If we acknowledge that most everything is political, what then does it mean to do “political” anthropology? And if law is a social and economic construct that, in turn, constructs society and the economy in profoundly contested (and thus political) ways, what then does it mean to do “legal” anthropology? At a time when decolonial and abolitionist voices are duly challenging both “politics as usual” and “the law” as such that it has produced, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review is co-hosting this roundtable with Board Members of the Association of Feminist Anthropology as a way to open up a conversation about political and legal anthropology in the current moment, asking: How are we understanding political and legal anthropology in this historical moment? Who is automatically included in this conversation, and who is excluded? What broader issues of disciplinary unevenness and stratifications of voice do these inclusions and exclusions reveal? How can we expand what is meant by political and legal anthropology, and build tangible connections with other fields within anthropology? Concerned that some AAA colleagues who are doing political and legal anthropological scholarship do not naturally see PoLAR as a space for them, the aim of this conversation is to continue, in person, discussions that have been taking place within PoLAR’s editorial collective (past and present) around diversification and internationalization of the image and content of political and legal anthropology reflected in the journal’s pages, global citational justice, and multilingual access, among other topics. We invite colleagues in a range of anthropological subfields to strategize with us the appropriate solutions to these ongoing challenges that are so current in our time. This roundtable will be complemented by a mentoring workshop inviting scholars who have not yet published with PoLAR to submit their work for supportive feedback from the editors, editorial board members, authors who have previously published with PoLAR, and volunteer members of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

Presenters

Sindiso Mnisi Weeks
University of Massachusetts, Boston

Georgina Ramsay
University of Delaware

Gina Ulysse
University of California, Santa Cruz

Victor Castillo de Macedo
University of São Paulo

Smoki Musaraj
Ohio University

Sahan Ghosh
National University of Singapore

Jacqueline Zhenru LIN
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Carna Brkovic
University of Goettingen

António Tomás
University of Johannesburg

Roslynn Ang
Independent Scholar