July 12, 2024
Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities edited by Kristine E. Yarris and Whitney L. Duncan, brings together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called “accompaniment.”
Accompaniment as anthropological research and praxis troubles the boundaries of researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community to explicitly address issues of power, inequality, and the broader social purpose of the work. More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand. The volume stands as a collective conversation about possibilities for caring and decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement with im/migrant communities. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.
This edited volume brings together anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a mode of engagement inspired by feminist care ethics, decolonial methodologies, and Latin American activist traditions of acompañamiento, or accompaniment. Collectively, this volume contributes to applied anthropological scholarship by challenging prescribed boundaries and dichotomies, such as researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community member. In so doing, the chapters collected here unsettle received ways of doing anthropology and explicitly address issues of power, positionality, inequity, and the broader social purpose of our work. We also situate this work within a longer trajectory of applied, engaged, and activist anthropological research and within contemporary decolonial and feminist critiques of anthropology, which seek to redress historical inequities within the discipline and beyond. Drawing together an array of anthropologists working with im/migrant communities in various research settings and experimenting with different modes of doing and writing ethnography, the volume represents a collective conversation about possibilities—both epistemic and empirical—for caring, decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement.
Many of the authors featured in these pages originally came together in the fall of 2016, at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in Minneapolis. There, we attempted to gather our collective
responses to the rise of a xenophobic, racist, and white supremacist political moment in the United States, which culminated in the election of the forty-fifth president. Reeling in the wake of the presidential election, we organized a late-breaking AAA session to talk and strategize about how best to support our im/migrant research participants, students, friends, family members, and communities experiencing overt and rhetorical attacks on their safety, health, wellbeing, and very existence. From this initial encounter, we established the Anthropological Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees (AANIR), an informal collective of engaged anthropologists working with immigrant communities. AANIR has continued to meet regularly since our 2016 founding, acting as a space of solidarity, information-sharing, inspiration, and organization. We have shared strategies for creating sanctuary campuses and advocating for policy change; we have offered webinar series; we have organized conference sessions; we have collectively drafted op-eds, policy papers, and position statements together. In the process, we’ve offered and received care, community, and encouragement. In these ways, AANIR itself has served as a space of accompaniment that helps inspire this volume.
We are mindful of the historical specificity and the collegial solidarity that has given rise to and sustained the ethnographic engagements detailed here. At the same time, of course, troubling xenophobic, racist, and anti-immigrant tendencies have deep roots in the United States, just as efforts to build a more welcoming and inclusive society and polity also have longstanding roots in social movements for civil rights and immigrant justice in this country and beyond. Though we represent a variety of training backgrounds and perspectives, as U.S.-based anthropologists our work collectively responds to and addresses present sociopolitical conditions: entrenched inequality, heightened xenophobia, unbridled white nationalism, and the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, with its disparate impacts on marginalized and impoverished communities. We have invited all volume contributors to reflect on how the current political and historical moment has inspired and shaped our scholarship and relationships as engaged anthropologists working with im/migrant communities.
The central questions guiding this volume are: How do we understand and enact accompaniment with im/migrant communities? What does accompaniment offer our engaged anthropological work—as research modality, as practical engagement, and as a collaborative option for thinking and writing together and with our interlocutors? While we situate our approach to accompaniment historically within related theoretical concepts and methodologies, we do not intend to provide a definitive account or to foreclose avenues for thinking about accompaniment. Indeed, one commonality across the work of the authors in this volume is our willingness to engage with the uncertainties and discomfort that our shifting subjectivities as anthropologists accompanying im/ migrant communities require. We seek to draw forward these tensions, describing how and why our roles may shift from scholar to social worker, observer to friend, witness to advocate. Across the chapters, then—as contributors describe fighting deportations, engaging in social protest, writing reports and editorials, developing immigrant-friendly programs, advocating for inclusive health and social policies, and fostering systems of support for migrants—accompaniment acts as a grounding force, a being-with and standing alongside, a form of care that shifts us away from received ways of doing ethnography into more unsettled but productive spaces of possibility for solidarity and social justice.