[Linganth] 2024 AES/APLA Spring Meeting

Sun Jan 28 16:33:31 UTC 2024

Dear colleagues,

The University of Pittsburgh will host the 2024 American Ethnological Society/Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Spring Meeting. I would love to see some panels on language. Feel free to contact me (svl11 at pitt.edu) if you have any questions/ideas. The CFP deadline has been extended to February 5th.

2024 Theme: Repair

AES/APLA

April 4-6, 2024

https://americanethnologist.org/meetings/spring-conference/aes-2024-repair/

[https://americanethnologist.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/AES-APLA-Spring-Conference-2024.jpg]<https://americanethnologist.org/meetings/spring-conference/aes-2024-repair/>
AES 2024 Repair - American Ethnological Society<https://americanethnologist.org/meetings/spring-conference/aes-2024-repair/>
This in-person spring conference is being co-hosted by two subsections of the AAA: AES and APLA.
americanethnologist.org

In the face of compounding harms—mass extinctions, settler-colonial dispossession, gentrification, displacement—what does it mean to repair the historic legacies of damage and harm? What does it demand of individuals, communities, or states? How might studies of possibility or hope be enhanced through an attention to actually existing practices of repair? How can the tools of anthropology be used to amplify the demands coming from historically disadvantaged communities? Such questions call for anthropology to link the radical imagination to present struggles. At the same time, as scholarship on abolition, revolution, and refusal highlight, it is also important to document unfixable situations, times in which repair does more harm than good, or instances in which people find it more ethical to abandon or refuse.

The 2024 AES spring conference invites scholars to grapple with the complexities and possibilities of repair in the contexts of the people and sites with and in which they work. How does (or doesn’t) repair take shape in communities or for your interlocutors? What kinds of solidarities and futures does repair potentiate? What do discourses of “repair” close down? Who decides what constitutes repair, who has access to it, and who does the work? Is repair enough? What does it look like to stand in solidarity? What does anthropology need to be doing today in this moment of ecological/political/fiscal crisis? How can anthropology take the lead from interlocutors moving into spaces that are uncomfortable or that might take great risk? Possible intersections include: care (and care in trouble), placemaking after dispossession, healing and harm, engagement and refusal, resistance and complicity, hope and loss, systemic violence. We particularly invite conversations that cross-cut subfields and interests in the areas of: Anthropocene studies & more-than-human worlds; embodiment and health; (dis)ability and crip theory; political economy of urban space and containment; justice & abolition; Black futures; Indigenous cosmopolitics; labor and other solidarities.

The conference will be located at the University of Pittsburgh, the ancestral lands of many Indigenous peoples, including the Seneca Nation. As recently as 1960, one-third of the Seneca’s ancestral lands were taken by the U.S. government to create the Kinzua Dam<https://www.alleghenyfront.org/the-complicated-history-of-the-kinzua-dam-and-how-it-changed-life-for-the-seneca-people/#:~:text=Nestled%20securely%20between%20the%20rolling,long%20and%20120%20feet%20deep.> northeast of the city. We thus gather under the shadow of dispossession and acknowledge the presence and ongoing contributions of Indigenous people to the Pittsburgh region<https://www.cotraic.org/>. Amid widespread deindustrialization and abandonment, a decaying steel-coal complex continues to pollute while a frenzy of “fracking” draws petrochemical megaprojects to the region. Once termed “hell with the lid off,”<https://blog.historian4hire.net/2019/07/12/quotable-pittsburgh-visitors/> Pittsburgh’s touted “Eds & Meds” revitalization<https://www.225.pitt.edu/story/eds-meds-thrive-former-steel-city> has harmed many communities, especially Black, Brown and working poor people, who continue to experience displacement through gentrification<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-05/where-it-hits-gentrification-hits-hard-study> and respiratory illnesses<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-01/the-cumulative-toxic-assault-on-braddock-pennsylvania> disproportionately. Taking repair as our cue, however, this conference is also situated in a key site of early<https://battleofhomestead.org/pittsburghs-labor-history-sites-an-interactive-map/> and contemporary labor movements<https://www.pittfaculty.org/>, environmental justice activism<https://www.publicsource.org/not-good-enough-for-whom-pittsburgh-is-a-place-worth-fighting-for/>, community gardening<https://www.alleghenyfront.org/soul/> to resist food deserts<https://www.100daysinappalachia.com/2018/11/a-fresh-divide-inside-pittsburghs-food-deserts/>, and other practices of reparative solidarity<https://centerforcoalfieldjustice.org/>. In gathering in Pittsburgh, then, we hope to bring together scholars and activists to think about repair in the face of layered harms.

Best,
Stephanie

Stephanie V. Love, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
The University of Pittsburgh
http://www.anthropology.pitt.edu/people/stephanie-v-love
Pronouns in use: she/her/hers

Recent student work
http://anthropologyatpitt.com/urbananthro/fall2023
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