[Linganth] AAA 2026 panel call: Rethinking ethnographic practices, researcher positionalities, and community engagement in a rapidly changing world

[Dominika Baran, Ph.D.]

Dear Colleagues,

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 at duke.edu by Monday, 4/20.

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!

Thank you for considering!

Best,
Dominika


Rethinking ethnographic practices, researcher positionalities, and community engagement in a rapidly changing world
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.
This panel seeks to interrogate how we as linguistic 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.





Dominika M. Baran
Associate Professor
English Department
Duke University
Allen Building 303
Durham, NC 27708

Pronouns: she/her/hers

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