From Ecophany to Burnout? An Anthropologist’s Reflections on Two Years of Participating in Council-Citizen Climate Governance in Eastbourne

In July 2019, Eastbourne Borough Council declared a climate emergency and committed to making Eastbourne carbon neutral by 2030. In order to achieve this, citizens together with Council created a unique model of council-citizen collaborative climate governance, the Eastbourne Eco Action Network (EAN). EAN’s main strategy has been the setting up of targeted working groups, each bringing together Councillors, engaged citizens and providers, and each tackling a specific area of climate action through a combination of infrastructure, institutional and behavioural changes. As an environmental anthropologist living in Eastbourne, I was involved in this process right from the beginning, having had my own ‘ecophany’—the realisation that the climate emergency required urgent action—in February 2019. Two years and one pandemic later, in this paper I reflect on the overall experiences and challenges of EAN’s and Eastbourne Borough Council’s work towards town-wide carbon neutrality to date, discussing possible factors (structural and other) determining varying successes and failures. At the same time, this paper provides an auto-ethnographic account of what ‘engaged anthropology’ means in practice, mapping out the real contributions anthropologists can and should make in local climate action, but also reflecting on challenges encountered along the way.

Antropologias, artes e política: engajamentos e encontros

Este artigo explora as modalidades de engajamento que a disciplina antropológica tem vindo experimentar, e em particular, seguindo um percurso pessoal da minha atividade como antropólogo e cidadão, procura dar conta da produção de um certo tipo de antropologia pública. Tomo como ponto de partida a perceção de que todo o conhecimento é, para além de situado, político, uma vez que a produção ou o enquadramento do conhecimento tem sempre efeitos políticos. Para ilustrar esse debate proponho partilhar as estratégias e os itinerários utilizados na realização de três encontros internacionais que buscaram cruzamentos entre arte, antropologia e ativismo e que visavam conjugar tanto artistas quanto pesquisadores, num pano de fundo ligado a uma cidadania engajada. Palavras-chave: Antropologia Pública. Arte. Ativismo. Antropologia engajada. Anthropologies, arts and politics: engagements and encounters Abstract: This article explores the modes of engagement of anthropology that anthropology has been experiencing, and in particular, following a personal journey of my activity as an anthropologist and citizen, seeks to account for the production of a certain type of public anthropology. I take as my starting point the perception that all knowledge is political, besides being situated, since the production or framing of knowledge always has political effects. To illustrate this debate, I propose to share the strategies and itineraries used in the realization of three international meetings that sought intersections between art, anthropology and activism and that aimed to conjugate both artists and researchers, in a backdrop linked to an engaged citizenship.Keywords: Public Anthropology. Art. Activism. Engaged Anthropology.

Stymulowanie aktywnych taktyk studentów i absolwentów wchodzących na rynek pracy a strategia uczelni

The article aims to illustrate and discuss how the strategies of universities influence the tactics used by students and graduates while entering the labor market. Its author attempted to find the answers to three research questions. First, what are the ways of entering the labor market of students and graduates of the faculties that appear on the highest positions in the graduate tracking systems and those that hold low positions? Secondly, how do university strategies influence the tactics developed by students and graduates? And last but not least, how to help humanities students enter the labor market. To answer those questions, the author applied ethnographic research carried out with individuals in the space of the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH) and ethnology students and graduates at the University of Warsaw (IEiAK). In her article, she refers to the concept of strategy and tactics developed by Michel de Certeau and describes the implementation of the study results within the framework of the engaged anthropology program at the University of Warsaw. The performed analyses led to the conclusion that SGH had a broader range of strategies that allowed its students and graduates to develop more effective tactics for entering the labor market. On the other hand, implementation of the research results allowed to broaden the scope of both the strategy offered by IEiAK and tactics used by its students and graduates.

I said, they said: The ethnographic backstage and the politics of producing engaged anthropology

Two commonly articulated goals of engaged anthropology include: 1) creating equal power relations with research participants; and 2) producing scholarship that critiques inequality. Though these seem commensurate, this article discusses how working toward both goals can lead to conflict when collaborators vehemently disagree with the critical aspects of your research findings. This article argues that writing about the ethnographic backstage — the background negotiations that rarely make it to the printed page — can help engaged anthropologists foster more egalitarian relations when it comes to ethnographic representation and can sharpen our sociocultural critiques. Because engaged anthropology, by definition, is shaped by negotiations with research participants, examining the ethnographic backstage helps us better understand an important axis in the production of anthropological knowledge.

The Observatory of Justice for Afrodescendants in Latin America (OJALA) as an initiative of engaged anthropology for the promotion and defense of human rights

In this essay, I write about the initiative of engaged legal anthropology that led to the formation of the Observatory of Justice for Afrodescendants in Latin America (OJALA), housed in the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center (KG-LACC) at Florida International University (FIU). I have been delighted to serve as OJALA’s main coordinator and founding director since February 2018. This piece’s intent is to explain the foundation of OJALA, out of an interest for understanding how the Latin American multiculturalist state “functions” in the concrete relations it threads with its Afrodescendant citizens, and particularly and most importantly, what the state’s justice system does, or doesn’t do, in the courts of law, with the legal instruments the “new Latin American constitutionalism” brought, when the time comes to defend Afrodescendants’ rights. This led us to engage in careful comparative ethnographic work on specific litigations filed by Afrodescendants in the justice systems of various Latin American countries. Ultimately, the ethnographic knowledge of Latin American justice systems “at work” will be useful for the enhancement of the public acknowledgement, protection, and defense of Afrodescendants’ rights.