Can ethnography exist absent DEI?

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

For years, the ASA ethnography caucus has held stimulating panels interrogating how to understand, bound, and challenge what is ethnography. Today, with universities across the country responding to political concerns and threats, rapidly changing policies related to DEI, it induces questions around what is missed when DEI is decentered, or erased, in the academy? Funding, presence of certain populations on staff, in faculty, and in student enrollment, policies that protect rights to protest and speak, are some regularly identified losses. What about in our scholarship and its theory and methods? Beyond a term, DEI is a concept. Like its “multiculturalism” predecessor, and “tolerance” before that, some were simply counting down the clock for the term DEI to face attacks, and it did. Particularly on its enactment and misuse (Sara Ahmed), it inadvertently worked against, and was even weaponized against, its own interests. An attack on the ideas and intentions motivating DEI, however, took many by surprise in recent years. Today, it seems efforts to address histories of marginalization and racism have been so unable to articulate themselves to protect from detractors that now the idea itself of needing to diffuse and undo marginalization and racism is under threat of being dismantled - as if they have been eradicated. How does that impact ethnography as a genre, used interdisciplinarily, rooted in spending extensive time in places and spaces, most often with marginalized people, seeking to push back against manifest and implicit colonialism? Can the interactional and socially embedded research ethnography platforms exist without the ideas behind what motivated DEI as we know it today? Taking the assault on DEI, critical race theory, and even campus activism as a part of the same machine battling what’s at the root of DEI, this panel aims to host a conversation across our ethnographic approaches to think through the answers to these questions vis-à-vis our ability to even DO ethnography under such threat.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Ben Chappell, University of Kansas

Panelists

• Karilyn M Crockett, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Deborah E Whaley, University of Kansas

• Indulata Prasad, Arizona State University-Tempe

• Nancy A Khalil, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Biographical Information

Chair: Ben Chappell is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas, where he teaches
in areas of identity, ethnography, cultural studies and critical theory. He is an ethnographer of
Mexican America, and the author of Lowrider Space (Texas 2012) and Mexican American
Fastpitch (Stanford 2021). He founded the Ethnography Caucus of the American Studies
Association and currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal for the Anthropology of
North America and co-edits the quarterly journal American Studies. He has served several times
as a visiting professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg in Germany.His
current research pivots to critical university studies, examining the interplay of different
knowledge ideologies in academia, through ethnographic research on the experiences of
individuals who move from faculty into administrative roles.

Nancy A. Khalil is an Assistant Professor in American Culture, and Core Faculty in the Program on Arab and Muslim American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her current research interests include Muslims, ethnography, higher education, racialization, and advertising. Her forthcoming book project with Stanford University Press is an ethnography on recognizing Muslim religious leadership in the US and the path towards a profession for imams. Dr. Khalil received her PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 2017 and afterwards completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University's Center for Race Indigeneity and Transnational Migration as well as the Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan. She has a Masters degree in higher education administration and her current research project is on accreditation for Muslim seminaries in the US and inequities in accreditation access facing non-Christian and non-Jewish traditions.

Karilyn Crockett’s research focuses on large-scale land use changes in twentieth century American cities and examines the social and geographic implications of structural poverty, racial formations and memory. Karilyn’s book "People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making" (UMASS Press 2018) investigates a 1960s era grassroots movement to halt urban extension of the U.S. interstate highway system and the geographic and political changes in Boston that resulted. In 2019 this book was named one of the “ten best books about Boston of the decade” by the Boston Public Library’s librarians. Karilyn holds a PhD from the American Studies program at Yale University, a Master of Science in Geography from the London School of Economics, and a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale Divinity School. She has served in a range of executive leadership roles in Boston city government; including Director of Economic Policy & Research in the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, Director of Small Business Development; and later as the City of Boston's first Chief of Equity, a Cabinet-level position. She is a professor of urban history, public policy and planning at MIT and currently leads the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to assess the regional racial wealth gap.

Indulata Prasad, Ph.D. (Anthropology) is an Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Recent publications include “Towards Dalit Ecologies” (2022) and “Caste-ing Space: Mapping the Dynamics of Untouchability in Rural Bihar India” (2021), for which she received the Bluestone Rising Scholar award. Her book titled, “We Achieved Great Feats”: Feminist and Anti-Caste Activism in the Bodhgaya Land Movement of Rural Bihar (in production, Routledge Press) is an ethnographic exploration of the longitudinal impacts of the land movements in Bihar region.

Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is an artist, curator, writer, poet, vegan blogger, and Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Kansas, where she also serves as department chair. Her research and teaching fields include American literature, history, and culture; the institutional history, theories, and methods of American and cultural studies; 18th century to contemporary cultural history, comparative ethnic studies, Black cultural studies, the digital humanities, the medical humanities, popular culture, and the visual arts.