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October 15th, 2020

Plenary Lecture

Dr. Ambika Kamath, University of California Berkeley

12:15-1:30 PM EST

A Dialectical Future for Behavioral and Evolutionary Ecology

In this talk, Dr. Kamath will describe a recent expansion in their thinking about the conceptual underpinnings of how we behavioral and evolutionary ecologists study adaptation and natural selection. Specifically, they argue that deep conceptual progress in our fields hinges, in part, on making explicit the implicit political perspectives underlying our research.  In this manner, we can make room for an understanding of nature that is rooted in a multitude of explicitly acknowledged political perspectives. Their argument weaves dialectical thinking as applied to evolutionary biology, philosophical considerations of agency, and feminist standpoint theories together with their lived experience as a practicing scientist, union worker, and person trying to make meaning in our challenging world.

Workshop

Sammantha Holder and Christina Crespo, University of Georgia

1:50-3:05 PM EST

That's What She Said: Building Networks of Support, Collaboration, and Friendship

Part story time, part workshop about creating workshops, and part reflection and discussion--this session explores how friendship and collaboration can become tools for not only combatting the isolating forces of academic research, but also for working towards change. We center collaboration as a means of troubling the boundaries between fieldwork, research, and teaching. We began organizing the events that would become Gender, the Body, and Fieldwork Across Disciplines with the goal of creating space for crucial conversations around fieldwork considerations that are not always openly discussed, often because they are deemed irrelevant or too uncomfortable for academic spaces. In this workshop, we will share stories to offer insights that we have gained through the process of working together. Through reflective activities and breakout discussions, participants will explore what collaborations means, reflect on what we as individuals bring to the table, and identify opportunities for strategically forming networks of support.

October 16th, 2020

Rachel Arney and Akanksha Sharma, University of Georgia

10:00-11:30 AM EST

“It is not simply that social factors such as gender, race, sexuality, class, age, and ability shape
our capacities and styles of movement in relation to other people, but rather that our capacities
for movement shape our bodily experiences and identities within normative social orders and
hegemonic mobility regimes.” Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age
of Extremes
, pg. 45

This session seeks to create dialogue about what it may mean to have a body that is disabled, a
body that is transforming in unanticipated ways, a body we may not understand anymore, a
body that may be frustratingly uncooperative, especially in traditional field settings and routines.
Rachel and Akanksha hope to explore the challenges faced in academia with differing bodies and how the academy can become a more accessible and transformative place to different abilities and mobilites. Through discussions on the psychological, intellectual, and physical impact of bodily limitations, they hope to create dialogue that removes stigma experienced while conducting fieldwork in a patriarchal, hegemonic landscape.

 

This interactive session will be an open and honest dialogue about past experiences, apprehensions, diagnostic journeys, and working in the field with bodies that may not cooperate in the ways we wish they did. We will also grapple with understanding autoimmunity and the realities it engages with fieldwork, and strategies for making the field specifically, and academia in general, ‘work’ for our unacknowledged, unaccustomed bodies. The session will also engage with intersectionality and positionality to examine how diverse people facing bodily limitations experience fieldwork in an often inequitable academy. Rachel and Akanksha hope to create a community for scholars who move through life in an unaccustomed way. They ask participants to come prepared to share and engage in deep conversation and activities with the goal of creating a rough outline of what fieldwork can look like moving forward.

Transforming Realities: Fieldwork in Unaccustomed/Unacknowledged Bodies

Plenary Workshop

Dr. Ambika Kamath, University of California Berkeley

11:50 AM-12:50 PM EST

Fieldwork, Identity, and Our Minds, Bodies, and Hearts

In this workshop, Dr. Kamath wants to make room for us to consider the ways in which doing fieldwork--materially engaging with the world outside our labs and offices, with the goal of producing knowledge--can be a means for discovering, creating, and expressing our core identities. Dr. Kamath will offer reflections on my own relationship to fieldwork from the intersecting perspectives of gender, community, and mental health, and offer prompts for participants to reflect on their own and in community (small break out rooms) with one another. Their hope is that we can, together, connect our minds' goals of knowledge production with how we engage with the world through our bodies and hearts.

October 17th, 2020

Organized Session

Mansi Hitesh, University of Cambridge

10:00-11:00 AM EST

Ethics, Ethnicity, and Ethnography

This session will center the experiences of international student researchers – those students who call countries other than the United States their home, but train in the American academy. Mansi intends to spark dialogue on the visibility and support structures available for ethnographers whose embodied presence in the field situates them as doubly vulnerable researchers, i.e., the transnational body in a disciplinary field centered around the reflexive imaginings of White, Anglo-American ethnographers, and the foreign ethnographer in local communities whose authority as an ethnographer is always under contestation given their ability to travel between sites and spaces. Rooted in a decolonial, transnational, and fugitive anthropology, Mansi aims to enable a revisitation of such pivotal concepts as reflexivity and accountability through the experience of the ‘ethnic’ ethnographer to offer the opportunity to delve into the challenges faced by "locals" studying the local.

Live Podcast

Jordan Chapman and Jana Carpenter, University of Georgia

11:20 AM-12:20 PM EST

B-Scientists: Gender, Body, and the Field

B-Scientists is a podcast produced by the Black Science Coalition and Institute (B-SCI). B-SCI is a 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to increasing diversity from Black and underrepresented communities in science and STEM fields. In each episode, chemist Jana Carpenter and geoarchaeologist Jordan Chapman discuss their experiences as Black scientists. In this episode, Jana and Jordan will speak to other Black scientists about their experiences in the field work. A brief Q and A session will be conducted at the end where audience members can provide questions in the chat room.

Closing Remarks

12:20-12:50 PM EST

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