American Anthropological Association 2024 Annual Meeting; Tampa, Florida

Conference: American Anthropological Association 2024 Annual Meeting; Tampa, Florida
November 20 – 23, 2024

Presentation: Communities of Controversy: Ethnographic Praxis in Contentious Spaces

REPORT:

From November 20 to 24, I attended the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meetings held in Tampa, FL. My conference attendance and participation as a presenter in the roundtable “Communities of Controversy: Ethnographic Praxis in Contentious Spaces” was made possible through a travel grant from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. During the roundtable on Wednesday, November 20 from 12:30-2:15 pm, I and five other participants presented challenges and reflections on our practices of ethnographic research within communities that are typically seen as undeserving, politically distasteful, or contentious. Following the presentation of my work on the tensions between Israel’s leftwing peace activists and the political Zionism they support, an audience member approached me to share how her work in Lebanon examined similar forms of political exceptionalism and its manifestations in Lebanese Christian communities. This interaction led to a shared evening spent discussing our own work and reflecting on the central theme of research we both explore: lived ethics/ethical daily practices.

During the AAA in Tampa, FL, I also shared a meal with three other graduate students and a postdoctoral scholar, all of whom work in the Middle East/Levant Region. Because most members of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association had boycotted the conference, I was glad to renew the connections I had made in previous years with these four graduate students and postdocs. We shared resources that we liked using in our teaching, and discussed potential postdoctoral opportunities through our regional specialty. I learned about two different opportunities to pursue postdoctoral work and I am currently working on applications to submit to these programs. Finally, we were able to support each other as we reflected on the difficulty of continuing to do research in a region that has significant active war, discussed how our research participants were doing and what we were trying to do to support them, and generally found consolation together as we grieve for the destruction of the last 18 months in the Middle East.

Finally, I attended a panel organized by the Society for Linguistic Anthropologists exploring the theoretical applications of person-presence, a theoretical framework that I consider in my own work as a cultural anthropologist. This presentation provided both resources and an opportunity for critical engagement with linguistic anthropologists on a topic with which they are familiar and I am still learning. I integrated some of the theory I heard into a chapter of my dissertation that was completed about a week after I attended the conference. As a participant of the Middle East Section’s online business meeting, I also connected with senior scholars in my field who had not participated in-person at the Tampa meetings.