AAA 2018 – Queering the Life Course

“Queering the Life Course” would have been a way better title than what I actually slapped on my poor paper for this year’s AAA. Sure, you may not be any more interested in “queering the life course” than in my actual title, which is, unfortunately, “Quotidian Present or Normative Future.”[ETA: jk! see note below!] But queering the life course approach is exactly what I’m hoping to do, so it still would have been a better title.

Another title I might have gone with is, “An analysis of 10th grade moments in urban Quito.” Or, because I set the bar pretty low, “Bailando, Happy Birthday, and a solo violin: three (queer?) times in a 10th grade age horizon.” At least those titles more accurately reflect that the majority of this presentation will be storytelling and not jargon.

FB meme that made the rounds a few years ago …

Strained titles aside, I am very excited to get up and get evocative about interactions with three of my informants from Colegio Conquistador, a municipal high school in downtown Quito where I did my doctoral research. When I was in the field, I had one of those cool things happen where an everyday interaction that I observed gradually appeared a lot more meaningful. It turns out it makes a great story. And, adding cake to that icing, it’s a great story that I think makes a strong case for a particular methodological approach to analyzing age. Specifically, it’s great for showing how to add queer phenomenology to the life course approach.

I want to tell you more about it. And I will! At my talk! Which happens to be on Part 1 of the panel, “Anthropological Engagements in Queer Theories, Part I: Potentialities of Queerness” on Wednesday, November 14 from 12:00-1:45pm. Yifeng Cai put this whole thing together, and George Paul Meiu will be the discussant on my panel. (If you haven’t read Meiu’s article, ‘Beach-Boy Elders’ and ‘Young Big-Men’: Subverting the Temporalities of Ageing in Kenya’s Ethno-Erotic Economies, do yourself a favor and go read it now.) Frankly, I also heard Paula Martin give an amazing paper at last year’s AAA, and they’re on my panel, too, and I am super excited to see what they come up with this year.

I hope I see you there! Also, if you have a talk you want me to come to, please drop me your deets in the comments.

** [ETA: it turns out, I recognized how terrible that title was a while ago, and I changed it on the AAA site and then promptly forgot that I’d changed it. So you’ll actually find it in the program and on my CV as “Queering Youth Becoming: Socially Mobile Students in the Here and Now”]

“A Bad Age for Citizenship” at the AAAs – 11/30 8am

This year, at the American Anthropological Association in Washington, DC, yours truly will be chairing a panel. The session is early (8am, Thursday, November 30, 2017), but I’ll be there with my coffee in hand and now that you’ve made it here to read the description, I hope you will, too. Let me try and convince you.

Every year, the closer I get to the November conference, the more my inner groupie flutters at the chance to exchange ideas with people I respect. But this year is extra special because I have all but guaranteed this by having some of those people on my own panel! Even better, everyone is talking about a topic I think is really important: age as citizenship.

The panel, titled “A Bad Age for Citizenship: Barriers to belonging in the school years,” has me, Patrick Alexander, Sally Bonet, and Cara M. Morgenson presenting papers and Caroline Bledsoe as the Discussant.

If you haven’t heard of Caroline Bledsoe, allow me to fangirl on you for a minute. Bledsoe’s book, Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa, totally changed how I thought about age. Reading it was the point at which I decided I wanted to make my anthropological career about theorizing the life course. And, yeah, that MIGHT have had a little to do with why I asked her to be our discussant. But another reason is that she came out with this great article in 2011 with Papa Sow that took the implications of cultural variation in aging to another level, and got me thinking about a lot of the themes we go into in this panel.

She’s not the only one on my panel I’m stoked to meet – we have a really great line up. And as excited as I am to hear their papers, I’m even more excited to get to talk to them face to face and ask them questions about their work.

Here’s the official abstract, and I hope you’ll come and say hi to me after!

AAA Session Abstract: Youth and families around the world face a dilemma when school is simultaneously a critical site for establishing youth as citizens and a site of social differentiation, exclusion, inequality, and danger. Responses to this dilemma are shaped by imagined futures of familial social mobility as well as histories of familial exclusion; these responses are both constrained and made possible by the intersections of local, national, global, and transnational age-based rights and responsibilities (Bledsoe and Sow 2011). This panel contributes to AAA 2017’s conference theme of anthropological engagement with contemporary crises of inequality by diagnosing barriers to social justice where they intersect with schooling (arguably the most important hybrid global and local institution for remedying national inequality). Using school-based ethnography as a methodological starting point, this panel discusses how youth and intergenerational age identities limit and produce possible solutions to the differentiation of school-based citizenships. The papers on this panel examine student citizenships set in uncertain futures and precarious presents, as well as the intergenerational and often transnational strategies for overcoming barriers that stretch across the life course. The research focuses on youth, parents, and educators in Ecuador, Britain, the U.S., as well as the transnational “betweens” occupied by refugees. Building on the anthropology of youth allows these papers to highlight the importance of youth cultural practices, thus centering variation and differentiation over a search for a generically acceptable boundary between youth and adult rights and responsibilities (Bucholtz 2002). Drawing on the anthropology of education has grounded our interrogations of school-based citizenship through ethnographic analyses of how global and national directives are locally implemented and contested (Levinson 2011). And making use of the theoretical contributions of life course anthropology has highlighted the importance of situating these questions within their temporal, intergenerational, and changing biocultural contexts (e.g., Johnson-Hanks 2006, Lynch and Danely 2013). Sitting at the intersection of the anthropologies of youth, education, and the life course, this panel examines the contested belonging that youth and their families must confront while engaged with schooling.

AAA 2017 CfP – A Bad Age for Citizenship: barriers to belonging in the school years

Call for Papers: A Bad Age for Citizenship: barriers to belonging in the school years
American Anthropological Association (AAA) 2017, Washington, D.C., 29 Nov – 3 Dec

Chair/Organizer: Samantha Grace (University of Arizona)
Invited Discussant: Caroline Bledsoe (Northwestern)

Youth and families around the world face a dilemma when school is simultaneously experienced as a site for establishing youth as full citizens and as a site of social differentiation, exclusion, inequality, and danger. Responses to this dilemma are shaped by imagined futures of familial social mobility as well as histories of familial exclusion; these responses are both constrained and made possible by the intersections of local, national, global, and transnational age-based rights and responsibilities (Bledsoe and Sow 2011). Just as the AAA 2017 theme highlights the diversity of anthropological engagements with contemporary crises of inequality, this panel seeks to diagnose the barriers to social justice where they intersect with schooling (arguably the most important hybrid global and local institution for remedying national inequality). In line with that goal, this panel’s discussion revolves around the theme of school-based citizenship as informed by a life course approach. Questions on that theme include (but are not limited to):

• How do concerns about students’ futures guide family’s engagements with schooling in the present?
• How are transnational citizenships shaped by familial constellations of age?
• How do physical/bodily changes in youth and childhood impact expectations of students’ rights and responsibilities? And how do school structures and policies impact the physical bodies of students?
• What can school-based language ideologies tell us about age and belonging? And how do discourses about civic responsibilities differentiate students?
• How do concepts of “risk” shape student roles in their schools, homes, and communities?
• How do school structures produce and constrain dangers to students?
• How do (cultural and national) age identities limit and produce possible solutions to racial, gender, and class inequalities?

This panel seeks papers from the anthropologies of youth, education, and the life course that concern the differentiation of belonging and citizenship. The anthropology of youth has improved the interdisciplinary study of youth citizenship by highlighting the importance of youth cultural practices, and thus centering variation and differentiation over a search for a generically acceptable boundary between youth and adult rights and responsibilities (Bucholtz 2002). The anthropology of education has grounded interrogations of school-based citizenship through ethnographic analyses of how global and national directives are locally implemented and contested (Coe 2005, Koyama 2011). Life course anthropology has highlighted the importance of situating these questions within their temporal, intergenerational, and changing biocultural contexts (e.g., Johnson-Hanks 2006, Danely and Lynch 2013). This panel builds on the methodological strength of anthropological approaches in examining the contested belonging that youth and their families must confront while engaged with schooling.

Please e-mail proposed paper titles and abstracts (max. 250 words) to Samantha Grace (slgrace@email.arizona.edu) by 5pm AEST, 4 April. Please use the subject heading, “AAA 2017” in your e-mail. I will let you know if your abstract will be included in this panel by 10 April. If included, you will be required to upload your individual abstracts to the AAA conference portal and register for the AAA by Friday, 14 April 2017 (5pm EDT).

Guerilla Panels at #AAA2012

A lot of people attended talks at the AAAs, but I think I’m one of the few who got to see a guerilla panel. It was awesome.

As I understood it, when the AAAs got more panels than could fit in their massive program, the AALCIG and AAGE’s* sponsored panels got dropped. But, rather than accept the rejection, they opened their Board Meeting with two new scholars’ papers. Three more senior scholars served as discussants for each. And maybe it was because there were more discussants than papers, and maybe it was just ‘cuz those guys were awesome, but it was massively educational. Apart from learning a great deal about what people who really like to work with “life course” care about, here are some other important lessons:

• the AAAs are an opportunity to do the kind of anthro you care about – you can use other methods to get the word out to people, but take advantage and make it happen, regardless of the institutional support
• champagne and chocolate chip cookies go fast
• silent auctions of stuff that people in the group are interested in is a great thing to have happening in the background of a meeting (and my grad student group should totally do something similar)**

In sum, it was pretty great, and maybe I’ll try to be part of making something like that happen again next year. What were your highlights?

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* the AAA Aging And Lifecourse Interest Group and the Association of Anthropology and Gerontology
** I won a video called My Name is Julius in the silent auction. Exciting because it’s about life course (my interest) and hearing loss (my husband’s interest, because of his company, Acudora).

Networking the AAAs

Robin Reineke, Lucero Radonic, Robin Steiner, Pete Taber and Sam Grace at #AAA2012

I am one of those weird people (at least weird among anthropologists I know) who actually likes the idea of networking. There’s a certain thrill to just showing up and selling yourself to a stranger. A sort of competition with yourself that is made more exciting and somewhat less scary when there are 6,000 opportunities (one number I heard for this year’s attendance at the AAAs).

In the past, the majority of my networking has occurred in hallways and presentation rooms, meeting people I hadn’t ever heard of before – a carefree and emergent approach to adding people to my rolodex. But this year, I decided, I was going to be more targeted. I got a bunch of suggestions from peers on how to go about it:

• go to all the cash bars
• sign up for a lot of workshops
• make a list of valuable people, search for them in the program, and show up where they will be

To these I added my own instinct to work the networks I’ve already got, and so I also:

• showed up to the #AAA2012 #tweetup*
• made sure I went to former peers’ and profs’ talks
• went to an interest group meeting**

This was, overall, a success. But I think I’ve still got room for improvement. What say you people (anthro or other conference goers)? What are your networking strategies at conferences? Is there anything that makes you suck at it?

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* Rex coordinated it via @savageminds, and then I actually got to meet him, which was definitely my celebrity squee of the conference. The motivation to attend the tweetup (read: meet up of AAA attending Twitter users) was definitely augmented by the exhausting attempt to livetweet the talks I attended – but that’s another post.
** Turns out, the Aging and the Life Course Interest Group + Association for Anthropology and Gerontology Board Meeeting was secretly a guerilla panel that was the highlight of my conference – but that, too, is another post …