The intangible in developing literacies: Reflections of an anthropologist becoming-with research on psychosocial immigration reports

• In Event: Diffractive Research on Situated, Historical, Embodied Semiosis in Accounts of Lifespan Becoming-With and Worlding

Abstract

In the context of US immigration adjudication, mental health care professionals (MHCPs) are increasingly being asked to write reports based on forensic mental health evaluations for individuals seeking humanitarian-based legal relief. Psychosocial immigration reports are valued by legal professionals as a form of evidence that can make an applicant’s deservingness legible to immigration adjudicators. Use of these reports has expanded without well-established standards or expectations from professional organizations or reviewing institutions (e.g., US Citizen and Immigration Services). My doctoral research aims to describe the highly variable emerging semiotic genre systems of immigration reports and the diverse communities of professionals responding to calls for MHCP training and guidance on writing to “immigration” and to judges seeking more “objective” evidence. In this paper, I draw on data from interviews, observations of training and mentorship spaces, and textual analysis of reports alongside my fieldnotes to reflect on my experiences both studying the semiotic genre systems of immigration reports and developing literacies as researcher/analyst/academic.

Responding to representational research methodologies and social scientific knowledge production that aligns with positivist ideas of rigor and “objectivity”, feminist approaches have argued for embodied objectivity, situated knowledges, and diffractive methodologies (e.g., Haraway 1988, 2016; Barad 2007). Anthropological approaches to ethnography have increasingly valued immersive relational practices, where researchers’ closeness and emotional engagement might support deeper understandings (e.g., Csordas 1993; Behar 1996; Desjarlais 2003; Rosaldo 2017). Explicitly articulated flexibilities in research designs and methods for how to factor in emotions and support the researcher/analyst becoming critically engaged remain elusive. Reflecting on mentoring an ethnographer through their doctoral fieldwork, Malkki refers to the intangible quality of anthropological work as “the anthropological sensibility” (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007). Anthropologists struggle to articulate this sensibility to publics and to instruct others on core elements of practicing anthropology that simply go without saying or must be learned through experience (e.g., Cerwonka and Malkki 2007; Fassin 2017). Moving beyond reflexivity and acknowledgements of positionality is key to resisting reproduction of inequities and diffractively making visible the intra-active character of knowledge production (e.g., Berry et al 2017; Günel, Varma, and Wantanabe 2020).

Designing and conducting my doctoral research during and following a global pandemic challenged the methodological ideologies that had been instrumental to my training and my understanding of what was needed to develop an anthropological sensibility. Can immersive ethnographic research be conducted virtually? Is it anthropology? The MHCPs I was talking to during the early stages of this project also discussed similar tensions present in their work – contradictory therapeutic/evaluative practices, the need to establish expert positionality in a new-to-them role, and the struggle to design/teach optimum writing practices for supporting successful applications for humanitarian-based legal relief. Both they and I were operating in contexts without clear guidance on what was needed and what might achieve success. Thus, I focus here on these parallel trajectories of the intangible character of becoming-with specialized literacies and semiotic genre systems as a generative, diffractive, affective, intra-active entanglement.

Author

• Anna Prior, University of Chicago