Programs in Anthropology are excited to announce that we will have students, faculty, and alumni presenting at the 2025 American Ethnological Society (AES) Conference. The AES Conference, to be held at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from March 20–22, 2025, invites scholars to consider whether archipelagos and “archipelagic thinking” can aid us to analyze pressing global challenges across cultures, geographies, climates, disciplines, and methodologies.
Please see the following information for the upcoming AES presentations from TC Anthropology students, faculty, and alumni:
Panel: Intersecting Isles: Transnational Archipelagos and Diasporic Exchange
Friday, March 21st, 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Presenter: Fernanda Vasconcelos Dias, Anthropology & Education Ph.D. Candidate
Paper: Archipelagic Thinking and the Afro-Brazilian Experience in the NYC Metro Area
This paper examines Afro-Brazilian immigration to New York City and Newark, NJ, focusing on race relations and the lived experience of race as a social construct. While Brazil and the U.S. share histories of slavery and Black intellectual exchange, their distinct racial formations shape how Afro-Brazilian immigrants navigate identity and politics in the NYC metro area. This paper discusses: How do Afro-Brazilian immigrants experience race and race relations, and how do their understandings shift upon migration? Engaging with the conference’s theme of archipelagic formations, this research conceptualizes Afro-Brazilian immigrants as part of a social and ideological “archipelago,” shaped by transnational flows of racial discourse, culture, and labor. Like physical archipelagos that balance connection and fragmentation, these immigrants traverse multiple racial systems, carrying Brazilian racial ideologies while adapting to the U.S.’s rigid racial binary. This fluid negotiation reflects the ruptures and continuities central to archipelagic thinking. Additionally, this study examines the political economies of migration within an archipelagic framework, positioning the NYC metro area as a key node in Black mobility and labor networks. By incorporating ethnographic perspectives on education and work, it fills a gap in scholarship on the contemporary African diaspora from Brazil in the U.S. Ultimately, this research highlights how Afro-Brazilian immigrants’ experiences of race contribute to broader discussions on sovereignty, social belonging, and the transnational reconfiguration of racial meanings.
Panel: Archipelagic Resistance and Solidarity: Indigenous and Decolonial Methods
Friday, March 21st, 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Presenter: Amina Tawasil, Faculty Lecturer
Paper: Refusal as “Romanticization” and/or Decolonization: Accounting for Difficult Fieldwork Situations in the Islamic Republic of Iran
The 1979 Revolution created unprecedented opportunities for religiously conservative women to participate in building a Shi'i revolutionary state through expanded access to women's seminaries. I lived in Iran for 15 months to explore what being loyal to this project looked like for them. My interlocutors included five Supreme Leader students and over twenty Basij paramilitary members. While my book, "Paths Made by Walking" (September 2024), focuses on the women's educative experiences, I chose not to include my challenges conducting fieldwork. As part of my anthropological training, I also did not concern myself with writing about their motivations since these are assumed in social interactions. These methodological decisions represent a conscious step toward decolonizing ethnographic practice and reinforcing archipelagic thinking, or what we have in common with those who have been historically Othered. Yet in avoiding these, I risk appearing to romanticize their participation in a state known for its repressive practices. In this paper I ask: How do we navigate the tension between decolonial methodological commitments and what critics dismiss as "romanticization" when writing about fieldwork situations? I challenge the reductive category of "romanticization," which inadequately captures the complexities of centering marginalized experiences, particularly when these align with state power. I look to decolonial scholars Harrison (1991) and Biehl (2007). Building on Tuck and Yang's (2014) proposition to "make settler colonial metanarrative the object of social science research" to prioritize the perspectives of targeted communities, I consider how this might extend to state actors like the seminarian women in Iran.
Panel: Performance as a Site of Inquiry and Exploration
Friday, March 21st, 1:30PM - 2:45 PM
Presenter: Skylar Kaat, Anthropology & Education Ph.D. Candidate
Paper: Echoes of a Language: Performing to Speak Mongolian in Inner Mongolia, China
On a scorching hot afternoon, in a community center in Inner Mongolia, China, twelve modestly-dressed elderly people come together to learn Classical Mongolian. It was the language of their parents and grandparents, but one that they never had the chance to learn due to over seventy years of state-led assimilationist agenda promoting Mandarin Chinese (Curdt-Christiansen and Gao 2021). One might imagine that they strive towards fluency or hope their dedication ignites a broader revitalization for future generations.
However, from six months of preliminary research, I found that learning Mongolian in their case has shifted in meaning from mastery of the language to its use in performance (Bauman 1993) and as a performative act (Austin 1962). The elderlies focus their meetings on cultivating the feel of speaking Mongolian, through repeating basic phrases and singing Mongolian songs to tourists, without understanding most of the Mongolian they utter. What can we learn from a case where language survival does not seek fluency or revival in the strict sense, but is about learning to do things with it in public to ensure its presence endures without threatening the dominant language, Mandarin Chinese.
This project rethinks language continuity: In what forms beyond simple restoration to daily conversational use can language survival manifest? Like an archipelago—where isolated islands remain socially connected to the mainland—Mongolian persists in fragmented yet meaningful ways. This project foregrounds language survival, rather than revitalization, as an important notion in anthropological studies of minority languages.
Panel: Performance as a Site of Inquiry and Exploration
Friday, March 21st, 1:30PM - 2:45 PM
Presenter: Reid Pierce, Anthropology & Education Ed.M. Alum
Paper: From Movement to Movement: Shifting Political Subjectivities on the Dance Floor
Johan Andersson (2022) has described Berlin’s queer nightlife spaces as archipelagic; rather than being huddled together in a ‘gayborhood,’ they are instead scattered across the city, taking root in neglected, in-between spaces. This could easily be extended to a global scale with DJs, promoters, and ravers traveling to make music and dance on floors scattered around the world. As such, dance floors are spaces where people and ideas intermingle, and novel social formations can be explored. How do dance floors facilitate these exchanges and what possibilities are there for building solidarity? In this paper, I build on research in queer nightlife studies, geography, and political anthropology to argue that the affective states created by the combination of sound and movement can be leveraged towards shifting political subjectivities. I draw on fieldwork conducted in New York’s dance music scenes in 2023 and 2024 as well as some of my own experiences on dance floors in Berlin and Riga, LV to show how DJs, organizers, and others use the tools at their disposal to encourage shifting political orientations.
Panel: Flash Ethnography Panel
Saturday, March 22nd, 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Presenter: Suma Cheru, Anthropology & Education Ed.M Student
Paper: Counterspaces of and with Acompañamiento for Unaccompanied Im/migrant Youth: Countering Restriction Through Humanizing Pedagogies in Office of Refugee and Resettlement (ORR)
This paper explores the pedagogical ethos inside Office of Refugee and Resettlement (ORR) facilities in the United States. Drawing on pilot summer 2024 ethnographic
fieldwork with five former ORR teachers in the Rio Grande Valley, TX region, I demonstrate how ORR's formal physical constraint and limited mobility policies hinder humanizing education for unaccompanied im/migrant youth in detention. Transcending the formal educational apparatus, however, I also highlight how some teachers were effective in fostering educational 'counterspaces' (Shirazi, 2018) of 'acompañamiento,' a philosophy that rests upon empathy to facilitate community-building, place-making, and solidarity (Sepulveda, 2011) in nonformal learning contexts. These 'counterspaces,' or safe spaces, were more prominent outside the formal schooling apparatus. This paper seeks to complicate formal education within carceral-like learning spaces by illuminating the liberatory possibilities of nonformal 'counterspaces.'