Scholars across disciplines have wrestled with how to think, write, speak and teach about the Covid-19 pandemic–particularly the conditions of its emergence, its unevenly distributed harms, and its implications for the future. Researchers and lay people alike often latch onto the concept of  “crisis” to emphasize the exigencies of the pandemic and its capacity to throw into relief the impact of climate degradation, anti-Black violence, religious and ethnic persecution, authoritarianism, failed infrastructures, and so on. Approaching these phenomena as “crisis” re-invigorates ongoing debates about inequality and power within and outside the academy.

However, when “crisis” is ongoing and continuous, what analytical value does the term have for grasping the complexities of social suffering? Moreover, when conditions such as poverty, precarity, and illness are presented as crisis, “is it not the case that certain questions become possible while others are foreclosed?” (Roitman 2014). Following Roitman, we seek to move beyond “crisis” and pursue more meaningful and constructive language for addressing present conditions of “stratified liveability” (Wahlburg and Burke, 2021).

Scholars engaged with such questions offer a rich array of concepts to think with and build on:

• Max Liboiron (2021) works with an ethics of incommensurable values (“one that digs into difference and maintains that difference while also trying to stay in good relations” [137]) and protocols (“protocols reinforce and perpetuate what is meaningful and right in an activity … they are orienting technologies, pointing us toward certain futures that are good and right and true, rather than merely describing a series of actions or processes” [122]). 
• Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt (2019) offer the patchy anthropocene (“the uneven conditions of more-than-human livability in landscapes increasingly dominated by industrial forms” [186]), which can be animated in several different ways: observing landscape structures (patterns of human and nonhuman assemblages), acknowledging catastrophe while imagining possibility, and approaching patches as sites for understanding intersectional inequalities among human among other ways.
• In her “Notes From a Fever Dream,” Amy Moran-Thomas uses the embodied experience of COVID-19’s neurological symptoms to chart the imbricated and dissonant precedents that manifest in this moment (2021). She writes of the experience of feeling “truth slipping from all sides,” of “fact-checking with broken tools” (16), about “the delirium factory” of the American dream (19). “Maybe it’s a symptom of delirium when everything feels like a metaphor of body and country, or a concretization of the world we have made” (21). 

These approaches offer a starting point for questions we (the conference planners: Upuli DeSilva, Margaux Fisher, Emily Jorgenson, Tenzing Wangdak) hold close as we grapple with the challenges of building research programs and projects. We raise these questions in hopes of engaging collaboratively and constructively with others across inter-disciplinary spaces: 

• How can we, as graduate students, reorient and ground ongoing academic practices in this moment to move ethically through it (Ralph 2021)? 
• What language(s) can facilitate moving beyond “crisis”? And why do both lay people and experts continue to hang onto “crisis”?
• What kind of orientations and protocols open up the conditions of possibility for more equitable and just futures? What theories, methods and modalities inform and compose these orientations and protocols (Max Liboiron 2021)?
• What does an ethics of working with incommensurable values look like on the ground? How do researchers across disciplines grapple with the contradictions and injustices in which their work is embedded? 
• How might epistemological pluralism open up academic orientations towards certain futures? 
• What needs to be left behind in order to create better futures? What refusals and solidarities can allow for hope out of the wreckage?

A series of roundtables with an emphasis on collaborative theorizing and extended discussion will be held around themes identified in submitted works. Themes may include but are not limited to: engaged/experimental ethnography, knowledge production and praxis, epistemological pluralism, genres of justice (social, racial, environmental, etc.), anti-colonial and feminist research methods, Black radical tradition, resistance, refusal, open access, collaboration, community-based participatory research, etc. We welcome and encourage submissions beyond the traditional paper format, such as workshops, performances, films, and other creative endeavors. 

This call is inter-disciplinary and open to those from various fields, including but not limited to: anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, history, geography, comparative literature, Black studies, area studies, gender and women’s studies, digital humanities, and any other fields of inquiry relevant to the themes described above.

 

Submission details

Abstract submission of no more than 300 words should be submitted by February 4, 2022 . Please include your name, affiliation, 3-5 keywords, a concise description of your work, and a short biosketch. We welcome submissions from Masters and PhD students at all stages of their graduate careers. Conference activities all take place on Friday, April 8th. Events will primarily be held via Zoom, though refreshments and socials will be offered on the UC Irvine campus if circumstances permit. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by February 25, 2022.

For additional information about events and updates please contact us at anthropologyintransit@gmail.com.