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- Convenors:
-
Toby Austin Locke
(University College London)
Elena Liber (University College London)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Identities and Subjectivities
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 2.02
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 3 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores possibilities for reconfiguring academia through ethics of generosity. Emerging from the question—can we apply the same analytic generosity to academics and students as we do to fieldwork participants?—we invite papers exploring generosity in ethnographic and analytic settings.
Long Abstract:
Anthropological sentiments often require a high level of analytic generosity. During fieldwork we are often required to come to understand and participate in situations and practices that challenge us to leave behind our cultural and ethical preconceptions. To do so requires a level of generosity in analysis that is often not translated back to the way in which anthropologists engage with one another, or with other elements of the academy.
The academy often appears to be configured as a site of agonistic or antagonistic competition between ideas. With the increasing neoliberalisation of higher education, this tendency seems to take on new forms. Here, we would like to explore the possibilities of reconfiguring academic practice and engagement through varying ethics of generosity. How might the production and development of knowledge be transformed through such ethical orientations? What possibilities would such ethics offer for a renewed vision of anthropology? And how might ethics of generosity better allow us to engage with contemporary social, political and economic challenges?
The panel welcomes papers that approach the question of generosity, understood in the broadest sense, with a view to exploring the possibility of an ethics of generosity as a foundation for anthropological engagement in and beyond the field.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 3 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on the temporalities and constraints of an ethics of generosity based on learning generated from the Young Lives study within the context of a 15-year mixed-method observational cohort study of childhood poverty involving marginalised children and families in four countries.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the temporalities and constraints of an ethics of generosity based on learning from Young Lives, an international study of childhood poverty that has traced the changing life trajectories and circumstances of 12,000 children over a fifteen-year period in Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana States), Peru and Vietnam. It uses both survey and qualitative approaches to engage children and adults in the research. The study is multi-disciplinary, embodying differing understandings of the way knowledge is produced. A more positivist approach emphasises the study's observational (non-interventionist) design, such that the research should neither change the lives nor influence the phenomena under investigation. A more interpretivist approach accepts that the research endeavour is a co-production of knowledge and meaning involving researchers and their interlocutors in a complex relationship. I draw on accounts from researchers, children and families involved in the study, and on classic anthropological theories of gift exchange, to illustrate the varied understandings, tensions and expectations regarding 'generosity', how these changed as research relationships evolved over time, and the questions raised about the possibilities and limitations of an ethics of generosity.
Paper short abstract:
Using the analytical categories of the 'desk' and 'field', this paper explores the seemingly lack of openness to other ways of knowing upon returning from the field. Moreover, it explores how openness to knowledge within the academy maybe effected by an approach that collapses the desk and field.
Paper long abstract:
As David Mosse points out, anthropology can sometimes appear to be an anti-social discipline. Still under the influence of Malinowski, we erect boundaries between the 'desk' and the 'field' - especially at the point of entry and exit. The value of anthropological knowledge is that it cannot be anticipated from the desk. It's an approach that pushes anthropologists to denude pre-conceived ideas formed from the desk; the epistemology comes from being in relationship towards those in the field. It's an approach that requires openness and generosity to differing opinions and ways of knowing.
Upon returning from the field, this sense of openness can sometimes seem reduced in the 'desk' world of the academy. There seems to be less openness, generosity, to other ways of knowing. Through discussions with anthropologists who have worked closer to home, near the desk, and anthropologists that have worked further away from home; away from the desk, this paper explores why there seems to be a lack of openness to other ways of knowing upon returning from the field. Moreover, this paper explores how the openness to knowledge within the academy maybe effected by an approach to research that collapses the desk and the field.
Paper short abstract:
The Open Dialogue approach to mental health crisis care abandons diagnosis to facilitate dialogical conversations with clients finding openings out of crisis. Can an ethnographic stance emulate the generosity of clinical 'not knowing' that de-centres analysis through non-interpretive presence?
Paper long abstract:
The NHS is trialling an alternative non-diagnosis-based social network approach to treating serious mental illness that draws service user 'peers' into therapeutic teams: Peer-Supported Open Dialogue (POD). Key to POD practice is a non-interpretive, non-analytic stance in clinicians' relationships with clients, and having treatment discussions exclusively in 'network' meetings with clients/family networks. The underlying idea is that people in acute distress are often caught in 'rigid, constricted ways of understanding and communicating about the problems that absorb them' (Seikkula and Trimble, 2005: 462) and are stuck in the 'monological' treatment system that is unable to allow new ideas to emerge. Adopting Bakhtin's dialogism, new meaning develops in the inter-personal space requiring that clinicians abandon diagnostic prowess, learn how not to be interpretive and analytical, and instead, through attention to their own emotional selves, become a responding presence in-the-moment facilitating the meaning-making of client networks (using mindfulness techniques to this end). This paper reflects on the process of setting up an ethnographic study of POD (running alongside the first randomised controlled trial of the approach), the preparatory year-long practice-based training and membership of a community mental health POD team (serving a socially diverse London locality). It explores the possibility of an Open-Dialogue-inspired alternative ethnographic stance that shifts the location of analysis and description, and takes the capacity for meaning-making and reflective self-understanding (individual and institutional) rather than analytical-descriptive outputs as anthropological ends. It asks whether encouraging distributed interpretive processes might create openings out of a certain academic institutional 'stuckness'.
Paper short abstract:
Through possible dialogues between Marcel Mauss's The Gift and the work of Isabelle Stengers on Cosmopolitics, I seek to open possibilities for reimagining academia as a generous ecology of practices through which autonomous spaces of value may emerge and generous analytics replace critique.
Paper long abstract:
In Why has Critique run out of Steam, Bruno Latour sketches the desert emergent of the dominance of the critical tendency in scholarly practice. In its endless iconoclasm, uncovering and unmasking, critique leaves nothing untouched, dissolving all theories, models and concepts through the sheer force of its critical gaze. The figure of the critical analyst comes to rule absolutely, but they rule across a decimated landscape hollowed out of meaning, significance, and friendship. It is an unpopulated landscape, scared by the battles of the intellect. The critical iconoclastic gesture taken to its extremity leads to a nihilistic cynicism through which the brightness of enlightenment comes to shine only across a desert in which despondency rules.
The latent seeds of an alternative mode of scholarly practice that might be able to flourish in this hostile landscape are already with us in the works of Mauss and Stengers, and more crucially in conversations between their works.
Mauss's essay The Gift presents generosity as a primordial underpinning of human sociability. Generosity is an obligation which in turn obligates further generosity. In this sense it is a recursive foundation to human sociability. Drawing on Stenger's identification of specific obligations as a way of identifying varying modes of knowledge production, I hope to explore ways in which this primordial obligation of generosity might itself become enshrined within scholarly practice through the psychosocial type of 'the idiot' in Stengers and that of the 'humble giver' in Mauss.
Paper short abstract:
Engaging with the question - can we apply the same analytic generosity to academics and students as we do to fieldwork participants? - this paper explores the possibility of employing an ethics of generosity and care to transform the space of the seminar and the classroom.
Paper long abstract:
Engaging with students and colleagues within the discipline of anthropology necessitates a high level of analytic generosity. When teaching and guiding students it is crucial to facilitate a space where difficult topics can be discussed and difficult conversations can be had. This requires a high level of care and attention to those present in the room as peers, students and colleagues. So often the setting of the seminar or the classroom becomes a space of competition, pitching one idea against another with one emerging victorious. Might employing an ethics of generosity help transform these spaces in to sites of mutual knowledge production? Through listening generously, critiquing generously and disagreeing generously a space can be built for engaging with many of the crucial but difficult conversations we are having within the discipline.
Students want to engage with the conversations we are having surrounding decolonising or decentring anthropology, yet many of us shy away from having these discussions for fear of disrupting the space of classroom. Based on experience of teaching and engaging with the academy post-fieldwork this paper will explore how employing an ethics of generosity can transform the space of the seminar and the classroom and provide the possibility of engaging with the conversations that are shaping our discipline. Drawing on the work of bell hooks this paper will think through the idea of building an academic community based on an ethics of generosity and care.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks to develop a response to growing concerns around the future of the University, and to think more deeply about academic work as more than the esoteric "production of knowledge", but also as forms of social reproduction.
Paper long abstract:
Last year saw the largest industrial action in Higher Education occur through the UCU pension dispute. As noted particularly by Jamie Woodcock this strike was a convergence of many differing concerns within the industry. The increased intensity of competition within the academy cannot be delinked from the looming spectre of scarcity that haunts the halls and offices of our institutions. Where can one look to develop a response to growing concerns around the future of the University? How can we think more deeply about academic production as not simply the esoteric "production of knowledge", but also forms of social reproduction?
This paper explores situating an "ethics of generosity" within a politics of responsibility for the institutions in which we work. Re-engaging ourselves in the academy as workers, calls for a process of inquiry into the wider composition of our institutions if we are to understand where struggle against increasing "value-for-money" managerialism, budgetary scarcity, and racism may emerge from. Through drawing upon experience organising with outsourced and predominantly BAME workers on university campuses, I explore what can be learned from these workers' demands, and how it may open up sites of intervention into how the University comes to be reproduced. I argue that the struggle for space and time within the institution becomes intimately linked with an ethics of generosity and care. By engaging with the material conditions of the University as a workplace, we are able to re-approach the "production of knowledge" with a renewed sense of common purpose.