Authentic Research, Teaching, Events, and Assessments for Economic Prosperity

Responsive research serves as an alternative platform to address issues of human rights violations, ACEs, structural violence, and systemic poverty in particular as it relates to educational opportunities. This chapter identifies four step-by-step processes that can be used when conducting community-led research and education. Activist anthropology, studying up, studying through, and financial implications of debt foreground earlier efforts made by anthropologists to use their research as a way to examine how policy decisions shape cultural practices and impact the livelihood of specific communities. These efforts are expanded upon by examining the controversy, pitfalls, and rewards found within the epistemological paradigms and research methodologies. The second half of the chapter identifies four pathways researchers can use when engaging in activist anthropology: teaching to a goal; responsive mapping to uncover mystical barriers; community building as the goal for focus groups, interviews, and surveys; and responsive programs and events.

Situating Iraq in Oxford: Reflections on identity, place, and justice

In this essay, I explore the relevance of Eve Tuck’s theorization of damage-centered research and Scheper-Hughes’ activist anthropology to my positionality in my research on displaced Iraqis’ navigational access to education. The work of Tuck (2009) and Scheper-Hughes (1995) shows us that our assumptions regarding our research participants influence the way we research, which in turn have real life impacts. As an Iraqi person, issues of representation through research and subsequent responses to social ills are rooted in family history and thus are deeply personal and urgent. The historical marginalization of Iraqi voices, both those of researchers and the researched, can be redressed by foregrounding qualitative studies in lived experiences which acknowledge Iraqis’ dignity and agency. I call for a decolonized methodology and ethics which surpasses traditional expectations of academic work and moves towards a proactive, human-centered ethos.

ICE Offices and Immigration Courts: Accompaniment in Zones of Illegality

In this article, I examine two sites of the contemporary illegality industry in the United States: the ICE Field Office and the Immigration Court. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic engagement, including accompaniment and observations in a regional Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office and an Executive Office of Immigration Reform (EOIR) Court, I trace how human interactions and social relations in each of these bureaucratic sites structure and reinforce conditions of precarity, insecurity, and marginality among undocumented and asylum seeking people in the United States. In both sites, the enforcement power of the state is visible through the configurations of bureaucratic processes and the structures of interactions between migrants and federal government officials. Examining these two sites from the vantage point of engaged ethnography, I illustrate how routine, bureaucratic encounters (re)produce illegality and exclusion by enacting violence against migrants through the powers of surveillance and administrative monitoring, and the threat of deportation and family separation. I also reflect on the political potential that emerges through activist anthropology and accompaniment with migrants in sites of state violence.

Draft Deposited ¡El Yunque se levanta! Interdisciplinarity and activism at the La Mina petroglyph site

This interdisciplinary work utilizes ethnoarchaeology, ethnogeology, and activist anthropology to analyse the La Mina site, a previously unrecorded petroglyph site near the El Yunque National Forest in Municipio de Naguabo, Puerto Rico. This work highlights the importance of the site and the people who created and continue to protect them.

Taking sides

This think piece argues for a ‘partisan anthropology’. Building on lessons learned through my research about the practices of postmastectomy breast reconstruction in France and Italy, I reflect on the role of the researcher in fieldwork. In my own research, I acted as neither a militant nor an activist in the field, that is, I did not actively participate in the initiatives I observed. However, in the analysis stage, I decided to side with the patients I had met: my aim was to understand their experience of the illness and the therapies available, as well as their sometimes difficult relationship with the medical system. Having decided to take the patients’ side, I conducted a ‘partisan anthropology’. These reflections are intended as an effort to fully recognize the legitimacy and the scientific character of a partisan anthropology, building on previous arguments for militant and activist anthropology.

From cartonera publishing practices to trans-formal methods for qualitative research

Interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and counter-disciplinarity are the hallmark of cultural studies and qualitative research, as scholars over the past three decades have discussed through extensive self-reflexive inquiry into their own unstable and ever-shifting methods (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018; Dicks et al., 2006: 78; Grossberg, 2010). Building on the interdisciplinary thought of Jacques Rancière and Caroline Levine on the one hand and traditions of participatory action research and activist anthropology on the other, we bring the methods conversation forward by shifting the focus from disciplines to forms and by making a case for aesthetic practice as qualitative research process. In this paper, the question of methods is approached through the action-based Cartonera Publishing Project with editoriales cartoneras in Latin America – community publishers who make low-cost books out of materials recovered from the street in the attempt to democratise and decolonise literary/artistic production – and specifically through our process-oriented, collaborative work with four cartonera publishers in Brazil and Mexico. Guided by the multiple forms of cartonera knowledge production, which are rooted not in academic research but rather in aesthetic practice and community relations, we offer an innovative ‘trans-formal’ methodological framework, which opens up new pathways for practitioners and researchers to work, think and act across social, cultural and aesthetic forms.