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- Convenors:
-
Sara Riva
(CSIC-University of Queensland)
Otto Wolf (University of Portsmouth)
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- Discussant:
-
Elisa Floristán
(Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM))
- Format:
- Roundtable
- Location:
- 9 University Square (UQ), 01/006
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In this roundtable we analyse our complicity in the reproduction of oppressive hierarchies in the academic world and beyond to engage in an exercise of imagination and hope. How can we engage in events that transform and shape oppression in our societies beyond observation?
Long Abstract:
In this roundtable we invite researchers to engage in a reflexive exercise to analyse our complicity in the reproduction of hierarchies in the academic world. Many of our work's pressures-constant need to publish, expectations to produce "innovative" research, or to submit "brilliant" proposals-exacerbate the already problematised extractivist features of modern research. This roundtable offers the opportunity to engage in a dialogue that explores questions such as: Who are we researching when we engage in ethnographic research and for what reason? What knowledge are we producing? Furthermore, we ask the participants in this roundtable how can we, as researchers, engage beyond observation in events that transform and shape the oppressions that bodies experience in our societies?
As neoliberal subjects we are embedded in a system that seems to actively restrict reflexivity. In this feminist roundtable we invite short presentations that challenge and explore the role our positionality plays in the intersections of our work and activism, as well as our responsibility in reinforcing hegemonic structures of knowledge and power. Additionally, in a move to counteract neoliberalism's imagination void which reaffirms certain oppressive structures such as borders, we look to enter a conversation based on an exercise of imagination to implement into our research contexts activist ideologies grounded in transformation and hope known as abolitionism, focused on fundamentally challenging these hierarchies. In this vein, we seek to discuss how to integrate findings into our activism and begin to question what an activist methodology might look like and who are its authors.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Rich Thornton (SOAS, University of London)
Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores my relationship with an education social entrepreneur in Delhi – a key ‘informant’ – and how, in my attempts to write a ‘valuable’ PhD thesis, I reshaped him into an ideal ‘neoliberal subject’ which I could analyse as an ethnographic object.
Contribution long abstract:
In this presentation I explore my relationship with an education social entrepreneur in Delhi who became a key research collaborator during my PhD fieldwork. My aim is to show that introspection and self-reflection – conducted both in the field and post-fieldwork – has been instrumental in the development of my conclusions and ethnographic contribution. This paper reveals how I, the anthropologist, produced Prashant as my ethnographic object par excellence, in part as a way of defending myself from doubt at career choice, and in part as a response to the academy’s demand to produce a ‘valuable’ thesis.
I provide an itinerary of my reflection that foregrounds how my ethico-political history as a subject of patriarchal schooling, and active critic of this discourse, oriented me to both identify with and abject Prashant as other. I conclude by suggesting that it is conceptually productive to position my ethnography as not one that studies Prashant, but instead the Prashant-I assemblage that has appeared as object produced by both my relationship with Prashant the person and with Prashant the ethnographic object in my mind’s-eye.
I argue that my introspective reflections on my own desire and subjectification have been crucial to developing this new framing of the production of ethnographic objects. I suggest that such sincere reflection on how ethnographers produce objects helps throw light back on the hierarchies that allow members of the academy to speak and write about others.
Simon Campbell (University of Graz)
Contribution short abstract:
What role does activist-scholarship have in engaging with the mobile commons and embedded knowledge of the border which does not confine itself to peer reviewed text? Minoring research to the struggles of people experiencing the violence and racism of borders in their everyday lives.
Contribution long abstract:
Knowledge production on migration has, and continues to be, authored by people-on-the-move themselves. Those who cross borders and navigate the precarious internal spaces forged by state/colonial violence pen their own routes, strategies, accounts and critiques: whether written, digital or oral. Testimony, video, music, mapping, housing and other digital/material resources form a complex web of exchange about transit and mobility which people draw on to navigate borders. These interlocking practises expressions and resources, often referred to as a mobile commons (Trimiklinioti, Parsanoglou, Tsianos 2015), are a material and epistemological resistance to the border.
Yet claims laid by academia (as well as media and NGOs) have regularly created a sanitised buffer of abstraction in order to make cross-border mobilities legible or palatable to a supposed wider audience. Knowledge then is often presented as statistics, death tolls, aggregated experiences and expert views, rather than the thick, and fluid inter-subjective movement of people who are authoring their own cannon on mobility. The abstraction/extraction of much research leverages power within the border complex to speak for others. This contribution opens up the question of: How can research minor itself (King 2016) to the struggle of people experiencing the violence and racism of borders in their everyday lives? What role does activist-scholarship have in engaging with the mobile commons and embedded knowledge of the border which does not confine itself to peer reviewed text?