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An online space for anthropological engagements with North America
A project of the Society for the Anthropology of North America

COMMUNITIES IN CRISIS, 2023-2024

For this special series titled “Communities in Crisis,” Home/Field asked contributors to consider crisis as a category in their own research, from mass mediated moral panics to the intimate spaces of mutual aid. What kinds of communities are invoked, formed, or obscured by claims of crisis? How is crisis leveraged as a tool of governance or social mobilization? How do ethnographers navigate, document, and contest various iterations of crisis? The result is a series of rich and provocative text and photo essays that engage the affective and temporal dimensions of crisis. Contributions address urgent topics such as the politics of care and hunger, far right education politics, environmental degradation and military bases, the role of mutual aid as a response to austerity politics, environmental racism, climate crisis technology development, and the moral panic over trans healthcare.
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Our Name

Because many (although not all) ethnographers of North America are also from there in one sense or another, we also think about the politics and ethics of North American anthropological engagement through the idea of doing ethnography ‘at home.’ However, in our name and elsewhere, we emphatically do not suggest that 1. Anthropology’s proper home is any version of US American intellectual genealogy, geographic space, or neo-imperialist reach; or 2. That only people ‘from’ North America can or should do ethnography here. Indeed, not only do we welcome and encourage North American ethnographic engagement from diversely-situated scholars, but we also recognize and seek to foreground disciplinary contributions from the margins; from the global south; from Indigenous sovereign nations; from locations of US empire; and from historically excluded scholars. We imagine Home/Field as, in part, a space where we think about our obligations of care and experiment with accountability towards the people we learn with and from, as well as the broader spaces and places we call home.

Aim & Mission

Home/Field is a space for ethnographers of North America to contend with pressing issues through an anthropological lens, and to explore what anthropology as a discipline — methodology, theory, ethics, and more — can contribute to the imagination and enactment of a more just world. Home/Field is a project of the Society for the Anthropology of North America. We aim to publish short-form, dialogical, and multi-sensory work that exists in parallel to the long-form scholarly work found in the Journal for the Anthropology of North America to complement the research articles found in the journal.

COMMUNITIES IN CRISIS

For this special series titled “Communities in Crisis,” Home/Field asked contributors to consider crisis as a category in their own research, from mass mediated moral panics to the intimate spaces of mutual aid. What kinds of communities are invoked, formed, or obscured by claims of crisis? How is crisis leveraged as a tool of governance or social mobilization? How do ethnographers navigate, document, and contest various iterations of crisis? The result is a series of rich and provocative text and photo essays that engage the affective and temporal dimensions of crisis. Contributions address urgent topics such as the politics of care and hunger, far right education politics, environmental degradation and military bases, the role of mutual aid as a response to austerity politics, environmental racism, climate crisis technology development, and the moral panic over trans healthcare.
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