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- Convenor:
-
Neely Myers
(Southern Methodist University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Saturday 10 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Short Abstract:
TBA
Long Abstract:
TBA
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 10 April, 2021, -Jorge Molina (Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas)
Paper short abstract:
Death and grief are phenomena that take center stage in the face of the pandemic caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19). Both are studied as a social phenomenon, which opens the doors to an empirical-reflexive proposal from different angles. In this case as a social-cultural construction.
Paper long abstract:
In most cases death, grief and mourning have a ritual component which gives substance and form to the beliefs that are entangled around death and the process of dying. They also give a pattern to a double bind, where beliefs related to death serve as a basis and support to show it as a universal and natural phenomenon; but at the same time they deny it, through ideas that revolve around the continuity of life. Death and grief are phenomena that take center stage in the face of the pandemic caused by COVID-19. Ancestral cultures developed significant contributions about mourning and death, this leads us to reflect on the structures that are at the base of the construction that we have on death, and, consequently, mourning. This proposal starts from the construction of a few concepts: a) the "universe of certainties", which consolidates in individuals a prospective vision of their lives; b) the "horizon of continuities" where people visualize their future next to loved ones, ideals, personal projects, among others. But once the mourning occurs, the horizon of continuities is altered, it is at this moment where people struggle to rebuild this horizon, repeating ideas of the deceased person, merging their life project with the life project of the loved one, sometimes struggling to resemble the deceased in a biosimilar way (third concept). My presentation seeks to show a theory about grief as a social-cultural construction, and how it affects the lives of individuals in a significant way.
Nusaiba Chowdhury (Southern Methodist University)
Paper short abstract:
Refugees resettling in the United States face various barriers to successful resettlement. This paper focuses on mental health care access and utilization as one key factor impacting refugees in Dallas, Texas elicited via interviews with staff from a local refugee resettlement agency and non-profit.
Paper long abstract:
Refugees resettling in the United States face various barriers to successful resettlement and achieving economic self-sufficiency, defined as "earning a total family income at a level that enables a family unit to support itself without receipt of a cash assistance grant" by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. This paper discusses interviews with 21 staff at a Dallas refugee resettlement agency and nonprofit and their perceptions of barriers to refugees achieving self-sufficiency with a focus on interviewee discussions of mental health care access and utilization.
Audrey Jones (Emory University) Susan League
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores synergies between psychological anthropology and school psychology for studying disability. Ethnographic research on Turner Syndrome and experience as a school psychologist demonstrate educational spaces as microcosms where accessibility and inclusivity emerge, fail, and succeed.
Paper long abstract:
As our discipline interrogates its historical and continued role in the perpetuation of inequality and injustice, it is imperative we attend to disability not only as an identity but also as the sociocultural construction of difference. With longstanding commitment to the study of mental health, subjectivity, and production of knowledge, psychological anthropology offers a robust toolkit of approaches apt for exploring how disability becomes and is maintained as a personal, relational, and cultural category. By incorporating historical and applied perspectives, anthropologists can further interrogate the discipline while aligning with the interdisciplinary character of disability studies. School psychologists offer such insight, recognizing schools as environments where we learn societal expectations, and where inequalities and inaccessibility are particularly evident and disabling. In response to these challenges, educational institutions offer possibilities for a more accessible and inclusive society. In this paper, we draw from ethnographic vignettes of living with Turner Syndrome--a genetic condition that can cause nonverbal learning disability and anxiety--and personal experiences from the perspective of a school psychologist. Together, these case studies demonstrate how disability is produced in educational settings, and how students, parents, teachers, and school systems craft solutions to fit their personal, relational, and psychological needs. This paper therefore explores potential synergies between psychological anthropology and school psychology within the growing field of disability studies. Born from a collaboration between an anthropology doctoral candidate and her research participant, it simultaneously demonstrates and reflects upon the necessity of diverse forms of collaboration as anthropologists revisit and redefine our discipline.
Saiba Varma (University of California San Diego)
Paper short abstract:
In Indian-occupied Kashmir, former heroin users offered complex, elaborate, ethnographically and historically grounded arguments for how addiction was a tool of statecraft. In this paper, I use a decolonial approach to read former addicts as theoreticians, rather than as ethnographic 'subjects.'
Paper long abstract:
In Indian-occupied Kashmir, former heroin users offered complex, elaborate, ethnographically and historically grounded arguments for how addiction was a tool of statecraft. In this paper, I use a decolonial approach to read former addicts as theoreticians, rather than as ethnographic 'subjects.' In foregrounding my interlocutors’ capacities for theory making through attention to the political etiologies of heroin addiction, I follow many feminist and decolonial anthropologists’ calls to challenge the role of the anthropologist as expert and the political economy of knowledge production more broadly (Cusicanqui 2012; Harrison 1991; Swarr and Nagar 2010). As Faye Harrison (1991a: 6-7) noted more than two decades ago, the decolonization of the discipline must entail dismantling a conservative Eurocentric and androcentric canon, while also making space for indigenous theorists that “allow for and support the democratization of intellectual and theoretical authority.” To be clear, Harrison calls for going beyond an approach of “giving voice” to our informants. Instead, she draws our attention to the need to relocate authority in indigenous voices and claims. In this article, I bring to bear a decolonial sensibility on existing anthropological frameworks of addiction and social suffering in order to decenter the knowledge-making capacities of the anthropologist who unintentionally perhaps, end up “speaking for” addicts and other socially marginalized communities. Instead, I take my interlocutors as theory makers (Ralph 2020).