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Dear Colleagues, </div>
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A few of us are organizing a panel for AAA 2026 on discursive practices in ethnographic research and community engagement. Please see the panel abstract (work in progress) below. We are looking for a couple more papers so if you think you would be interested,
please send your 300-word abstract draft to me at dmb50@duke.edu by <b>Monday, 4/20. </b></div>
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If we get more abstracts than we can accommodate, we will be happy to put folks in touch so that they can consider forming another panel! </div>
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Thank you for considering! </div>
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Best,</div>
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Dominika </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><b>Rethinking ethnographic practices, researcher positionalities, and community engagement in a rapidly changing world </b></span></p>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">How we talk about and describe our work – in the planning stages, in fieldnote taking, and in later transcriptions and interpretations, analyses and discussions – informs
the kind of research we do, and how we explore the data that we collect and analyze. Historian Kit Heyam (2024) speaks to this when critiquing “the language of ‘reclaiming’” as “capitalist language of ownership” (27). Reflecting on how trans scholars and activists
discuss people whose genders appear to have been fluid in other temporal and cultural contexts, Heyam points out that such capitalist thinking frames history as a “scarce resource we need to fight over” (27), and positions people from the past themselves as
akin to trophies to be claimed. They contrast this with “the language of community” (27; Perley 2009) whose members are validated through, or despite, our own/outsider disciplinary practices. </span></p>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">This panel seeks to interrogate how we as
<i>linguistic</i> anthropologists approach our ethnographic work and community engagement through our own discursive practices. We build on previous critiques of discursive framings of research, such as the problematic framing of “giving voice” to members of
marginalized or oppressed communities (Pritzker 2025) and on powerful critiques of the neoliberal takeover of educational institutions and of service-learning and community engagement in particular, for example by authors in the collected volume edited by
Bonnie Urciuoli (2018). The papers in this panel will seek to explore discursive strategies for consciously moving away from neoliberal and capitalist language which sees research participants as “claiming ownership” of the data, or which pits the researcher
and the researched against each other as “stakeholders” competing for control of the research agenda, and how we can, instead, frame our work as shared creation of communities that simultaneously guide our projects and extend beyond their goals and boundaries.</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(32, 56, 100);">Dominika M. Baran</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(32, 56, 100);">Associate Professor</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(32, 56, 100);">English Department</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(32, 56, 100);">Duke University </span></p>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(32, 56, 100);">Allen Building 303</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(32, 56, 100);">Durham, NC 27708</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(32, 56, 100);">Pronouns: she/her/hers</span></p>
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