Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a Participatory Action Research project in Northeast Brazil, where the anthropologist played the role of a local broker and translator between two generations of residents, this paper exposes and explores the disciplinary boundaries between applied, engaged, and public anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

After the 2000s, collective action slowed down and professionalized in Brazil. Senior community members, at the margins of Fortaleza, in Northeast Brazil, believed that one reason for this decline lies in the lack of engagement of local youth. To understand how local youth relate to the neighborhood, I formed a local research team and following Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a research approach, conducted focus groups with young people from the neighborhood. The results revealed that younger community members were unaware of the history (of activism) in their neighborhood and the few that did, were engaged in local collective action. Senior community activists turned the research findings into a cordel (a popular literary genre in the form of a poem published in a booklet, traditional to Northeast Brazil), currently used in classrooms and local organizations to teach young people about the history of their neighborhood and inspire them to engage locally. In this process, the anthropologist played the role of broker and cultural translator between two generations of residents.

The project raises a couple of epistemological questions, at the core of which stand ethical concerns. What are the disciplinary boundaries between applied, engaged, and public research and why do they matter? What are the different moralities at play that the anthropologist must abide by when conducting public/engaged/applied research and how are they different for non- public/engaged/applied research? What are the moral implications of being “invisible” in public/engaged/applied research leading to knowledge and content with local implications?

Paper short abstract:

I draw upon fieldwork conducted as part of the Decolonising the Museum project (University of Edinburgh and Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford) to argue that the work of digital return of cultural artefacts entails a critique of the category of “public” as such.

Paper long abstract:

I draw upon fieldwork conducted in the north-eastern Indian states of Assam, Nagaland and Manipur as part of the project, “Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India” to argue that digital repatriation is not just an act of “returning” digital artefacts to communities. Rather, it entails a critique of the category of “public” as such.

The Gaidinliu Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford refers to a set of objects associated with Gaidinliu, a sixteen-year-old Zeliangrong Naga prophetess arrested by the British authorities in 1932 for organising an armed rebellion in north-eastern India. Beyond digitising the collection through digital photography, video, and 3-D photogrammetry, the project has undertaken a series of community engagements over the last year, including a travelling pop-up exhibition, group discussion-based workshops and personal interviews.

In this paper, I will discuss people’s responses to a set of twelve notebooks in the collection. Said to be written in her own hand, the inscriptions are considered untranslatable. Drawing on interviews and discussions during community workshops, I will show how the notions of “public” and “community” become problematised as the museum object is activated in the process of digital return, and traverses the contentious terrain of contemporary articulations of Zeliangrong Naga identity. I conclude by suggesting that the use of ethnographic methods can make the work of digital return a collaborative endeavour that engages with the different representational, affective, semantic, and performative regimes that constitute the “publics” within which museum artefacts become meaningful.

Paper short abstract:

This paper describes collaborations, co-productions, lived experiences and relationships of care between the proposing author, people on the move and migrant activists, to illustrate how practices of Public Anthropology centered in solidarity can both 'be useful' and claim for migrant justice.

Paper long abstract:

European host societies have been increasingly hostile to people on the move. Borders have been enforcing exploitive and abusive relationships with nation-states and national economies through dehumanising people racialised as migrants. European migration policies have been contributing to a hierarchy of deservingness between peoples, dividing those deemed as worthy of belonging from those regarded as dangerous or criminal. This paper explores how engaged collaborations and co-productions, inspired by Public Anthropology can attempt to challenge the border regime. Based in relationships of care and solidarity, established in the last eight years between the author (a community psychologist and anthropologist), people on the move in Europe and activists involved in informal networks of solidarity with people racialised as migrants, I present examples of practices that helped to resituate knowledge, accompany the resistance of people on the move, and resignify care as a central value to Public Anthropology. Contrasting intersectional intersubjectivities around migration status, social class and gender, I highlight the importance of becoming a critical and engaged ally, to co-produce new knowledge and offer something perceived as "useful" by research collaborators. Reflecting on the ethical tensions of these engaged endeavors, I explore possibilities of transformation of fieldwork experiences into practices of witnessing and denouncing border injustices. Building on Public Anthropology and Community Psychology scholarship, I argue that practices of solidarity, grounded in relationships of care, can strengthen the resistance of people on the move and help to resituate knowledge on mobilities, placing it on the other side of the borders.

Paper short abstract:

This paper starts from my work with state actors to revisit the politics of anthropology. Anthropology has long been invested in examining how the state affects and subjects. How do we reimagine an anthropological politics from within public institutional landscapes with (semi-)state actors?

Paper long abstract:

This paper starts from my work with state institutions and actors to revisit the politics of anthropology. Anthropologists have often positioned themselves alongside subaltern subjects against the rich and powerful. Especially “the state” figures as a powerful, violent entity, which is critically studied through the experiences of its subjects. While providing a powerful vantage point for critique, such a positioning does little justice to the great variety of state institutions, with varied investments and effects, that work to deliver public goods. Instead, my colleagues and I study the Dutch welfare state as a dense institutional landscape with varying logics and ethical investments. We do so working closely with policy actors who struggle to create more collaborative, trusting and democratic state-citizen relations.

This is a promising form of public anthropology that engages issues of governance in dialogue with governmental actors. It, however, raises poignant political questions. Anthropology has long been invested in a critique of the state “from without”, examining how it affects and subjects. What kind of politics do we develop when we, instead, immerse ourselves in public institutional landscapes and when (semi-)state actors become our primary interlocutors and their ethical investments, moral logics and dilemmas become central to our research? In this paper, I reflect on the anthropological politics of such work, and ask what happens to anthropology’s criticality when we work from within systems of power instead of from without.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores the complexities and responsibilities that the 'public' entails when anthropologists, as well as performers of cultural repertoires engage in a project of archival restitution in northern Perú, where old and new disputes and inequalities between multiple publics arise.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores the complexities and tensions that the 'public' as a category and praxis entails when researchers, as well as performers of cultural repertoires that seek to be recognized by the state as national heritage, engage in an anthropological project of archival restitution by means of collaborative methodologies and digital technologies. Since 2021, the “Shared Soundscapes” project aimed to return an audiovisual ethnographic collection produced in 1990 in the Peruvian Northern Coast -materials that portrayed musical instruments, genres and performers- with communities in Mochumí, a semi-rural town in this region. During this work, the research team developed sessions of elicitation and curatorship, public exhibitions and digital activation of photographs and sound recordings. This presentation first argues that giving access and “making public” should not be considered solely as an outcome but as a methodological instance where archival materials are examined, questioned, remembered or strategically paralleled with local archives. Secondly, we will describe how collaborative methodologies of archival restitution interrogate the positionality, authority and performance of anthropologists when they get involved in public affairs vis-à-vis multiple “publics” in Mochumí, who carry different versions of traditional dances, and therefore might interpret and utilize archival ethnographic materials in divergent ways. We finish this presentation by discussing the responsibility that comes when the return of archival materials activates old and new disputes and inequalities between local publics.

Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes reflections on the definition of the field of the public anthropology as an engaged anthropology that has powerful theoretical-methodological tools for the generation of a rigorous knowledge on relevant public themes, with an approach from and for the practice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes some considerations from my doctoral research on the Lorca earthquakes (Murcia, Spain, 2011) framed in the theoretical and practical contributions of the anthropology of disasters. Approaching disasters from an anthropological perspective means unmasking their processual, social and cultural aspects, trying to analyse vulnerability and capture perceptions of risk. The subject itself requires some sense of responsibility and encourages the search for recommendations for disaster management. This contributes to making the anthropology of disasters a public anthropology.

What does it mean to do public anthropology? The relationship between theory and practice and between academic anthropologists and applied anthropologists involves various connections and mediations, being fictitious and unrealistic the theory/practice and pure anthropology/applied anthropology separations (Giménez Romero, 1999). There is a difference between applied anthropology, that is oriented towards applying theoretical knowledge to practice, and engaged anthropology, that is a committed anthropology. Public anthropology may or may not be applied, but it is always engaged.

Based on this premise, in order to define what public anthropology is, it is proposed to reflect on the following aspects and the corresponding competences: 1) theoretical rigour; 2) presence in debates; 2) commitment to social transformation; 3) inclusion of knowledges; 4) social imagination; 5) broad audience; 6) accessible language; 7) assumption of the risk of going public.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a committed research project concerning the living conditions of working-class people in an Italian alpine valley. Moreover, it addresses the epistemological and social consequences that processes of ‘going public’ have on anthropologists’ skills, accountability, and position.

Paper long abstract:

As a growing literature is pointing out, scarce facilities - whether educational, working, commercial, or medical ones - often represent a public issue in rural, marginalized areas, where their insufficiency largely contributes to increasing people's precariousness and dependence from cars (see, for example, Coquard 2019). In such situations, highly contextual and collectively designed solutions seem capable of addressing these issues. A reliable representation of the social world, in particular, proves useful in designing local public services.

Being two anthropologists assigned by local authorities to bring out the lived experiences, expectations and claims of working-class people – farmers, hotelkeepers, youngsters – in an Alpine valley, we were confronted with the quandary of producing consistent anthropological knowledge and translating it to the local, institutional, and academic publics we are accountable to. In aiming to do research for and with people, non-ethnographical skills in group management and communication have proved relevant in particular for deconstructing our expertise and positions, while promoting a process of constant negotiation of social knowledge.

Moving from an ongoing research project on grassroots caring practices in the Italian Western Alps, this paper deals with the lessons we learnt while publicly conveying an anthropological research process. In exploring the epistemological and social consequences of making anthropology accountable to multiple publics, it addresses issues that are significant for anthropologists committed to an improving research praxis, whether in rural development or elsewhere.

Paper short abstract:

What does the term 'public' mean in urban contexts where municipal services and amenities are increasingly privatised? I suggest that the fragmented and piecemeal nature of the contemporary 'public' sector actually provides new opportunities for repatriating our work back to our host communities.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last several years, anthropologists have taken to referring to something we call 'public anthropology.' This now commonplace use of the term 'public,' however, risks falling into the same traps as did the now more widely interrogated term 'community.' That is, the notion of a 'public' anthropology seems to assume the presence of a single homogeneous 'public' for our work. Furthermore, in many cities around the US (and around the world), municipal services and amenities are increasingly privatised, raising additional questions about the changing nature of a putative 'public' sector. In addition to the contracted-out management of public services and corporate ownership of utilities and amenities, in my own city of residence, Indianapolis, the philanthropic sector also plays an enormous role in funding a number of community-based and civic activities, ranging from neighborhood organisations, to social safety net provisions, to the arts. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which my own community-based and engaged fieldwork in Indianapolis revealed to me the complexities of trying to define what constituted 'a public' for our work. I also discuss the ways in which, ironically, the complexities and contradictions of defining the public, in this era of municipal fragmentation, ironically provided new and innovative opportunities and formats for repatriating our research products back to our host communities.

Paper short abstract:

In 2023, a conflict escalated in my long-term field site in northern Somalia. Given my “expertise”, I felt compelled to engage publicly and ended up in a virtual battlefield. The presentation asks about the ethical dimensions and the limits of this type of public engagement.

Paper long abstract:

I wish to highlight a recent case of publicly engaged anthropology that emerged from my long-term research in northern Somalia. For many years, I have been researching conflict dynamics there, always trying to keep some middle ground between various conflict parties in the region. I found this analytical distance to be a necessary precondition for what I considered to be the main job of a researcher (following Max Weber): to contribute to a better understanding of social complexities. Yet, when the conflict I have been researching for over 20 years escalated violently in 2023, I found myself quickly on the activist side. I publicly engaged on social media, initially to provide historical background to the current events. Soon I used my contacts in the region to present daily updates on the dynamics of the conflict. This engagement positioned me at a virtual frontline in a war that happened on the ground and in social media. I became an enemy for some, and I was treated accordingly on the virtual battle field. Reflecting on this experience, I will talk about what collaborative and engaged anthropology means in the context of escalating violent conflict. I will also ask if one should refrain from public engagement, if it hurts the anthropologist, but also others in the field (with the “other side” in the current conflict also being part of my long-standing research). What I am interested in here, at a general level, are the (pre-)conditions and the limits of public engagement.

Paper short abstract:

Over the past 4 years I have developed several public anthropology projects connecting over 150 academics and artists, curating two digital platforms, an itinerant exhibition and a conference. I reflect on the challenges and unmet expectations faced, but also look at some of the unexpected results.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past 4 years I have developed several public anthropology projects. Central to them are two digital platforms, bringing together anthropology and art: https://antropedia.com/sfertulacademic/, https://theanthro.art/. They host 140 articles by more than 90 researchers, with editorial illustrations by over 55 artists and audio versions/podcasts recorded by actors – amounting to over 30 hours of audio content. Illustrations were included in an itinerant exhibition launched in 2023 in one of the largest central libraries in Bucharest (Cărturești) that will continue in 2024 to 7 other locations in Romania and abroad. I also organised a public anthropology conference aiming for a TED Talk format - https://antropedia.com/toolkit/program-conferinta/ - having the honour of a recorded keynote from Thomas Eriksen.

The questions put forward by this panel have been integral to my journey while developing these projects and I will share some of my conclusions. I look back at the work I did mediating between anthropologists and artists in curating the two digital platforms drawing on over 10.000 emails we exchanged. Despite all these efforts of translating anthropology for a wider audience and communicating it in novel ways, our public still seems elusive. I thus reflect on the challenges and unmet expectations faced, but also look at some of the unexpected results. Translating anthropology for a wider audience is just the first step. Making it visible and heard in a fast-paced world overloaded with ”content” - seems to be an (almost entirely) different endeavour. And getting funding for all this, is yet another story.