and the number who might defend us outside academia seems to be dwindling. ‘Public engagement’ seems to have be contained to something we do in distant fieldsites, proximate classrooms, social media platforms and sometimes also through the open proclamation of moral or political positions on current events. Reflecting on my own experiences in the past several years, in particular through developing academic podcasts and other initiatives with the intention of making the field more accessible to a range of individuals in the discipline's various borderlands, I will float some ideas about how we might go about cultivating new publics, offering advice I should probably take myself.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the experience of co-producing an anthropological podcast, this paper explores the discursive, affective, and analytical limits of traditional academic genres of speech, and the anthropological affordances of other genres that convene broader publics—along with how to foster them.
Paper long abstract:
Michel Foucault is reputed to have told a friend once that, out of necessity, ten percent of what he wrote was deliberately incomprehensible, lest the French intelligentsia fail to take him seriously. By the same token, he and his ideas achieved wide public circulation and influence. While we cannot doubt the value of his work (or of reading intricate theoretical work in general) the apocryphal anecdote raises underexamined questions.
On one hand, we must ask: what are the discursive, affective, and analytical limits of traditional academic genres of speech and writing? What anthropological insights cannot be spoken during a seminar, or a conference panel? What ethnographic insights are worth sharing that might remain inadmissible, or even illegible, in circuits of peer-reviewed publication? What keeps our ideas from moving beyond those circuits? And so on.
And on the other hand: what are the anthropological affordances of other genres of speech that speak to broader publics, and how can these be cultivated? What valuable analytical work, for example, does a podcast enable—with its capacity for integrating anecdote, interdisciplinarity, big-picture speculation, critical reflection, and so on? And how might that analytic work be enriched by the affective possibilities of a medium which facilitates humour, personal engagement, and (dare we say) fun—not to mention a permissive context in which to invite the voices of our ethnographic interlocutors?
This paper explores these questions on the basis of the author’s experience of public scholarship—particularly, co-producing the podcast Conversations in Anthropology for four years.
Paper short abstract:
As part of the panel, I reflect on digital anthropology as a publicly engaged anthropology from its emergence. Drawing on ten years of experience across British and Australian traditions, I consider ethnographic practice and writing from social media to activism and creative/non-scholarly works.
Paper long abstract:
As part of the roundtable, I will reflect on digital anthropology as a publicly engaged anthropology from its emergence as a sub-discipline. The mobility of mobile phones and sociality of social media allows for the assemblage of visual content, digital practices, interviews, researcher and participant reflection as ethnographic inquiry to allow for a deeper understanding of a distant geographical or social site, and the meanings they generate. Such an assemblage is already contributing to ‘writing culture’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) and to facilitate anthropology in ‘explaining itself to outside itself’ (Eriksen, 2006). Ethnographies are no longer confined to the thick descriptions of monographs or published journal articles; they have been made accessible through websites, online courses and short films, often made in collaboration with participants.
Drawing on ten years of experience across British and Australian digital anthropology traditions, I contribute to the roundtable discussion by considering ethnographic practice and writing from uses of social media to activism, to creative and non-scholarly outputs. In particular, I draw on insights gained from the globally comparative Why We Post project (University College London, 2012-2026), where integrating new modes of anthropological research dissemination using digital media platforms was integral to the project’s design. I further consider the implications of current circumstances of the immobilities and disruptions caused to ‘traditional’ research dissemination due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent increase in engagement with digital technologies.
Paper short abstract:
Poetry, as a way to engage in embodied learning in an accessible and visceral of pertinent anthropological insights.
Paper long abstract:
We will explore how a thread of poetics may help to lead the discipline of anthropology from the world of academia into people's homes. The poetic thread goes back into anthropology's past, to the impact poetics has had on the discipline's turning towards the sensuous. We consider the impact poetry has had on the anthropology's most renown representatives: Margret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir and Victor Turner. The thread continues into the present, leading us to the poetics of celebrity anthropologists Wade Davis and David Graeber. We then consider how poetic language can help to maintain the freshness and enduring value of anthropological insights, whilst enhancing their transformative potential. Finally, we look at what kind of anthropology we want to become a household word and how poetics may help to facilitate decolonisation of epistemology and with it, the world.