There are a few different things that brought me to anthropology. One of them was 9/11. More specifically, it was how many people in the US responded to 9/11, including people I knew well. There was a moment, right after 9/11 happened and all of our TVs were full of images of loss, sadness, and fear, when it felt like things could go one way or another. Alongside all that loss were images of hope, help, understanding, and community. It felt like there was still some possibility that the US might respond to the events of 9/11 with something other than fear, hatred, and more violence.

As we all know, that didn’t happen.

The US ended up in two wars that lasted for more than a decade. Along with those wars, xenophobia, dehumanization, and racism exploded, intensified, and permeated daily life in US society for years on end (as has happened before and continues to happen). I remember the reports of Sikh communities getting attacked, all of the paranoia in airports about people who ‘looked suspicious,’ and of course the relentless, ever-growing Islamophobia. The fear was relentless.

It was hard to comprehend just how deeply that fear actually went–and just how close it was. There’s one conversation with a friend that I’ll never forget. I’d known this person for several years, and considered them a nice, reasonable human being. We were talking about 9/11, and what the US might do next. When I asked him what he thought the US should do, he said: “I think they should just turn the whole Middle East a glass parking lot.”

He wasn’t joking, and I was speechless. Just…shocked. It made me realize how quickly and deeply fear could set in and shape people’s beliefs, words, and politics. It was such a blithe, massive dehumanization of millions and millions of people: Just nuke the entire region.

That level of fear, hatred, and dehumanization can be marshaled in so many ways. The invasion of Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, was made possible by the mass xenophobia and fear that grew from 9/11. It was a moment in which the actions of a very specific group of people were used to justify violence upon millions of others. Today, some two decades later, we’re seeing a similar process play out in another part of the world, grounded, yet again, in extreme dehumanization and fear.

That conversation I had a long time ago about 9/11 pushed me to seek something, some method, some kind of answer to what was happening to people all around me. Anthropology, as problematic as it can be, has been, for me, a vehicle for trying to confront these kinds of processes. It has been that method, that thing, that has helped me try to not only understand but also try to change, in any small way possible, the world around me. I see it, primarily, as a discipline that can and should confront dehumanization…whether that dehumanization is broad and structural or the kind of mundane version that crops up, sometimes unexpectedly, in everyday conversations with people you (think) you know.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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On the morning of March 30, 2021, three articles on the culture of harassment within archaeology dropped. And it was epic. Across three articles, Barbara (Barb) Voss reviewed and analyzed current research about the prevalence and patterns of harassment within our discipline. Most useful was her list of proven interventions that have demonstrable results in reducing harassment. Most difficult and heart wrenching to read were her own personal accounts dealing with harassment and how it impacted her career decisions. 

Reading these articles was tough, as I knew it would be, and it occurred to me that there are so many of us who had nowhere to turn when this happened to someone we knew or even ourselves. When we reported an incident of harassment, we were told that we had to figure it out or get out. That is messed up. The significance of these sorts of articles has the immense potential to change how we do archaeology – it could fundamentally change how we could feel safe in our professional spaces.     

The three articles, Documenting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology (2021); Disrupting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology (2021); and Using Public Health Interventions to Prevent Harassment in Archaeology (2021) are all Open Access, and I cannot recommend them enough. Over the course of the last few months, Barb and I have been talking through the responses and through the articles themselves. Based on the significance of our discussions, the impact it could have, and her thoughtful responses, I thought it important to make it more formal, and so I requested an interview. The interview took place on a shared document, in comments, and with an abundance of trust. 

Also, just to say, these issues, as we all know, are not limited to archaeology, but are discipline wide concerns.

Uzma: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Your articles have already become touchstones for discussion around harassment in our discipline. And perhaps we should start there/here. In your article you mentioned you are using the broad term of  “harassment” in recognition that gender and sexuality are not the sole factors in professional abuses of power. Your examples span across decades — important decades in which much work around harassment and safety have happened. Could I ask you to speak broadly about the ways we understand “harassment” to have changed over time? 

Barb: I think it’s helpful to think of harassment is a useful umbrella term, one that describes behaviors that share four specific attributes: (1) they occur in work and educational settings; (2) they involve an abuse of power; (3) they are interpersonal; and (4) they convey hostility, exclusion, objectification, or second-class status based on the perceived identity of the target. 

When Kate Clancy – one of the leading researchers on harassment in field sciences – testified to Congress in 2018, she introduced a framing I find very helpful: “come-ons” and “put-downs.” 

“Come-ons” are unwanted sexual attention, while “put-downs” involve speech and actions that marginalize or exclude the target(s) by stigmatizing their real or perceived identity. While “come-ons” receive the most media attention, “put-downs” are the most common, and they can cause just as much emotional harm and career damage as unwanted sexual attention. So it is important to address all forms of harassment – sexual, identity-based, physical and non-physical, direct and indirect – to remove barriers to participation in archaeology and related fields.

Although harassment has been most commonly used to refer to abuses of power related to gender and sexuality, Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us that, “Anything that’s meant to address gender inequality has to include a racial lens, and anything that’s meant to address racial inequality has to include a gender lens.” The research conducted to date shows that BIPOC archaeologists, queer archaeologists, and archaeologists with disabilities are disproportionately affected by harassment.

Uzma: Can I ask you to speak a bit about the ‘barriers to change’ that you were able to identify, including the normalization, the exclusionary practices, gate keeping, etc.? 

Barb: In “Disrupting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology,” I identify normalization as one of five key barriers to harassment prevention (the other four are exclusionary practices, fraternization, gatekeeping, and obstacles to reporting).  

In survey research on harassment, respondents commonly described harassment as part of the culture of archaeology, something that is socially expected and that is “normal.” These findings should be a wake-up call for all archaeologists. 

From a trauma-informed perspective, this normalization of harassment is understandable. Survey research indicates that 15%–46% of men archaeologists and 34%–75% of women archaeologists have experienced one or more harassment events during their careers. It’s likely that even more archaeologists have witnessed harassment directly or know of harassment occurring through second-hand accounts.

The resulting collective experience of trauma in our discipline is staggering to contemplate. My hope is that the two-article series provides archaeologists and others in allied fields with tools for dismantling this normalization of harassment. 

Uzma: Significant for such work are the discussions of quantifiable survey results related to harassment in the field. Could you talk a bit about how you selected the surveys?

Barb: My primary objective in writing the first article, “Documenting Cultures of Harassment in Archaeology,” was to aggregate and analyze the growing body of research about harassment in archaeology and related fields. There has been so much research done over the last ten years, but it is really hard to find it and some content is behind paywalls, which poses barriers to access, especially for early career and non-academic archaeologists.

Also, the sheer volume of new studies has made it difficult to keep up with the literature. I wanted to bring all that new information together in one place, so that if you are trying to make the case for better policies and procedures in your workplace – whether academia, museums, cultural resource management, or government and NGO – you can bring this one article to your dean or director or human resources manager and say, “Look, there is a real problem with harassment in archaeology. It has been verified through methodologically-sound, peer-reviewed research. And we need to take action now so that we protect our people and so that our department or company doesn’t become the next #metoo news story.”

Once I had gathered all the studies I could find, I used three criteria to select studies for analysis:  

1.     The study had to either focus exclusively on archaeology or present study findings in a way that allowed content related to archaeology to be disaggregated from general results;  
2.     The study followed an approved human subjects protocol or had equivalent procedures in place to protect research subjects’ well-being and anonymity; and
3.     The study had passed peer review or had been publicly presented in a juried venue such as a professional conference.  

During 2018-2020, I located twelve studies that met these criteria. Seven had robust quantitative components. Initially, I had hoped to be able to combine the results of these studies into a single set of metrics (what is often called a meta-analysis). However, it soon became clear that this would not be possible, because there was so much variation in survey methodologies and especially subject recruitment methods.

For example, many studies about harassment in archaeology recruited participants through social media, which raises questions about whether self-selection biases, technology access, and social network pathways influenced the composition of the study population. Other studies used professional society membership rosters to recruit participants, which on the surface might seem to resolve these issues. But, students, entry-level professionals, and other marginalized archaeologists tend to have low participation rates in professional societies. So it’s unlikely that membership-based surveys can fully capture the experiences of the most vulnerable archaeologists. So, both crowd-sourced and roster-based quantitative surveys have value, even if their results cannot be easily integrated.

The other problem is that very few of the studies published results for archaeologists of color, non-heterosexual archaeologists, archaeologists with disabilities, and trans, non-binary, and agender archaeologists. Several noted that this information was originally collected, but that because of the low number of participants in those categories, they could not disaggregate results by race or sexual orientation without potentially compromising the anonymity of the respondents. There’s a huge research gap as a result and we need to develop better methodologies that ethically document the experiences of archaeologists of color and other marginalized archaeologists.

While initially I planned to only focus on peer-reviewed or juried research, when these gaps became apparent, I expanded the paper in two directions. I added a very brief overview of the history of gender equity research in archaeology, which had tangentially addressed harassment as a mechanism for exclusion. Some of this equity research included a focus on class that was often missing from more recent surveys and interview studies. 

I also developed a section on grassroots activism: conference actions, ad-hoc groups, blogs, art installations, and journalism. This was one of the hardest sections to write because there is so much amazing stuff being done, and with the strict word limit in American Antiquity articles, I couldn’t include everything. I decided to focus on examples involving archaeology students, early career archaeologists, queer archaeologists, and archaeologists of color, because these are exactly the segments of our community that are underrepresented in formal research studies. 

Uzma: What were some of the surprises (or not) that emerged through analysis of the quantitative research?

Barb: Even as a survivor who has been intermittently involved in sexual violence prevention and activism for much of my adult life, I was still shocked by the high frequency of harassment in archaeology. Surveys results indicate that 15% to 46% of men archaeologists, and 34% to 75% of women archaeologists, have experienced harassment during their training and career, and that 5% to 8% of men archaeologists, and 15% to 26% of women archaeologists, have experienced unwanted sexual contact, including sexual assault. This high prevalence places archaeology in the same range as the military and the entertainment industry – two economic sectors that have notoriously high frequencies of harassment.

And I think we all should be shocked by this, because it’s absolutely horrific. No one should ever have to endure harassment to get an education or pursue a career. 

Some of the research in archaeology confirms well-documented patterns in educational and workplace harassment: harassers most commonly target early career archaeologists, archaeologists are most commonly harassed by other archaeologists (often members of their own research team), and archaeologists in marginalized groups experience harassment at higher-than-average rates.

One particularly interesting finding, which was consistent across many studies, is that there are specific gendered patterns to harassment in archaeology: women archaeologists are most commonly harassed by men and by superiors, while men archaeologists are more commonly harassed by peers of all genders.

It is also important to stress that while quantitative research reveals broad patterns, many people’s experiences of harassment do not conform to these dominant trends. This is why qualitative research – both open-ended survey responses and interviews – are so important, because they capture the full breadth of the problem.

Uzma: I found the section on interviews so revelatory after reading the survey results. One of the key points of analysis that you highlight from Laura Heath-Stouts work is how harassment places a ‘cognitive burden’ on those who have experienced it. Can I ask that you speak a bit more about that, in relation to (if you feel comfortable), your own experiences that you shared in the articles? In some sense, what I am asking is how do we work through the cognitive burden? 

Barb: Laura Health-Stout’s research, along with other studies, helps us understand why harassment has such a long-term negative impact on education and careers even when the harassment itself is short-lived or does not specifically pose a barrier of access to professional opportunities.

I understand this cognitive burden as having two components: one immediate, and the other quite long-lasting. To give an example from my own experience, in “Documenting Cultures of Harassment,” I describe a field project where a male colleague exposed himself to me in the shower facility. A few days later, while drunk, he tried to barge in on me when I was in the toilet. His behavior towards me was very aggressive and I feared it would continue to escalate. When I reported his behavior to my supervisor, she made it clear that she was not going to take any action to protect me from my colleague’s behavior.

For the remainder of that project, a huge amount of my mental energy was dedicated to tracking my colleague’s movements and his schedule. I was constantly performing this intricate calculus to avoid being caught alone with him: adjusting my paths of movement, timing my rest breaks and bathroom visits for times when he was occupied elsewhere, and isolating myself socially so that I would not be inadvertently drawn into meals or gatherings where he might show up. The archaeology work that I was there to do became secondary: I was counting days until the project was over and I could return home.

Afterwards, the mental calculus continued. Archaeology is a small field. I knew that I would not be able to completely avoid contact with him, so I strategized about how to minimize those interactions and ensure that I only saw him in public contexts with others present. I also carried a lot of anger against my project supervisor for disregarding my complaints. That lack of trust at times carried into other professional relationships and other projects.

When doing the research for these articles, it was so transformative to read similar accounts in the words of other survivors. Because harassment is by definition interpersonal, it is so easy to doubt yourself, especially when supervisors or other people senior to you disregard your concerns.

For me, healing from harassment is an ongoing process, one that is never truly finished. Having been victimized multiple times in archaeological settings, by other archaeologists, I walk with that personal history every day when I go to work, do field and research, attend a conference, or visit a museum. Usually it is in the background, but it is never fully out of sight. I have benefitted immensely from talking with other survivors (both informally and in organized groups) and from professional counselling. And I feel very fortunate and privileged that I am now in a professional role – tenured professor – from which I can talk openly about my experiences without fear of loss of employment.

Uzma:  I really appreciated the consideration of a trauma informed approach that you outline in your article, and I wondered if I might ask you to speak more about the importance of such an approach and what some key aspects might be to keep in mind, etc..

Barb: Trauma-informed approaches came out of grassroots activism in the 1970s and 1980s – early rape crisis centers, movements against domestic violence, sexual assault survivor networks, and veteran activist communities. They have now been validated by public health research, and have become the widely adopted standard of care endorsed by medical and legal associations as well as government health agencies. Trauma-informed care has also been slowly percolating into educational settings, and during COVID-19, we started to see this language being used more widely in academia.

The core principles of a trauma-informed approach are straightforward. First, an individual or group is more likely than not to have a history of trauma. We don’t need to ask about individual experiences, we can just assume that many people’s present-day experiences are shaped by their history.

Second, institutions and “business-as-usual” organizational procedures have the potential to retraumatize individuals. This is especially relevant to harassment, which occurs within an institutional context: workplace, school, organization, project, etc. So by definition, survivors experience harassment both as a result of the perpetrator’s actions and in relation to institutional culture and organizational responses.

Third, empowering survivors and other vulnerable members of organizations can transform these environments to deter further abuses of power and to support healing and recovery. General guiding principles include institutional transparency and honesty, including admitting when harm is done; building cultural competency; actively affirming that all members of an institution are valued; and fostering self-determination, privacy, and agency.

For myself, I try to bring these questions to my professional practice: What structures of power are at play at this moment? Who are the most vulnerable participants in this setting – are their needs being met, their voices heard, and their dignity respected? Who is empowered to make meaningful decisions, and who is being excluded? Can that be changed? Am I listening enough? Am I being honest about my actions and intentions, as well as my limitations and constraints? Am I willing to prioritize the well-being of others over my research and professional goals? Perhaps most importantly, what would be the more caring response to this situation?

Uzma: I think understanding the significance of interventions is really important. I invite you to close out our conversation with a list of what we can do and perhaps if there are one or two things you might want to highlight. 

Barb: The most important thing to do is to listen to survivors and other vulnerable members of your organization or research team. They will know where the problems are and what can be done to stop them. In addition to “open door” policies and transparent complaint procedures, regular confidential climate surveys can be especially important to identify problems as they are emerging.

Along with that, each of us can emphasize that reporting harassment is a courageous act that supports the health of the organization and the discipline.

On an organization level, every professional society, university, museum, research institute, and publisher needs to clearly state that harassment is a form of scientific and professional misconduct – similar to plagiarism, falsification of data, human subjects violations, embezzlement, and trafficking in antiquities – and will be treated as such.

For laboratories, field research projects, and other educational and training programs, codes of conduct with clear mechanisms of enforcement have been shown to dramatically reduce harassment.

Finally, prevent potential abuses of power by gatekeepers by establishing open and transparent procedures for advising, supervision, funding, permits, hiring, and other high-stakes career processes.

The details of these and other interventions will of course vary by context. For example, Carol Colannino and her colleagues are piloting a suite of interventions for field schools that specifically address the residential learning environment and faculty-student power differentials. The important thing to know is that whatever our roles in archaeology or in allied fields, there are actions each of us can take to prevent harassment before it starts and support survivors when it does.

Uzma: Thank you so much for this interview, for the work that you have done in bringing these articles into circulation, and for all the unseen labor that you do to keep our discipline equitable and just. 

Barb: Thank you for inviting me! And before we wrap up, I’d just like to mention one more thing – I’m currently working with an amazing team of translators to produce Spanish versions of both articles, which will also be released open access, hopefully later this year (2021).

Editorial Update: The Spanish version of both articles has been released open access.

Actualización: el 17 de noviembre de 2021, la revista académica Latin American Antiquity y Cambridge University Press publicaron las traducciones al español de una serie de dos artículos. Ambos artículos son de libre acceso.

Documentación de culturas del acoso en la arqueología

Contra las culturas del acoso en la arqueología

Whether you yourself are a survivor or whether you have—or someone you know has—witnessed harassment and sexual assault, you are not alone. Support is available. If you are not sure where to start, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) provides free and confidential support to survivors and to those who care about them. Support is available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week by phone (800-656-4673) and via live chat at https://www.rainn.org/. En español, llame al (800-656-4673) a la Línea de Ayuda Nacional Online de Asalto Sexual o comuníquese a través de la opción “Chat Ahora”: https://www.rainn.org/es.

Si tú eres un sobreviviente o si has sido testigo—o alguien que tú conoces lo ha sido—de acoso y agresión sexual, no estás sole. Existe ayuda disponible. Si no estás segure por dónde empezar, la  Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN) provee atención gratuita y confidencial a les sobrevivientes y sus seres queridos. La atención está disponible 24 horas del día, 7 días de la semana. En español, llame al (800-656-4673) a la Línea de Ayuda Nacional Online de Asalto Sexual o comuníquese a través de la opción “Chat Ahora”: https://www.rainn.org/es.

Barbara L. Voss is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and the incoming Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. She is a historical archaeologist who investigates the modern world through themes of colonization, diaspora, and sexuality.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

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By Adam Fleischmann

The site is easy to access. Just a short walk and I’m there, immediately confronted with two large rectangular windows. The large window up high and on the right is mostly opaque, save one dominating feature: a single, dark line scorches across its surface like a comet’s tail, bottom left to top right. The window on the left is less subdued, less ominous. Graceful curving layers of color arc to the right and skyward, almost topographical in their technicolor. Later, the layers will change shape, sloping hills, climbing ever-upwards or back down, until 2100.

I click on the “Graphs” menu above the two windows, switching the window on the left to a graph of “CO2 Emissions and Removals” rather than “Global Sources of Primary Energy.” I move the “Carbon Price” lever on the Energy Supply table and the lines on both windows plunge dramatically.

This field site, of course, is a website, and I’m visiting it from the desk in my bedroom that has served as my home office for over a year, due to the public health measures surrounding the novel coronavirus pandemic and thanks, in no small part, to my own privilege allowing me to work from home. The website is the online space of non-profit Climate Interactive’s climate change solutions simulator, En-ROADS. This simple climate model is free, runs on a laptop in less than a second and is available in nine languages. It is a climate policy System Dynamics (an approach to systems science) model that can show “how changes in the energy, economic, and public policy systems could affect greenhouse gas emissions and climate outcomes” (Climate Interactive). Just a click away from the Climate Interactive (CI) homepage, En-ROADS is the model to match the Climate Action Simulation role-playing game.

Last Thursday, April 15, 2021, I joined 316 other people on Zoom in a giant game of the Climate Action Simulation. Before it started, I went to refresh my memory on the En-ROADS model, whose refaced and expanded version was released about eighteen months ago along with the game, a non-role playing workshop and a guided assignment for the classroom and elsewhere. Last year CI converted the Climate Action Simulation, which is usually played in-person, for online play during the pandemic and beyond. Originally set up to play with twenty to fifty people (same as the in-person version), last Thursday’s giant game was an experiment to see just how scalable it could be.

Following my own experiences with remote, online and event-based research—some of which I’ve previously written about here on anthro{dendum}—this giant online climate change game has inspired me to ask questions related to anthropology and the shared circumstances of the global pandemic. For remote research methods, can a website act as a placeholder? Can a website be part of a field site? More broadly, for many, including many academics and educators, the past year has been spent Very Online It’s a year that has forced us all to think about our individual actions in relation to our communities and a larger virally interconnected globe. It’s also been a year that’s further demonstrated the inequities of our political, economic and medical systems. Could the experiences of the pandemic provide gateways into another possible world, ways of seeing and being in the world that emphasize our relations, in spite of the distances between us? Climate Interactive’s in-person games allow people the opportunity rethink their relationships with larger systems through learning experiences that are embodied, social and affective. I was curious how these learning experiences could function online in ways that give insight into building a better world post-pandemic.

The scalability experiment opens by unmuting everyone and having them say “hi” in their language. Among the 317 participants, I count people and languages from North America, Europe, South Asia, South America, Central America, East Asia, Africa and Pacific Islands. CI co-director Drew Jones briefly introduces the model, its confidence-building methods and the work of CI to “apply systems thinking as a framework for addressing climate and climate-related justice and equity issues.” He then breaks down how we’ll play the game. Players assigned alphabetically to one of the teams of stakeholder groups will negotiate their team’s positions among four to six fellow players in Zoom breakout rooms. Each stakeholder team is represented in the main Zoom room by a Team Leader, played by a CI staff member or associate. For Climate Justice Hawks, it’s Swedish activist Greta Thunberg; for Conventional Energy, former Exxon Mobil CEO and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Land, Forestry and Agriculture is represented by someone playing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and World Governments, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina. Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors leads Industry and Commerce, while Clean Tech is led by Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX fame. After breakout room negotiations, each team will be polled on which policy lever in the En-ROADS model their Leader should move, and each Team Leader will advocate for their team’s chosen climate policy change back in the main Zoom room. Drew will then share his screen and show us all in En-ROADS what difference that policy change makes. Together, all teams will work toward the goal of reducing global temperature increase to below 2°C, and ideally below 1.5°C—just like the goals of the actual UN Paris Agreement on climate change.

I’m assigned to the Conventional Energy team. I’ll have to negotiate for the continued relevance of the fossil fuel industry. We’re given five minutes to read our role-play briefings, change our Zoom names and backgrounds to align with our teams. Drew returns, now sporting a jacket and tie as UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, and sends us to our breakout rooms with gusto. By chance, all but two players in my room are from Conventional Energy, including Team Leader Rex Tillerson, played by CI staffer Bindu Bhandari, based in Nepal, who is wearing a necklace of money symbols from different world currencies. Myself, Yvonne in Switzerland and Paula in the U.S. round out the Conventional Energy team. Rory from Ireland represents World Governments and John plays team Land, Agriculture and Forestry from Hong Kong. Much as Rory tries to be the voice of reason, John quietly backing him up, we from Conventional Energy dominate the debate, arguing for carbon capture and storage technologies—a solution that allows us to keep producing our existing products even though those technologies do not yet exist. A pop-up appears telling us we’ve got 30 seconds before Zoom sends us back to the main room.

Up first in the main room is Clean Tech, who vote to increase the carbon price. Elona Musk, a woman in a sharp red blazer with an eastern European accent, steps up to the Zoom mic, riles up her Clean Tech teammates, and rallies the rest of the stakeholder groups for carbon pricing. “Electrify everything! Make them pay! Let’s put a carbon price on everything, we can do it by ourselves!” Before Drew-as-Guterres shows us how a carbon price of $50/ton CO2 would lower global temperature increase, he asks all the players “run your mental model,” to mentally simulate what we think our actions will do to the global temperature. The CI team then releases another poll, asking us, “What are the equity considerations that concern you with this policy? Or equity-related co-benefits you’d hope to capture?”

A $50 carbon price in the model leaves +3.2°C temperature rise, a relatively small reduction from business-as-usual 3.6°C.  The Conventional Energy and Industry and Commerce teams thwart a higher carbon price. Bolsonaro pledges some afforestation (planting trees), but it doesn’t do much to reduce emissions since carbon-absorbing trees take so long to grow. Team World Governments proposes some mild investment in renewables, but that, too, only reduces the global temperature by 0.1°C, since Clean Tech’s carbon price already drastically reduced coal use. During the whole first round of negotiations and proposals, the Zoom chat feature is figuratively on fire, the debate raging among what feels like all three-hundred-plus participants. Drew spurs us on with urgency, “This is terrible! We’re only at 3.4°, we started at 3.6°!”

In our second-round breakout room, Paula from my Conventional Energy team breaks the ice. “Out of character, this role-play is amazing. I want all my meetings to feel like this!” Rory, representing World Governments, agrees: “Three things: first,” he addresses our Rex Tillerson, “you in character are amazing. Two, how are you going to pay for carbon capture and storage? Third, you mentioned your engineering expertise and expressed concern for developing nations, Rex. Allow them to piggyback on your clean energy technology! You could be leaders!” Yvonne from Switzerland provides a counter argument for our dominant Conventional Energy team, but suggests conceding to a $50/ton carbon tax. Then I interject to reclaim the power dynamics. “I feel like I need to simply say: ‘Fossil fuels keep the lights on.’” I fidget, smirk. When Tillerson nods and repeats my phrasing, the rest of the breakout group all smile at the repetition of a phrase we all hear but suspect Bindu and I don’t actually believe out of character.

Brought back after the second breakout room, we have twelve minutes left. Drew-as- Guterres asks Team Leaders for just one sentence on the one policy their team will advocate for. Eventually we do get the temperature down to 1.8°C, using a combination of carbon pricing, electrifying the transport sector, regulating methane and other greenhouse gases and even carbon dioxide removal technologies (which, Drew reminds us, don’t exist yet, despite their appearance in countries’ real-life Paris Agreement pledges).

Drew stops the game there, and acknowledges what we’ve just accomplished. The team shares a link to our simulation, where our results can be viewed. He tells us we’re going to shift into a mode of reflection, removes his tie and suit jacket and asks everyone to remove background images saying what team they’re on. He asks us how we’re feeling, how it feels to go through this, to play a different role. A word cloud is produced on the polling website based on our answers: “hopeful,” “frustrated,” “overwhelmed” and “complex” loom largest. “I want to acknowledge the legitimacy of whatever you’re feeling,” he says. We’re then asked to take a 60-second moment of silence to reflect on what we would love about being part of a world on track to making something like our scenario happen. During the silence, I can hear only Drew’s quiet breathing, my roommate speaking in the room next door, my own thoughts. Other players have closed eyes, or are staring up in contemplation, hands on chins, ponderous. This time, instead of a word cloud, the screen lights up with dozens of responses. “Justice” and “future” are two words I note repeat. The simulation debrief ends with a question about what we’re going to do next to help fight climate change.

Ideally, this climate-policy simulation is meant to teach people some of the dynamic complexity of the climate-policy system, relating their own lives to broader systems and equity issues, while teaching them to connect delayed and distant climate causes and effects that are not intuitive. If the giant online game of the Climate Action Simulation is any indication, this form of climate change education and communication can work even with increasing levels of abstraction. Perhaps this unsurprising, given the success of the large Zoom call setting that is not unfamiliar to many students and educators during the past year or more of much teaching and learning from home. However, the longevity of online Zoom-style games for climate action work like CI’s remains unknown; there have clearly been advantages and challenges to hybrid and online learning during the pandemic. As for websites as field sites, many ethnographers contend that remote fieldwork works best when combined with some element of in-person research, and it’s true that my own has involved both. Some learning moments can be gateways to the possibility of making the world anew, independent of the learning or research venue.

In a recent talk organized by Trent University’s Anne Pasek, UCL anthropologist Hannah Knox talked about “the magic of scalar shifting” available when understanding global climate change action through a technological lens. Knox also noted how for the bureaucrats, engineers and scientists with which she did fieldwork, climate change was close to home—not far away, distant and global. Knowing climate change entailed a rethinking of people’s relationships with themselves and larger systems. I’ve experienced this gateway opening among my students, and also as a student, in anthropology and other classes that taught me to see the world anew. I’ve also experienced this new possibility through the lens of photography as an early teen. For many people, Climate Interactive’s games and models make global climate change about “immediate, material relations to the world and knowledge about the future,” as Knox put it in her talk. Through engaging learning experiences (“I want all my meetings to feel like this!”), CI’s work like the giant online Climate Action Simulation allows people to form those immediate relations between their lives, the global climate and future ways of being in the world. As Drew put it in his closing remarks, “We’re going to need to find the arguments, voices, ways of being that bring others together to get to the solutions we need.” I’m hoping that the strangeness and distance of the past year can, counterintuitively, help us do that.

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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I started writing this piece in June. It was during Pride month, amidst JK Rowling’s ongoing public transphobia, and the same time as I was getting occasional news alerts about Trumpian cuts to protections around trans healthcare. It was also amidst some discussion here in Canada about Prof. Kathleen Lowery, a professor whose workload was shifted after complaints about her transphobia. Prof. Sarah Shulist covered a fair amount of the news around Prof. Lowrey here on Anthrodendum, focusing on the words the media and Prof. Lowrey are using to talk about the situation, and Prof. Lowrey’s exceptionally transphobic and TERF-dogwhistle door. I am so grateful for Prof. Shulist’s writing. I’m so grateful for her vocal support. I’m so grateful someone sitting with the semiotics of Prof. Lowrey’s door, because that’s heavy work to do—it can feel Sisyphean, like trying to carry a pile of glass shards, your hands get cut and there’s always more to sift through.

But this isn’t just about Prof. Lowery. Or that being transphobic is far too often couched as “academic freedom” (which imagines “freedom” in unfortunate way and an academic community free of us trans folks, but I digress). I’m not even going to write about how Prof. Lowrey has a “Pro” account on a social network made for trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) (where she did ask if there were other anthropologists, so she could put together “a late-breaking session on radical feminism and academic freedom”). I’m not going to go in-depth into how “gender critical” is a nice way of saying “transphobic”— people like Natalie Wynn1 (known online as Contrapoints) have produced primers about the term “gender critical,” and others can do the work around the semiotics of TERFs. Others like Laurie Penny have written about how TERFs’ intellectual history is rooted in the UK. So, as much as I’d like to patiently explain how Graham Linehan—yes, the man who created or co-created Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd—is involved in all of this, I’m going to focus on something else.

I’m in part so grateful for Prof. Schulist’s work because of something that it took me a few years to realize: I’ve never met—let alone, to the best of my knowledge, been in the same room with—anyone with a PhD in Anthropology who is transgender or non-binary. (An aside: If you’re a trans or non-binary person with a PhD in Anthropology, I really would like to meet you!)  In the last few years, I’ve been to at least ten conferences on two continents, in more than five countries. I know several trans people who are currently graduate students, but still–I’ve never met a trans person who holds a PhD in Anthropology. I don’t know of someone who can be what Janet Mock and Laverne Cox call a “possibility model” for me.

I have never thought I was “the first” trans person to (fingers crossed) complete a PhD in Anthropology, but when I began to be more public with my decision to live authentically as myself, I realized how exhausting it can be to be out, but without a local trans anthro community. I am very aware that someone’s transness is more or less visible2, and many people do not come out for personal and/or safety-related reasons. (To be clear, no trans person “owes” it to anyone else to be out.) It just struck me as…odd. Sad. Lonely. So, after realizing that I had not ever met a trans person with a PhD in Anthropology, like a good researcher, I spent a few days trying to find the people I hoped were out there. I found someone: one trans person who holds a PhD in Anthropology.

One person.

Off the top of my head, I can come up with a fairly substantive list of anthropologists who do research “on” us trans people. (Their words, and yes, I flinch every time.) Part of CASCA/AAA last year was held on Transgender Day of Remembrance, and even though the lights outside the conference venue were blue, pink, and white for the day, there was no mention of this by anyone I encountered in the conference, nor did the constant misgendering stop–though I didn’t expect it to. I’ve been misgendered by most scholars I encounter, even if I wear multiple nametags with pronouns and correct them multiple times. Someone affiliated with my department hosted an event this past year for someone linked with trans conversion therapy3. It is also desperately important to point out how intersections of race and privilege affect trans experiences: trans women of color are at significantly higher risk of violence, and given academia’s track record with racism and sexism…it’s not great.

I understand why many trans people leave academia, and as someone who’s seen how research “on” trans people by cis scholars gets lauded, I’m also not surprised that trans people just don’t get hired in higher ed. Given that research keeps affirming what trans people have been saying for years—that using our names and pronouns means we face fewer mental health issues—there are many ways that are easy, simple, and free to make us trans people welcome in academic spaces. Yet, discrimination towards trans people continues, and trans people often have fewer or less explicit legal or university protections than cis people 4. I was a little surprised by Prof. Lowrey’s door, but given that I have been using they/them pronouns for years and am consistently misgendered (and there’s an emeritus prof in my department openly writing about “transgender privilege”)…am I really that surprised?

While I am in Canada now, I am from the US—while I graduated years after she started, I went to the same high school as Leelah Alcorn, a trans teenage girl who killed herself after her parents subjected her to conversion therapy. I have heard too many stories that feel heavy to carry. I’m very privileged in that I am white and I was assigned female at birth (AFAB), so for me, misgendering is usually as bad as things get. I’m included in “womxn’s spaces,” while my assigned male at birth (AMAB) trans friends and colleagues are less warmly welcomed, leading to uneasy feelings about bio-essentialism (and second-wave feminism). But still, my heart hurts for all the trans people who have been harmed this year, when in August, the US surpassed the total number of trans people killed in all of 2019.5 So far this year in the US, we remember: Dustin Parker, Neulisa Luciano Ruiz, Yampi Méndez Arocho, Monika Diamond, Lexi “Ebony” Sutton, Johanna Metzger, Serena Angelique Velézquez Ramos, Layla Pelaez Sánchez, Penélope Díaz Ramírez, Nina Pop, Helle Jae O’Regan, Tony McDade, Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, Riah Milton, Jayne Thompson, Selena Reyes-Hernandez, Brian “Egypt” Powers, Brayla Stone, Merci Mack, Shaki Peters, Bree Black, Summer Taylor, Marily Cazares, Dior H Ova, Queasha D Hardy, Aja Raquell Rhone-Spears, Kee Sam, Aerrion Burnett, Mia Green, Michelle Michellyn Ramos Vargas, Felycya Harris, and those whose names we don’t know—and those trans people who have been killed across the world.

Anyways, all of this is a digression. I was angry and frustrated about a tenured professor deliberately misleading people that she’s still getting money (and a course release) after aggressive transphobia. So, I made a small donation to Taking What We Need—a group in my community that provides financial support to transfeminine people, prioritizing BIPOC—and I felt a little bit better. When I saw academics sharing the Judith Butler New Statesman interview where she discusses TERFs, while not advocating for trans people in their own classrooms, I messaged a non-binary friend a particularly adorable photo of my cat, and remembered that my joy and my sense of self cannot be contingent on scholars waiting for an interview to come out featuring Judith Butler themself6.

So, as the pandemic goes on, and the academic job market gets worse and worse: lift up trans people, celebrate trans joy, build an academy that affirms the humanity of people of all genders. And, maybe I’ll meet that trans person with a PhD in Anthropology someday.

I just hope it’s before I become one myself.

1. To provide the briefest of contexts as to why some might not like my reference, there are many critiques of Natalie Wynn that exist, and those that are not just outright transphobic stem from her inclusion of Buck Angel, a trans man who has been outspoken against non-binary people and some trans people who don’t medically transition to his satisfaction, in a video. I’m citing her work here because I think that this is a really good primer on “gender critical” from a trans woman, but adding this context because I think it demonstrates how different trans people do indeed have different ideas about gender. ↩
2. I’m referring to “passing” here—that is, a transgender person’s ability to pass as cisgender, without notice. This is often an issue of safety, particularly for trans women. ↩
3. Without going into too much detail here, the frequent arguments cited here are that Zucker settled with the clinic he was fired from. This is true, but is true only in so much as he settled because the report was released publicly without notifying him first, and one complaint was withdrawn. As far as I am aware, the settlement was not a statement of wrongful termination. For a longer discussion of the academic literature around trans youth and gender-affirmative care, see Florence Ashley, “Homophobia, conversion therapy, and care models for trans youth: defending the gender-affirmative approach,” Journal of LGBT Youth 17, issue 4 (2020): 361-383. ↩
4. In particular, many universities—including my own—have refused to explicitly state that trans people have the right to be called by their names and have their pronouns used. In my experience and after hearing from other trans scholars who have issue at their own institutions, the most frequently-cited reason to not include pronoun protection is “academic freedom.” I believe that this is an unhelpful framing of the argument, but an academic freedom discussion is for another time—the point here is that other rights have to be mobilized (i.e. broad rules against harassment or “vexatious behavior”) in place of an explicit right to be called by one’s name and pronouns. ↩
5. I say “harmed” here because I believe trans people should be able to thrive, not just survive. Measuring success in terms of fewer people murdered or violently harmed is a low bar. Let’s do better, and aim for lives full of joy. ↩
6. Judith Butler uses singular “they” and “she” pronouns. Given how Butler is often described, I’m not sure if many more senior scholars know this. ↩

Rine

Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate at McGill University. Their current research explores how the UK asylum system assesses religious belief, they work towards a more curious (and kind) academy, and they live in Tiotiá:ke/Mooniyaang (Montréal) with their partner and cat.

Their website is here: https://rinevieth.carrd.co/

rinevieth.carrd.co/

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My next post will be more text-heavy, but until then: my short meditation on comics.

Rine

Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate at McGill University. Their current research explores how the UK asylum system assesses religious belief, they work towards a more curious (and kind) academy, and they live in Tiotiá:ke/Mooniyaang (Montréal) with their partner and cat.

Their website is here: https://rinevieth.carrd.co/

rinevieth.carrd.co/

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by Dr. REDACTED, Professor of Anthropology, REDACTED University

Dedicated to Dell Hymes, who once said, “One should react to the utterance of ‘That’s not anthropology,’ as one would to the omen of an intellectual death. For that is what it is…. Either one has something to say about [a subject] or one does not.” 

#1: “Leadership in Scholarly Activities”

“It is laudable that Professor REDACTED
has chosen to engage
with the public
on a matter of great importance.

However,
a leadership position within the academy
presupposes leadership in
scholarly activities.…
Without greater scholarly engagement
with the scholarly questions and debates
within
the field of anthropology…

The Committee finds
that Professor REDACTED’s scholarship
does not meet
the Department of Anthropology’s Criteria for Promotion.”

#2: “Advancing the Field”

“Scholarly knowledge…
is knowledge that advances
the empirical and conceptual development
of the field….

Because my own orientation
is to scholarly knowledge,
I will make reference to this
in what follows….

Professor REDACTED’s
achievement
in the world
is beyond dispute.

Professor REDACTED’s passion lies in pointing out
the injustices in the world
that have been visited on
the relatively disenfranchised….

Still, Professor REDACTED is evidently someone
who could be capable of more sustained
scholarly work,
judging from Professor REDACTED’s ability to engage with these issues.

Professor REDACTED’s passion, however….
is a passion for creating and maintaining a voice
in public debates
that promotes the immediate interests of less fortunate populations.

The central issue…
concerns the extent to which Professor REDACTED’s writings
advance the empirical and conceptual development
of the field….
The work is written for
popular consumption,
not
for the field.

It does not
do much
to advance anthropology
as a discipline….”

Dr. REDACTED is Professor of Anthropology at REDACTED University in REDACTED, USA. They received a Ph.D. and M.A. in anthropology from REDACTED University. 

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“What does it mean to know climate change?” ask Henderson and Long in a 2015 piece for this site’s Anthropologies #21. Researchers on science education, they ask this question to explore what we can do to ensure “knowledge of climate change” becomes “knowledge for social action.” This is no small task—for educators or anthropologists. It has largely shaped my own research, the preoccupations of those with whom I work and climate politics in North America writ large.

As Henderson and Long duly explain, for at least two decades anthropology, psychology, communications, sociology and related fields have agreed: socio-cultural community values and experiences, not merely information, are what shape people’s perceptions of and actions on climate change. This research dumps an assumption that has pervaded the mainstream discourse: that people who don’t care about or believe in climate change are just lacking information. If only we could inject more scientific knowledge into the public, they would understand and take appropriate action on climate change. This latter, defunct model of communication has been called the information or science deficit model.

∆∆∆

In other words, “Research shows that showing people research doesn’t work.” This is a recent mantra of MIT professor John Sterman (e.g. Climate Interactive 2016). Sterman is a key figure of one of the organizations with whom I’ve done anthropological research in the realm between climate science and politics: US-based non-profit, Climate Interactive (CI).

This past winter and spring, I had the opportunity to work with CI, conducting interviews with the users of their tools from all over the world. The people at Climate Interactive know extremely well that new information about climate change alone doesn’t change people’s minds and hearts. Even before he was CI co-founder and co-director, Drew Jones tells me that he recognized a problem: the climate is a complex system in which cause and effect are distant in time and space. Instead of asking what it means to know climate change, Drew asks: “What are interventions that help people viscerally experience the delayed, distant impacts of their actions in ways that create new possibilities?”

He tells me that the best way he figured out how to do this at meaningful scales is computer simulations, and games built around them. Simulation-based role-playing games “offer the potential to compress time and reality, create experiences without requiring the ‘real thing’” (Ledley et al. 2017). Enter CI’s World Climate role-play simulation.

Designed for three to sixty participants, this United Nations climate negotiations simulation has been run a registered 800 times, with over 35,000 participants in seventy-four countries worldwide (Climate Interactive 2017b), from school children to Obama’s climate-change team. Although it is run similar to a model UN event, World Climate benefits from one major pedagogical and design advantage: CI’s C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support) climate policy simulator—a computer model. Deemed an “instant climate model” (Tollefson 2009), combined with their simulation-based exercises it is CI’s biggest innovation, Drew tells me. Compared to the massive supercomputer models of the global climate that take weeks to run, C-ROADS is free, interactive user-friendly and runs online or from any laptop in about one second.

Following my work with CI this last year, and after observing Sterman running the simulation with executive business students at MIT, I was able to participate and observe World Climate in action at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco during the Global Climate Action Summit.

∆∆∆

On the last day of the Summit, I take the California Street Cable Car up the long, steep hill. Jerking all rickety and wooden like an old-fashioned rollercoaster, the car has fewer tourists and more San Francisco locals than I expect. I’m the only one that gets off at Grace Cathedral, my eyes drawn upward. The front-facing rose window of the giant Episcopal church has been cradled on either side by the two halves of an equally giant globe, the brilliance of our blue planet hanging in contrast to the sandy grey of the cathedral’s stone. My eyes track even higher. A bright blue banner of a sky hangs taut over the city, rippled in surreal ridges of opaque white.

The World Climate simulation is being held in an intimate room off the main cathedral. It is facilitated by Reverend Fletcher Harper of the interfaith environmental group, GreenFaith. The group of us, about fifteen or twenty people, range in age from late twenties to sixties and skew toward an educated, white, older, religious demographic. Moved into groups of two to five, with each group representing a country or grouping of countries, we prepare our negotiating approaches based on the provided position briefing. My group, the US, is made up of the three youngest people in the room and a white-haired man named Abe.

For each negotiating round, we move across the room, gather in groups. We make our demands and concessions then joyfully scuttle, whispering, back to our huddle of teammates. After each round, we go back to our groups and record what we’ve negotiated: 1) our intended reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, 2) our monetary contribution to the Green Climate Fund and 3) how much we’ll reduce deforestation and increase afforestation (planting trees). A representative announces the group’s proposals and Fletcher quickly enters the numbers into the instant climate model, C-ROADS. Changes appear in global temperatures, CO2 levels, sea level rise and more. Our goal is under 2ºC warming by 2100.

At first the negotiations are polite, not too urgent, playing into the stereotypes I’d constructed in my head about soft-spoken older religious folks. Soon, though, as participants realize how little their countries’ modest contributions are changing the results in C-ROADS, negotiations get nastier, more urgent. The representative from the European Union, a short haired middle-aged woman in sharp glasses, delivers a tough but impassioned plea for climate action; Chinas makes an articulate and very serious case for the US, EU and Other Developed Countries to contribute more to the Green Climate Fund.

The stakes continue to rise through the third and final round as participants attempt to successfully lower emissions below 2º. Heads huddle, quickly crunch numbers with their teammates, weighing options. Someone makes a plea to people of faith—“diverse faiths!” Someone else negotiates “woman to woman.” People run across the room, making in-game deals outside the parameters of the game—promises for the exchange of technology, contracts for domestically manufactured energy infrastructure. As the timer runs out, delegates negotiate urgent positions “in character,” with their country’s interests in mind, but aiming for the global temperature goal.

By the time the debrief comes around and we step out of our roles as delegates at the UN, everyone’s appealing to Fletcher to have another round. “I wanna get that number down!” the former EU delegate shouts. Heads nod in agreement across the room, faces creased in consternation. Someone formerly from the Chinese delegation says they could see this lasting all day. Participants talk about how they felt empowered or caught up by the role they were playing. Abe’s disappointed, he says, because he was playing to win for the position of the US. We go over what it would have taken to get down to 2º and Fletcher shows us in the model.

∆∆∆

As an embodied, social and affective experience, the World Climate simulation at Grace Cathedral had us participants riled up. People were smiley, angry, stubborn, gleefully ornery and downright upset. A sense of urgency pervaded the room once we realized just what it would take to turn the temperature down. Recent research (led by a CI collaborator and Director of the UMass Lowell Climate Change Initiative, Juliette Rooney-Varga) indicates that this urgency is part of what makes World Climate so successful. World Climate users experience statistically significant increases in knowledge about climate change, emotional engagement with the issue and an increased desire to learn and do more about climate change—even those with political ideologies linked to climate change denial in the US (Rooney-Varga et al. 2018). As a statistical construct describing participants’ feelings about climate change, gains in urgency were closely related to the desire to learn more and intent to take action; gains in knowledge were not.

World Climate acts as the common idiom for diverse participants’ experience of learning and feeling something so distant from normal human scales. The game is embedded in relations, built through playing a role with others in the compressed time of the in-game reality. For some, it acts as a bridging experience between delayed and distant cause and effect, between climate science and climate politics, between knowledge of something and knowledge for action.

The task Henderson and Long introduce to us–ensuring knowledge of something becomes knowledge for social action–has been a challenge not only for those working on climate change. Public anthropology blogs such as this one aren’t published simply for knowledge’s sake. Last month I asked what role anthropologists can play as the world warms toward 1.5ºC. After playing a role in World Climate in San Francisco, I have no prescriptive, right answers to that provocation. Yet as I walked away from Grace Cathedral, sky hung with the blue halves of our one Planet Earth, I remember wondering: what would it mean if anthropologists played the role not merely of translators, interpreters, advocates or witnesses, but bridges between parts of a whole?

References

Climate Interactive. (2017a). C-ROADS. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/c-roads/

Climate Interactive. (2017b). World Climate Simulation Grows in 2017. Retrieved February 28, 2018, from https://www.climateinteractive.org/blog/world-climate-simulation-grows-in-2017/

Climate Interactive. (2016). John Sterman addresses UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon [Vimeo upload]. United Nations, New York. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/190290108

Ledley, T. S., Rooney-Varga, J., & Niepold, F. (2017). Addressing Climate Change Through Education. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.56

Rooney-Varga, J. N., Sterman, J. D., Fracassi, E., Franck, T., Kapmeier, F., Kurker, V., Johnston, E., Jones, A.P., Rath, K. (2018). Combining role-play with interactive simulation to motivate informed climate action: Evidence from the World Climate simulation. PLOS ONE, 13(8), e0202877. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202877

Tollefson, J. (2009). Instant climate model gears up. Nature News, 461(7264), 581–581. https://doi.org/10.1038/461581a

Adam Fleischmann

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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“There are many reasons why people in our field work remotely,” one data analytics coordinator tells me. We are talking on the phone one afternoon, me from the far East Coast, him from the flat Midwest, having met each other at the Global Climate Action Summit on the West Coast. He continues. For one, it’s more sustainable. Plus it’s 2018, he says, we have the technology, so why not? This allows them to draw from a diverse and well qualified pool of staff and collaborators from all over the globe. Climate change is a global issue. He mentions the practical reason that you need people on the ground in and from local communities to understand the socio-political, economic and environmental issues related to his organization’s work on climate. Sure, he finishes, the staff get together twice a year, and they appreciate this face-to-face time, but they really value cutting down on travel. They are a climate change communication and mitigation organization, after all. I nod periodically. Remembering he can’t see me, I grunt or “hmm” at the appropriate times, thoughts racing at these mundane revelations.

Is this what fieldwork in the “murky middle” between political practice and scientific or technical knowledge looks like? I ended my first post this month with a series of questions about how an anthropology of climate change manifests when it explores other venues than the impacts of climate change. In this post I go deeper. What does anthropological research look like not among climate scientists or international policy negotiators, but, rather, with conveners of states and regional governments interested in working on climate change? Or the technicians who provided the data analytics and interactive computer tools for decision support among high-level leaders and middle schoolers alike? Or even the experts that provide the scientifically accurate and public-appropriate messaging for the latest viral piece of climate journalism?

Here, I introduce the shape that this field, and therefore this kind of fieldwork, between climate science and action can take. I also consider where this work takes place and how this milieu forces a change in the shape of research—or at least the shape it has taken during my own ongoing PhD research. This is also an attempt to open up a space for conversations in upcoming posts about the politics and affect (or emotions) of graduate student fieldwork, before leading to ethnographic anecdotes and reflections on the future.

Returning to the opening phone call, at the time I remember thinking that what my interlocutor was saying made perfect sense to me. It was completely reasonable, and perfectly quotidian. But the normality of it was surprising, and a bit disappointing. I became aware that I was hoping for more. I was holding out for a grand organizational philosophy or a complex strategic insight for why he and his colleagues, like so many others in this space, work remotely. Writing down his response in my notebook, I come to this realization. The mundane logic of telecommuting has largely structured my work and emotional life for the last year.

This is because my interlocutor’s organization, a non-governmental organization working on non-national climate action, is not unique in this regard. The murky middle ground of climate change work is made up of a diverse community of actors and techniques. Some are conveners, bringing together sub-national or national and international stakeholders from different states, in the face-to-face venues governments prefer. They often work closely with others who are policy coordinators and analysts, making sure climate policies add up and are consistent with scientific understandings. Others do data analytics or are technology developers, providing the tools and analysis to move knowledge and practice between what are deemed scientific and political realms. Yet others are science communicators, playing the role of translator for the public and leaders.

While most of these actors come from the non-profit world, academics are strewn throughout, collaborating and complementing existing work. Most people play multiple roles and the different types of climate actors often co-exist within the same organization. Yet most of the organizations I’ve followed so far are made up of people spread out across North America.1

They are staffed, if sometimes only partly, by telecommuters, who work remotely together—over conference calls and email. They periodically meet in person. Often these reunions occur at the diplomatic and organizing summits that are the culmination of months of work: this year’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco; the Climate Group’s Climate Week New York City; the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)’s meetings of scientists, or; the yearly COP (Conference of Parties) meetings of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). This is the case at a 10-person U.S. non-profit modeling and communications think tank, as it is at the Canadian branch, consisting of 4 full time staff, of a large international non-profit network, and even some large, international climate NGOs. The exceptions are either the biggest international environmental NGOs or those that have small offices staffed by just a handful, often shared with other environmental or climate groups. A different interlocutor tells me that, in his organization, “the operations/logistics person and the domestic policy person stay home, but the rest of the staff move around a lot because this is what the work demands.”

Anthropologists attempt to let the shape of what they study dictate the shape of their research. In academic speak, this means that we allow our objects of study and their manifestations to provincialize us, as Povinelli (2016) has recently put it. In other words, how we do fieldwork should follow after what we work on. In my case, the structure and logic of how my chosen object of research organizes itself out in the world has inevitably and necessarily changed the shape and methods of my doctoral fieldwork.

I realized early on that if much, but not all, of the work of the organizations working to bridge the gaps between climate change science and climate politics is realized remotely, my fieldwork would have to be follow suit. This has meant conducting interviews and casual conversations over the phone and video chat; sitting in and participating in conference calls and webinars; engaging in fleeting in- person meetings over coffee and between presentations; and travelling to conference and summits, the culmination of months of my field collaborators’ work. Currently in the murky middle of my research on the murky middle, the shape of this research is bound to continue to transform.

Before we dive into the ethnographic detail of a case study later this month, in the next post I explore how “murky” plays out as an affect for this type of fieldworking itself. I muse over the complicated nature–and the potential limits—of conducting first (doctoral) fieldwork like this; I reflect on power, positionality and the ethics of “studying up.”

References

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016 Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke Univ Pr.

1.  Note that, although anthropogenic climate change is a global issue, I’ve focused my PhD research on actors working mainly from North America. This was a strategic and methodological choice. ↩

Adam Fleischmann

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Adam Fleischmann

Early Saturday morning, October 6, 2018, push notifications lit up phones across the eastern half of North America just as the rising sun hit the weekend coast. Messages were coming in from a time zone more than half a day away–from Incheon, South Korea. The 48th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just come to a close. North American climate civil society organizations—never a cohort accused of respecting normal business hours—were writing home in exhausted celebration. The victory being celebrated? The approval of the IPCC’s Special Report on the impacts of 1.5ºC (or 2.7ºF) of global warming.

They were not celebrating the results of the research, per se. The report outlined new and disturbing revelations for the very future of humankind: if we keep on the current trajectory, we will reach a global temperature increase of 1.5ºC much sooner than anticipated, some time between 2030 and 2052. This 1.5ºC warming, the report warned, is more dangerous than we ever knew. An Earth of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels is an Earth of intensified droughts, wildfires and food shortages, inundated coastlines, increased poverty and a likely loss of 70-90% of tropical coral reefs. At 2ºC, we would very likely lose 99% of coral reefs. The situation is more dire than we ever thought, the report read; we have to get our act together now.

So what was good about this news, worthy of writing home about so early on a Saturday morning? In fact, the victory for civil society groups was their successful effort to meaningfully include a powerful and honest description of the impacts of 1.5ºC in the report (specifically in its Summary for Policymakers). Hard-won was the inclusion of the very real human and non-human suffering, ecosystem devastation and biodiversity loss due by around 2040 if we as a species continue living together as we currently do.

And, importantly, the report laid out the scope of efforts needed in order to halt warming below the 1.5º threshold: nothing short of an overhaul of our economic, social and cultural institutions.

~

What role can anthropologists offer as the world warms toward 1.5º?

Considering the stakes of the transformations it demands, anthropologists have had something to say about anthropogenic climate change for some time. In 2015, anthro{dendum} published (under its previous heading) the 21^st issue of its Anthropologies series, the Climate Change Issue. In his introduction, Jeremy Trombley notes how anthropologists have for decades been at “the forefront of studying the ‘human dimensions’ of climate and environmental change,” in all their diverse forms. “Recently,” he continues, “with the release of the AAA [American Anthropological Association] statement on climate change (Fiske et al. 2014), it has become solidified as an important concern” for the entire discipline. As both Trombley and Sean Seary (who provides a review of some representative topics) note, the foremost focus of anthropologists’ work on climate change has been local impacts and adaptations.

Indeed, research in the anthropology of anthropogenic climate change has tended to concentrate its efforts on impacts on threatened communities, their vulnerability and adaptation to, and their resilience in the face of, climate change. Such research has been called “ethnographic climate change response research” (Baer and Singer 2014: 63). Studying the human dimensions of climate change has been instrumental in lifting up the stories of those who have often contributed the least to climate change, but suffer the most from it. This is a trend that will only intensify as we writhe toward 1.5ºC. At the same time this focus has allowed anthropologists to converse in the language of international negotiations and broader environmental change research, all while conducting research predominantly in what have been anthropology’s “traditional” field sites, in indigenous, small rural or otherwise marginal(ized) communities.

For a decade anthropologists have called for heightened focus on climate change and increased involvement in (and research on) natural science climate research (Crate 2008; Jasanoff 2010; Hulme 2011; Fiske 2012; Barnes et al. 2013; Fiske at al. 2014; etc.). Only recently, however, have calls to study the “power brokers” (Lahsen 2008) of climate change—scientists, researchers, journalists, government decision makers and business leaders—taken hold (e.g. Callison 2014; Whitington 2016; Howe and Pandian 2016). These power brokers are “much more important in shaping climate change and associated knowledge and policies than are the marginal populations we are accustomed to studying” (Lahsen 2008:587). Hall and Sanders in their piece for Anthropologies #21 suggest the way forward is “to anthropologise the myriad Euro-American contexts in which climate change knowledge is produced and put to work.”

So what does an anthropology of climate change look like if it moves explicitly outside the important work on impacts, vulnerability, adaptation and resilience? To what part of the massive climate change knowledge-producing apparatus does it look? In fact, anthropologists have turned their gaze to diverse sites. For example, Myanna Lahsen (2002) has looked to Brazilian climate scientists, science administrators and government officials; Candis Callison (2014) has pointed her analysis toward climate change journalists, scientists, denialists, business, religious and indigenous leaders; Jerome Whitington (2016) has considered carbon accounting, markets and trading in Asia, North America, at the UN and with activist groups. My colleague Jonathan Wald has worked with state environmental analysts in Brazil as they strategize and design for unprecedented change.

When it comes to the current state of global environmental change research, “we have developed a fair amount of scientific and technical knowledge on one level,” wrote P.J. Puntenney in 2009. “On another level,” she continued, “we have made real progress in sorting out the application of practical knowledge. It is between these levels, where managerial and scientific knowledge meet…that things are murky” (322). Who inhabits these borderlands? Can anthropology investigate this murky middle space?

This month at anthro{dendum}, I explore these questions and more. I’ll start by looking through the prism of my own research with non-state actors inhabiting the spaces where climate research meets organizing, policy and advocacy work. I examine what can be learned from those working on climate change in the United States in this time of rapid change. I will also ask what these spaces demand of graduate student “first research” and the ethics of “studying up.” The month will wrap up with reflections on the future of anthropological work on climate change. What politics and ethics does climate change demand of the anthropologist and their broader world?

References

Baer, Hans A., and Merrill Singer, eds. 2014 The Anthropology of Climate Change: An Integrated Critical Perspective. 1st ed. Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group/Earthscan from Routledge.

Barnes, Jessica, Michael Dove, Myanna Lahsen, et al. 2013 Contribution of Anthropology to the Study of Climate Change. Nature Climate Change 3(6): 541–544.

Callison, Candis. 2014 How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Experimental Futures. Durham: Duke University Press.

Crate, Susan A. 2008 Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology’s Role(s) in Global Climate Change. Current Anthropology 49(4): 569–595.

Fiske, Shirley J. 2012 Global Climate Change from the Bottom up. In Applying Anthropology in the Global Village. Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler, and Jacqueline Copeland-Carlston, eds. Pp. 143–172. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Fiske, S.J., Crate, S.A., Crumley, C.L., Galvin, K., Lazrus, H., Lucero, L. Oliver- Smith, A., Orlove, B., Strauss, S., Wilk, R. 2014 Changing the Atmosphere: Anthropology and Climate Change. Final report of the AAA Global Climate Change Task Force. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.

Howe, Cyemene, and Anand Pandian, eds. 2016 “Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Website. Cultural Anthropology. Theorizing the Contemporary,. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/788-introduction-lexicon-for-an-anthropocene-yet-unseen, accessed July 17, 2016.

Hulme, Mike. 2011 Meet the Humanities. Nature Climate Change 1(4): 177–179.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2010 A New Climate for Society. Theory, Culture & Society 27(2–3): 233–253.

Lahsen, Myanna. 2002 Brazilian Climate Epistemers’ Multiple Epistemes: An Exploration of Shared Meaning, Diverse Identities and Geopolitics in Global Change Science. Discussion Paper – 2002-01 presented at the Environment and Natural Resources Program, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass, January. http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/2792/brazilian_climate_epistemers_multiple_epistemes.html.
2008 Commentary on “Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology’s Role(s) in Glocal Climate Change” by Susan A. Crate. Current Anthropology 49: 587–588.

Puntenney, P.J. 2009 Where Managerial and Scientific Knowledge Meet Sociocultural Systems: Local Realities, Global Responsibilities. In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions. Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, eds. Pp. 310–325. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Whitington, Jerome. 2016 Carbon as a Metric of the Human. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39(1): 46–63.

Adam Fleischmann

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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At the end of my sixth semester as an anthropology professor, I’m reflecting on what it means to inhabit this discipline (or, maybe, to occupy (re-occupy?) it). I have spent the better part of the last 8 years immersed in anthropological theory, anthropological politics, and engaging and interlocuting with the ghosts of the discipline’s past. And, to be honest, this work wears away at my cells, my fibres, my bones. I’m exhausted.

I have aged. I recently joked in a talk to a room full of bright, enthusiastic Métis students at a conference here in Ottawa that when I started my tenure-track position three years ago, I looked like I was twelve years old. And now I look like I’m twenty. (The women in my family age very well).

All jokes aside, though, the work of embodying the discipline, of disciplining myself into the structures of not only the academy, but the specificities of anthro itself, wear and tear at my Indigenous body. I paused the other day to ask myself if any of the last 8 years in anthro have brought me joy.

I cannot say that they have.

To propel myself forward within the discipline, to deflect the various forms of daily violence I experience within it as an Indigenous woman, I keep working towards the next step, the next goal, hoping that behind each successive door there might be something about anthro that brings me joy. If not passing my proposal defence, then surely the viva voce. If not the viva voce, then surely the feeling of graduating in absentia. If not the absentia graduation, then surely presenting at x,y,z conference or publishing in x,y,z venue. If not all of these things, then surely the satisfaction of tenure in a few years’ time will provide that joy or at least sense of meaning or belonging.

But what keeps creeping in throughout this punishing marathon of seeking external validation from anthropology is that I find joy elsewhere. Publishing in, and speaking at, critical art history venues. Collaborating with art historians, geographers, artists, and Indigenous/feminist STS scholars. Sneaking in my own artwork and poetry and references to popular TV shows into serious academic contributions. Working with other Indigenous feminist scholars to examine, in great detail, the experiences of our communities and our ancestors. Everything that brings me joy is outside anthropology. So why do I continue to call myself an anthropologist? (and do I?)

Disciplines discipline. They police boundaries and they seek to convene specific discourses. As a teenager, I once dreamt of joining the military, and through my adolescent years as an Army Cadet in Canada, I grew to love discipline. I loved the predictability of it, the reward of meeting a goal within the rubrics of military training. I loved running with our cadet company or platoons, I loved the camouflage, the drills, the routinized expectations. All of it. It gave me a sense of purpose, comfort. I was very good at discipline. I could take it, and I could mete it out.

But the thing with finding yourself through discipline, through routinization, through external rewards and punishment, is that at some point — for some folks — there is a limit to what the institution can offer you. A limit to discipline (a disciplinary limit).

At this point, when you have exhausted your utility to an institution or structure, and when the institution has exhausted its usefulness to you: you must make a choice. When your body exceeds the limits of the body of work you contribute to, what do you become? Waste? Collateral damage? Disciplines do not like unruly bodies or bodies that permeate and puncture the walls of their cells.

Disciplines are macrophages, seeking like and familiar. When your protein coating does not read as familiar to the institution’s immune system, when you are unfamiliar, you are ingested, broken down, and excreted as waste.

Eight years in: I feel like waste. And as life imitates art, my own immune system and other bodily systems are overrun with the markers of waste typical of a body that has been forced to circulate toxic, life-threatening levels of cortisol and other stress hormones for far too long.

Either we find a way for our bodies to assimilate to the pressures of the structures we occupy, or our bodies turn that pressure inwards, slowly destroying the structures that keep us standing.

I read Sara Ahmed’s work to help keep me afloat on the tenure track. Her words give me buoyancy but they also give me ballast. Her theorizations of what it is for Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) scholars to occupy academe are important documentations of the ways disciplines discipline.  She also articulates, with laser precision, what it means for BIPOC scholars to speak up and to name problems within the academy, within disciplines. To speak up, to defy convention and the disciplining of disciplines is to become ‘problems’ within the university and within broader fields of study (Ahmed 2014). As Ahmed notes regarding sexism in the academy:

 “When [we] point out these structures, we become sore points, because you are pointing out something that gets in the way of how people occupy space. Note as well: when you point out sexism, you are often blocked. The message does not get through. In my work I have  called these blockages “walls” (Ahmed 2012). In the academy, I come across the walls of sexism every day: whether through citational practices that repeatedly privilege work by men (particularly when it comes to defining a new field or object of study, feminist work that leads to field formation often disappears once a field is given form); whether it is how women who are not willing to participate in sexual banter get called “uptight,” whether it is in the  expectation of who the lecturers are, of how they appear; whether it is in the constant stream of questions asked to female academics about how their work relates to this or that male theorist.” (Ahmed 2014)

This same process applies to speaking up about racism, white supremacy, and colonialism in anthropology. Thinking with Ahmed’s work, it is clear to me that to name the violences of anthropology, to speak of them, and to refuse their relegation to the ‘bad past’ separate from the ‘good present’, is to become a problem. Further, when you work in ways that confound disciplinary boundaries, you become a problem. When your body, and your body of work, do not fit neatly into the categories provided, you become a problem.

Achille Mbembe (2015: 19) articulates a desire to provincialize European thought (in reference to the work of Fanon) by enacting his specific vision of the pluriversity. He explains (2015: 19):

“By pluriversity, many understand a process of knowledge production that is open to epistemic diversity.  It is a process that does not necessarily abandon the notion of universal knowledge for humanity, but which embraces it via a horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions. To decolonize the university is therefore to reform it with the aim of creating a less provincial and more open critical cosmopolitan pluriversalism – a task that involves the radical re-founding of our ways of thinking and a transcendence of our disciplinary divisions. The problem of course is whether the university is reformable or whether it is too late.” (Mbembe 2015: 19)

What does epistemic diversity look like when we are tangling with a euro-western academy that meticulously tags and monitors us as problems? And is the discipline of anthropology reformable, as Mbembe asks of the university more broadly, or are we indeed ‘too late’?

I am not sure.

So, I turn to stories to tease out what is happening and what might be possible.

Over the last year, I have been interlocuting with a Black anthropologist who has dealt with egregious levels of antiblack racism in the discipline, and who has spent the better part of the last decade raising concerns about this through all the means available to them. And I have watched as anthropologists dismiss this individual as a ‘problem’. I have tried to figure out how I reconcile the work anthropologists claim to do to dismantle racism while I see it faithfully and viciously reproduced in every aspect of the discipline. I am trying to figure out how I counteract the surveillance and disciplining of our discipline while also making sure I stay alive, while I make sure the pressure doesn’t kill me. How do I, to borrow a term from Simpson’s (2007, 2014) work, refuse anthro’s underlying white supremacist tendencies?

I acknowledge that as a white-coded Indigenous woman, I possess a great deal of privilege. So, if I am feeling ground to nothing in anthropology — and I inhabit this Indigenous body that is read as white and is not subjected to the same racist surveillance and everyday violence as racialized bodies — then what levels of care and support can I hope for for my racialized students in the discipline? If I can barely survive the micro-aggressions against me as a white-coded Indigenous woman over the last 8 years, then what can I possibly hope for for BIPOC students?

I do my best to fight for the safety of BIPOC students, and to assert that nobody’s humanity is up for debate in my classroom. But I cannot guarantee the broader discipline or academy will offer this level of care. It feels unethical to try and recruit students into a discipline that I know to be violent, to a discipline that I know excuses a great deal of racism in its everyday operations. So I have not tried.

Instead, I am moving half of my appointment to an Indigenous Studies program, where I feel I can ethically supervise students and protect them from the worst of the violences I’ve faced as an Indigenous woman in anthropology in European, American, and Canadian contexts. (I am not naive, though. All disciplines discipline in various ways. It is a matter of finding the ones within which you can actually breathe, if possible).

It fascinates me that disciplines also quibble over the things that don’t matter when they could expend that energy actually transforming their fields into spaces that are inclusive and dynamic. I have had the relatively hilarious recent experience of defending my work to both anthropologists and sociologists. I hold graduate degrees in both disciplines. Some folks in both disciplines remain suspicious of my intentions. When I speak to some anthros, they are suspicious of my embrace of sociological theorists and principles. When I speak to some sociologists, I am a trojan horse, bringing my unruly embrace of ethnography and epistemic diversity (Mbembe 2015) into the neat and orderly world of ANOVA tests and quantitative measurement. The thing is, both disciplines are still rooted in white supremacist logics and histories. Both disciplines discipline. Both disciplines have more in common with one another than they care to admit. Their roots in euro-western cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemes hold them much more closely together on the tree of euro-western intellectual life than they realize. 

And based on my experience — and that of myriad colleagues and students who have shared harrowing stories over the years — both disciplines are still, largely, hostile space for Indigenous scholars here in North America.

Dr. Audra Simpson opens the fourth chapter of her seminal ethnography Mohawk Interruptus with the following statement: “to speak of Indigeneity is to speak of colonialism and anthropology, as these are means through which Indigenous people have been known and sometimes are still known” (Simpson 2014). What I learn from Simpson’s work, and from my own informal ethnographic study of the discipline, is that to speak of Indigeneity within anthropology is to navigate erasure of Indigenous agency, sovereignty, and self-determination (in all of their pluralities and complexities) — and to confront disciplinary conventions that frame Indigenous peoples in very specific ways. Ways that pose us alternately as cherished, noble informants (outside the academy), or nasty and brutish problems (within the discipline).

At a job interview (outside of anthro), a senior white male scholar approaching retirement leveraged this complaint against me: “where is the social theory in your work? You don’t seem to use any social theory!”. As a sociologist, he could not read my citations of Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Kim TallBear, Leroy Little Bear, Audra Simpson, Val Napoleon, John Borrows, my Aunt (Métis-Cree filmmaker Loretta Todd) as ‘social theory’. When this question was posed to me, I knew it spelled doom for me and this particular job opportunity. So I gathered up my Michif stubborness, took a deep breath, and offered this back to the interrogator:

“What if I asked you this question: you demand to know where the social theory is in my work as an Indigenous feminist scholar. I suppose my question back to you is: what has your discipline (sociology) done to deserve the presence of Indigenous feminist scholars within it, to be worthy of my social theory?”

I did not get the job.

Back to the joke-filled talk I delivered in front of the hotel banquet hall full of Métis students last month. In that moment, I felt joy. I did not have to defend my right to be there, to occupy that space discussing my work on Métis law, fish, and extinction in the Canadian prairies. I did not have to self-consciously cite obscure anthropological theory to prove my worthiness to be in that space. I told stories rooted in my place as a Métis woman borne of the Lake Winnipeg watershed. I cited the legal traditions that influence our governance, I talked about our theories and cosmologies. I cited myriad BIPOC women scholars, I talked about what it is like to do anti-colonial work in the spirit of building something otherwise. Later, colleagues asked pointed but thoughtful questions about my work — in ways that hold me accountable to the community I write about and belong to.

So what does it look like for us to engage more epistemic diversity, to be more generous and generative with the work that we do, with the bodies (human and figurative) that we carry within our disciplinary walls? I am not sure.

I think the biggest hurdle to embracing epistemic diversity in anthropology, to dismantling its current configuration as ‘white public space’ (Brodkin et al. 2011) is admitting the white supremacist roots of the discipline. To stop saying that anthropology ‘decolonized’ itself with the decolonial turn 30 years ago. Decolonization is a process, not a destination. You cannot declare you’ve arrived somewhere if you’ve barely even strapped on the seat-belts and delivered the safety lecture.

In Canada, the lives of Indigenous people are statistically shorter than the lives of non-Indigenous people . First Nations, Inuit, and Métis women can also expect to experience violence at 2.7 times the rate of non-Indigenous women. The categories employed here are also problematic — because the inter-related violences of the State against Indigenous, African-descended, and Afro-Indigenous communities are built into the DNA of the country. The above data are the statistics for Indigenous women, and statistics for African-descended and Afro-Indigenous communities and individuals are equally distressing: the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner recently completed a study of anti-Black racism in Canada that raises very specific concerns about violence against African-descended peoples in the Country. Despite appearances to being a liberal haven, Canada still turns on the logics of white supremacy and colonialism, and these realities permeate every institution, including our universities and academic disciplines.

So, as a Métis woman, I can expect to live at least three years less than a non-Indigenous Canadian woman, and I am 2.7 times more likely to experience serious violence in my life. With this statistically shorter life, and statistically higher likelihood of experiencing violence, I seek the right to inhabit those spaces that celebrate and nurture and uplift me.

Anthro: you have not been that space.

So, to cite the classic song by Tracy Chapman: give me one reason to stay here. I can’t promise I’ll turn right back around, though. Because I have found joy in so many other places within and beyond academe, and I am not sure the disciplining discipline of anthro can offer me anything at the moment that would draw me away from living a resolutely, stubbornly joy-full and meaningful life beyond its halls.

Works Cited:

Brodkin, Karen, Morgen, Sandra and Janis Hutchinson. 2011. ‘Anthropology as White Public Space?’, American Anthropologist 113(4): 545–556.

Mbembe, Achille. 2015. “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive.” Lecture. May 2, 2015 at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. Retrieved October 05, 2016. (http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf).

Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures 9: 67-80.

Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

zoetodd

Dr. Zoe Todd (Red River Métis) (she/they) is a practice-led artist-researcher who studies the relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures in Canada. As a Métis anthropologist and researcher-artist, Dr. Todd combines dynamic social science and humanities research and research-creation approaches—including ethnography, archival research, oral testimony, and experimental artistic research practices—within a framework of Indigenous philosophy to elucidate new ways to study and support the complex relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish well-being in Canada today. They are a co-founder of the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures, which is a collaborative Indigenous-led initiative that is ‘restor(y)ing fish futures, together’ across three continents. They are also a co-founder of the Indigenous Environmental Knowledge Institute (IEKI) at Carleton University. In 2020 they were elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, and in 2018 were the Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University.

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