CASCA/SANA 2016: Panel CFP - Solidarity with who?: On the Challenges of Studying Up

Solidarity with who?: On the Challenges of Studying Up
Session to be submitted for the CASCA/SANA meetings at Dalhousie
University, May 11 - 15, 2016

Anthropologists often position themselves in solidarity with marginal
groups, frequently represented by our research participants. Yet, for
several decades, anthropologists have also focused on studying
powerful institutions, including sites of scientific and technological
practice, government bureaucracies, and legal and policing systems.
Through this practice of "studying-up," anthropologists unpack the
meanings and practices of those operating within and through often
opaque institutional systems, providing a means of understanding and
often critiquing operations of power (Nader 1989). Yet, conducting
ethnographies of powerful actors and institutions can put us at odds
with the interests, goals, and politics of our research participants.
This panel invites papers that explore the complexities of enacting
solidarities while "studying-up," including discussions of productive
and problematic solidarities in the field and beyond, different means
and forms of solidarity, analyses of critical versus collaborative
approaches to ethnography, and considerations of relationships other
than solidarity in fieldwork.

Please send inquiries and abstracts to Samantha Breslin
(sdbreslin@mun.ca) by January 8, 2016.

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*Samantha Breslin, PhD Candidate *
Department of Anthropology
Memorial University of Newfoundland
e:mail: sdbreslin@mun.ca