MATERIALITIES: How does this panel draw out the material features and infrastructures of place and space?
SCALES: How are space and place scaled in this panel? How are bodies cast and conceptualized?
ORGANIZATIONS: How does this panel describe the organization, meaning and valuation of space and place?
METHODOLOGIES: What methods, ethnographic and otherwise, are being used to work with and theorize space/place in this panel?
FRAMEWORKS: What theoretical/political/ethical frameworks are drawn on in this panel?
ENGAGEMENTS: Are there openings for collaboration? What (in)capacities exist for more collaborative research practices in this panel?
STORIES: What spatial stories does this panel animate and how are these stories cultivated?
KNOWLEDGES: What are the spatial knowledges embedded within or produced through the spaces and places in this panel?
PRACTICES: What are the spatial practices that (re)produce and (re)claim these spaces and places in this panel?
INFASTRUCTURES: What material and social infrastructures are vital to supporting the spaces and places in this panel?
TOXICITIES: How is toxicity at play across the problem spaces explored in this panel?
Anonymous, "Anthropology in Transit 2020 | Shared Questions", contributed by Kaitlyn Rabach, Jessica Slattery, Gina Hakim and Danielle Yorleny Tassara, Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 3 February 2020, accessed 19 April 2024. http://centerforethnography.org/content/anthropology-transit-2020-shared-questions
Critical Commentary
Structured Analytics:
In an effort to promote collaboration, PECE works with different analytics across various scales to develop a shared set of questions for people to think with and alongside each other. These sets of questions are developed in collaboration and are meant to be engaged across a variety of different works, settings, disciplines, etc. Placing these questions and responses in conversation with each other is meant to enrich our analysis and create a textured, multiperspective response to particular topics and themes. We encourage you to think with and respond to these questions throughout the conference as a way of contributing to this multiperspectival approach.
Spatial Stories:
When we began to organize this conference more than a year ago, we were inspired by a quote from geographer Doreen Massey: “Space, instead of being a flat surface, it’s more like a pincushion of a million stories.” We ran with this inspiration and titled the conference “Stories-so-Far: Spatial Knowledges and Imaginaries.”
If space is alive and inhabited by stories, this begs the question: how do we study it? How do we interpret space beyond its physicality? How can we understand space as social relations? As intimate and abstract? And as a container for “the myriad stories in which we are all living at any one moment”?
By centering space and place as critical fields of inquiry, we hope to rethink how space has been theorized within anthropology, as well as stimulate conversation about ways that theory and methods from critical cartography can be brought into our research practices. A spatial lens invites new ways of conceptualizing how space is constituted through movement, as well as new interventions for remapping how space and territory are imagined, remembered, and narrativized.
- 2020 AiT Steering Committee