Anthropological Perspectives on Law, Language, and Social Justice

Presentation Location

Willow Oak

Document Type

Event

Start Date

9-4-2022 8:30 AM

End Date

9-4-2022 10:00 AM

Description

  • Helen Regis, Session Chair
  • Helen A. Regis (Louisiana State University). Doing Oral History as Public Anthropology: Reflections on an Ongoing Partnership.
    Doing Oral History” engages undergraduate and graduate students as co-researchers in a collaborative and community-engaged oral history project. Supported by a research partnership between a faculty member, an oral history center and a non-profit archive, the course engages learners in the exploration of a festival and its community. Through oral histories with festival workers, artists, staff, volunteers, and neighbors, we contribute to expanding the public history of Jazz Fest and the social movements that have shaped it. Students learn from an indigenous carver of duck decoys, a sound engineer from New England, a Sicilian-American baker, a Latinx altar maker, a Black hip hop DJ/producer, and an Afro-Creole restaurateur. These oral histories engage complex racialized, classed, and gendered hierarchies and the challenges of making a living in a precarious tourism economy. In this paper, I reflect on how the class contributes to doing and teaching public anthropology in the South. Key words: public anthropology, community-engaged research, oral history, folklore, social justice, pedagogy.
  • Ann Kingsolver (University of Kentucky). Standing Together Against Silencing: Anthropology as Inclusive Public History in the Anti-CRT Legislative Era.
    Most southeastern states (among many other US states) have passed or have pending bills that prohibit or restrict discussions of structural racism; whiteness; and histories of – and social movements countering – discrimination based on minoritization by race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and sexuality. These bills often name specific forms of structural violence that cannot be referred to in the classroom, like environmental injustice or redlining (a well-documented form of racialized economic injustice). This powerful attempt at silencing weaponizes Critical Race Theory – without knowledge of that area of critical legal studies – to reinforce white fears of a loss of control of the public sphere. I have been documenting such legislative moves (eventually proven unconstitutional, but always doing actual harm) for several decades. In this presentation, I will discuss some ways in which I have used anthropological tools in the past year to stand with others against this kind of silencing and intimidation of educators, and a specific project I am planning to repurpose past anthropological research as a learning resource for public schools in rural Kentucky. Since anthropological projects have most often documented minoritized voices and perspectives, over time, I suggest that there is potential for us to contribute practical resources for use by public educators in teaching creatively about local history in diverse, equitable, inclusive ways.
  • Robin Riner (Marshall University) and John Conley (UNC-Chapel Hill Law School). From practice to ideology: Rethinking engaged research in language and law.
    Research in language and law from fields including linguistics, anthropology, and sociology largely focuses on documenting and critiquing the linguistic practices used in legal contexts. It does not often provide perspectives on the language ideologies that inform, shape, and make possible such linguistic practices. This paper argues that engaged language and law research involves more than demonstrating how language practices unfold in legal contexts. It also involves working toward a shift in ontological perspectives on language, that is, how one defines language, how they believe it to be structured and to operate in the world. This paper draws on our varied research and professional experiences as trial lawyer and law professor (Conley) and linguistic anthropologist (Riner), providing examples of how fundamental ideas about what language is and how it works lead to unjust legal practice. For example, we examine how jurors’ judgments of witnesses’ credibility and intelligence are often based in racialized, locally-situated ideologies about what constitutes “correct” language use. The belief that Standard English is a universally available, neutral code that can facilitate the “objectivity” of legal processes – common among legal professionals – elides the limitations many face accessing the standard dialect and ignores the fact that we both see language and hear race (Rosa 2019), thus negating the possibility that any language use is neutral. We argue that identifying and bringing to practitioners’ awareness the deep-seated language ideologies that undergird their practices is a step towards systemic legal change. Key words: language and law, language ideologies, legal anthropology.
  • Heidi Kelley and Ken Betsalel (University of North Carolina, Asheville). “You Used to Speak Like Us”: Being Aphasic in a Spanish Galician Community and Affrilachian Neighborhood Elder Club.
    You used to speak like us,” scolded a Galician friend. “Don’t throw that cornbread away,” admonished one member of the Affrilachian neighborhood elder club. In this paper we explore how being disabled and being aphasic both opens anthropological insights and adds responsibilities to our participants. When one of us started our fieldwork in a Spanish Galician village as a young graduate student, the proximate distance in age and health was relatively close to what villagers perceived as “normal” time. When this American anthropologist had a catastrophic stroke in her 40s, leaving her speechless and immobile, her disability could be seen as another disruption to our village participants. In our fieldwork with an Affrialachian neighborhood elder club, the ethnographer’s disabled body and broken speech, could be seen as a point of convergence in which the horizons of difference can be bridged. Hence, time spent visiting and staying close, allowed for both of the ethnographers to be brought in, to learn that “we don’t throw anything away,” not cornbread, not relationships. Both our fieldwork experiences, refracted through the lens of disability provide the same conclusion: our Galician and Affrilachian participants perceive disability to be just another rupture. But with that realization, comes an urgent responsibility to render our fieldwork more poetically. People do not live in sequenced time alone, but storied time that is made up of non-sequential chapters. Hence, human life is more like poetry than the well-ordered ethnography might suggest--yoking disparate experiences together into a fractured whole. Key words: aphasia, disruption, disability, elders, poetry, visual anthropology.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 
Apr 9th, 8:30 AM Apr 9th, 10:00 AM

Anthropological Perspectives on Law, Language, and Social Justice

Willow Oak

  • Helen Regis, Session Chair
  • Helen A. Regis (Louisiana State University). Doing Oral History as Public Anthropology: Reflections on an Ongoing Partnership.
    Doing Oral History” engages undergraduate and graduate students as co-researchers in a collaborative and community-engaged oral history project. Supported by a research partnership between a faculty member, an oral history center and a non-profit archive, the course engages learners in the exploration of a festival and its community. Through oral histories with festival workers, artists, staff, volunteers, and neighbors, we contribute to expanding the public history of Jazz Fest and the social movements that have shaped it. Students learn from an indigenous carver of duck decoys, a sound engineer from New England, a Sicilian-American baker, a Latinx altar maker, a Black hip hop DJ/producer, and an Afro-Creole restaurateur. These oral histories engage complex racialized, classed, and gendered hierarchies and the challenges of making a living in a precarious tourism economy. In this paper, I reflect on how the class contributes to doing and teaching public anthropology in the South. Key words: public anthropology, community-engaged research, oral history, folklore, social justice, pedagogy.
  • Ann Kingsolver (University of Kentucky). Standing Together Against Silencing: Anthropology as Inclusive Public History in the Anti-CRT Legislative Era.
    Most southeastern states (among many other US states) have passed or have pending bills that prohibit or restrict discussions of structural racism; whiteness; and histories of – and social movements countering – discrimination based on minoritization by race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and sexuality. These bills often name specific forms of structural violence that cannot be referred to in the classroom, like environmental injustice or redlining (a well-documented form of racialized economic injustice). This powerful attempt at silencing weaponizes Critical Race Theory – without knowledge of that area of critical legal studies – to reinforce white fears of a loss of control of the public sphere. I have been documenting such legislative moves (eventually proven unconstitutional, but always doing actual harm) for several decades. In this presentation, I will discuss some ways in which I have used anthropological tools in the past year to stand with others against this kind of silencing and intimidation of educators, and a specific project I am planning to repurpose past anthropological research as a learning resource for public schools in rural Kentucky. Since anthropological projects have most often documented minoritized voices and perspectives, over time, I suggest that there is potential for us to contribute practical resources for use by public educators in teaching creatively about local history in diverse, equitable, inclusive ways.
  • Robin Riner (Marshall University) and John Conley (UNC-Chapel Hill Law School). From practice to ideology: Rethinking engaged research in language and law.
    Research in language and law from fields including linguistics, anthropology, and sociology largely focuses on documenting and critiquing the linguistic practices used in legal contexts. It does not often provide perspectives on the language ideologies that inform, shape, and make possible such linguistic practices. This paper argues that engaged language and law research involves more than demonstrating how language practices unfold in legal contexts. It also involves working toward a shift in ontological perspectives on language, that is, how one defines language, how they believe it to be structured and to operate in the world. This paper draws on our varied research and professional experiences as trial lawyer and law professor (Conley) and linguistic anthropologist (Riner), providing examples of how fundamental ideas about what language is and how it works lead to unjust legal practice. For example, we examine how jurors’ judgments of witnesses’ credibility and intelligence are often based in racialized, locally-situated ideologies about what constitutes “correct” language use. The belief that Standard English is a universally available, neutral code that can facilitate the “objectivity” of legal processes – common among legal professionals – elides the limitations many face accessing the standard dialect and ignores the fact that we both see language and hear race (Rosa 2019), thus negating the possibility that any language use is neutral. We argue that identifying and bringing to practitioners’ awareness the deep-seated language ideologies that undergird their practices is a step towards systemic legal change. Key words: language and law, language ideologies, legal anthropology.
  • Heidi Kelley and Ken Betsalel (University of North Carolina, Asheville). “You Used to Speak Like Us”: Being Aphasic in a Spanish Galician Community and Affrilachian Neighborhood Elder Club.
    You used to speak like us,” scolded a Galician friend. “Don’t throw that cornbread away,” admonished one member of the Affrilachian neighborhood elder club. In this paper we explore how being disabled and being aphasic both opens anthropological insights and adds responsibilities to our participants. When one of us started our fieldwork in a Spanish Galician village as a young graduate student, the proximate distance in age and health was relatively close to what villagers perceived as “normal” time. When this American anthropologist had a catastrophic stroke in her 40s, leaving her speechless and immobile, her disability could be seen as another disruption to our village participants. In our fieldwork with an Affrialachian neighborhood elder club, the ethnographer’s disabled body and broken speech, could be seen as a point of convergence in which the horizons of difference can be bridged. Hence, time spent visiting and staying close, allowed for both of the ethnographers to be brought in, to learn that “we don’t throw anything away,” not cornbread, not relationships. Both our fieldwork experiences, refracted through the lens of disability provide the same conclusion: our Galician and Affrilachian participants perceive disability to be just another rupture. But with that realization, comes an urgent responsibility to render our fieldwork more poetically. People do not live in sequenced time alone, but storied time that is made up of non-sequential chapters. Hence, human life is more like poetry than the well-ordered ethnography might suggest--yoking disparate experiences together into a fractured whole. Key words: aphasia, disruption, disability, elders, poetry, visual anthropology.