Emergent Conversation 28

This essay is part of the series “Solidarity for Anthropologists”
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 28

By SJ Dillon

I started putting this series together at the end of 2023, as American Anthropological Association (AAA) members debated holding and attending the 2024 annual meeting in Tampa, Florida. In the past, the locations of AAA meetings have been understood as decisions tied to politics, and refusing particular spaces was understood as a kind of legitimate political praxis. AAA meetings have historically been moved to avoid crossing the picket line of striking hotel workers, sites have been rejected to avoid non-union hotels, and debates have been not uncommon. Florida, at that time, had recently passed quite extreme anti-trans legislation, laws which even now remain some of the most oppressive in the country. In particular, Florida made it legal to discriminate against trans people accessing medical care, making an emergency in the state while trans and unfamiliar with the medical landscape of the local area (i.e. which hospitals and doctors are safe) potentially life threatening. There were concerns about going to Florida, there were concerns that the AAA would be bankrupted should the meeting be moved, there were objections to the idea of boycotting the state, but at the heart of the discussion was the question of solidarity. What counts as solidarity? Who should we be in solidarity with and how should that solidarity be expressed?

Many anthropologists’ discussions of solidarity at that time seemed to be centered around particular kinds of information performances. In these discussions, solidarity seemed to me to emanate from scholarly articles published by university presses (especially if they had high impact numbers) and conference presentations (particularly when presented at the AAA; solidarity was framed by different sides of the conversation as both attending the AAAs and refusing to). Further, anthropologists as individuals were framed as enacting solidarity in the role of consumers, through spending money at minority-owned businesses; capitalism itself became a central vehicle of solidarity.

Looking back with fresh eyes, I think part of the 2023-2024 angst around what solidarity and activism means (and questions of who was really acting in solidarity and who was not) was embedded in a larger, structural problem. Solidarity as a prestige-oriented academic practice had become anthropology’s answer to the perennial, anxiety-inducing question of why our field matters. Anthropology (cultural) matters, one answer goes, because ethnography itself is a form of solidarity. Thus, our professional practices become political practices, solidarity praxis. Academic papers and conferences (and money spent therein), within this argument, become a central method by which this solidarity gains audience eyes and achieves success.[1] In other words, our shared quest to produce the kinds of scholarly performances demanded by universities in order to maintain our positions and economic stability also becomes the method by which we achieve solidarity with marginalized groups who host our anthropological fieldwork.[2] This is a heady argument.

However, to dismiss this idea of ethnography and solidarity entirely out of hand is suspect to me too. Many of the topics targeted for removal from the academy by the second Trump regime’s war on wokeness are central concerns of anthropological ethnographers striving toward solidarity. In fact, the crackdown on wokeness has squarely targeted our discipline. This aggressive censorship drive betrays the importance of our field and other social sciences, not our insignificance. Anthropological studies of anti-imperialism, labor organizing movements, Indigenous sovereignty movements, social movements for Black liberation, anti-coloniality, gender identity, sexuality and sexual practices etc. have seen their grants canceled and their lead investigators fired. Graduate students, especially international graduate students involved in student organizing, have also been dismissed, deported, and attacked; meanwhile, the scope of graduate work has been severely restricted in some university systems. Professors across the humanities and social sciences are losing their jobs, being investigated, failing tenure, and programs are having to cut back on students, postdocs, and future tenure lines. I wonder if these restrictions demonstrate that the most significant political challenge anthropology poses is perhaps in the classroom, not in scholarly publications. Indeed, approaching pedagogy as solidarity has a long and famous history (hooks 1994; Freire 2005 [1970]). More recently, Aimee Cox (2018) has described a mode of ethnography-based teaching that is particularly threatening to any regime interested in the university as a space of compliance and indoctrination. Cox’s approach teaches students to engage in ethnography fundamentally as solidarity-building between students, people, and organizations both inside and outside of the academy, in what she calls unconditional relationality. This approach destabilizes hierarchies that are propagandized as normal and natural, and “is rooted in the belief that we are responsible for and accountable to one another and, thus, that the knowledge we produce must be produced collectively in order to engender actions with any real transformative potential” (Cox 2018, n.p.)

Thus, I am not wholly convinced by my own critique of solidarity within what could be construed as typical academic scholarly labor roles. Ethnography, I think, can be a form of solidarity. In fact, I think the fundamental conceit of ethnography practiced today is that it is a form of solidarity.[3] Good ethnography is founded in the assumption that people are the experts of their own lives, and that if we talk to different people, we will and do learn something significant about the world, that we apprehend theories worth knowing and sharing.[4] By leaning away from statistics which obscure people and toward the material workings of lives in the everyday, cultural anthropologists record and retell important and often dismissed stories of what it means to make life from positions of powerlessness. In the mode of connection I am gesturing to, ethnographers witness in the sense that Deborah Thomas describes: “[w]itnessing, as implied here, is neither straight-forward nor unmediated; rather, it is ambivalent and relationally complex” (2019, 2), and works to “produce the internal shifts in consciousness that radiate from one to another in unexpected and necessarily nonlinear ways, and that lead to lasting, world-changing transformations” (2019, 3). Ethnography becomes a call to change, one that makes ethnographers be different, live differently, and do differently. Ethnography itself becomes a vehicle for action.

In 2026, as conference location debate has been handly eclipsed by the new regime’s plans for higher education, I have continued to reflect on solidarity and anthropological practice. I wanted to learn what other models for solidarity exist within our profession, especially among anthropologists who were thinking centrally about practices of solidarity. Thus, a call for this series was born.[5]

The concept of solidarity we have come to know today was originally used in French legal spaces and emerged from Roman law to refer to a type of joint indebtedness (Hayward 1959). The term was then adopted by French philosophers in the 19^th century as they reckoned with and theorized Marxism as a social practice (Sangiovanni and Viehoff 2023). Solidarity was brought into academic usage by French sociologists, such as Auguste Comte (2024 [1839]) and Émile Durkheim (1933 [1893]), and remains a critical political and social concept, particularly among labor and socialist organizers, though Black feminist theorists have also long discussed solidarity, both its possibilities and its limits (Combahee River Collective 1977; Hill-Collins 2008; hooks 2000; Lorde 1984). In the digital era, social media claims of solidarity proliferate, and are reminiscent of the academic solidarity I described introducing this essay: solidarity is a discursive action, with posting taking the place of academic writing. Recent social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, Extinction Rebellion, and the Movement 4 Black Lives, have revitalized the theory and praxis of solidarity as a central mode of relating across difference using more direct actions. The call that developed out of my thinking included specific questions, which I put to you as well:

• What does solidarity look like in the present moment within the field of anthropology and academia writ large?
• What historical understandings of solidarity have anthropologists encountered and how does prior work influence current approaches to the concept?
• How are different scholars and communities approaching solidarity as practice and as theory?
• How are anthropological interlocutors understanding, mobilizing, and embodying solidarity within their own lives?
• Is solidarity an appropriate concept for questions of resistance?
• Is solidarity a practice that is possible within academic professions?
• How are practices of solidarity, such as mutual aid and others, criminalized and how does this impact networks of care and support?

In 2026, the question for students of why anthropology (as opposed to any other field), to paraphrase Aimee Cox (2018), is ever more pressing (Santos 2025). The deep-seated anxiety about answering this question (whether there is an answer, perhaps) underscores our other discussions and disagreements about what it means to be in solidarity. As anthropology majors drop (alongside other social science and humanities majors), while business, hard science, and other career-track majors rise, there is a sneaking question about where anthropology matters (and even more frightening for soon-to-be and recently-made-PhDs, whether it does at all). How do we fit within the university system intent on making money and placating the wealthy, when we don’t seem to do that very well? How do we fit in a political environment when we are not often called in to television and op-ed writings like our sociologist, economist, and political science colleagues? Anthropological theory doesn’t seem to be quite as titillating as women’s studies and film studies (at least on social media), and our ideas don’t seem to become common parlance the way we see from various humanities disciplines.

What do we offer and why do we matter? is, I think, the question anthropology as a field is grappling with at this current time, while simultaneously refusing to fully engage, through our conversations about conference sites. I think solidarity offers a compelling answer, not in the sense of an article written in a journal (or on an academic website such as this) or a presentation given in the finest hotel meeting room this side of the Mississippi, but as something more socially embedded. I believe anthropology offers the world something interesting about what it means to be in society, and we offer students (and perhaps people on and off social media) the skills to grapple with the social as a lived thing, rather than a statistical or textual object. Cultural anthropologists are not quite the same as literary theorists (although we cite them and use some of those methods) nor are we number-crunchers necessarily (although we do some statistical analysis). We are ethnographers, and I think ethnography done well almost always speaks to some kind of solidarity, to some kind of material, social, and ethical investment and orientation towards the world.[6] It influences how one shows up in the world, how one teaches, how one moves and with whom one moves. It shows that no conversation is as simple as it seems, and that discussions across difference and plural perspectives are important and possible. In these increasingly precarious times, solidarity, or witnessing, or unconditional relationality, or the erotic, or the many names by which this relation-building mode goes by, is what we can give each other. Ethnography is one way to approach what it means to be in community, which is the foundation of solidarity at the end of the day. In theory perhaps, the tool is with us.

Each scholar in this editorial run offers an angle on how they are thinking about solidarity, and all of them offer methods far beyond ethnography as a simple answer (though I hope I have complicated that simple answer a bit). Whitney Russell, a feminist anthropologist with significant labor organizing expertise, challenges us to consider anthropology as a field a site of labor. We are workers, with all the rights and the promises of solidarity that this brings, and she introduces some ways anthropologists can and do build solidarity within the academy.

Linda Green steps out of the academy and describes teaching within incarceration facilities in the US as a form of solidarity, building spaces of hope, bearing witness to the endless violence of our systems, and knowing people in the intimate space of the classroom. For her, teaching is a space of profound solidarity, one worth reckoning with.

Sana Malik Noon brings us to the in-between of fieldwork and academics. She pushes us to think through friendship as a site of being alongside, as a mode of knowing and being known, as well as being misrecognized. She asks what we can do with the limits of friendship, the limits of ethnography and solidarity, when we are all just people living in the incompleteness of knowing one another.

Samira Marty takes us into solidarity itself as a site of research, questioning how commemorative practices of revolutionaries are evoked within solidarity movements, and how the language people use to construct identities for themselves and each other are strategies to create solidarity across and despite state practices of control.

Finally, an afterword by Jennifer Curtis considers the pieces in light of new forms of solidarity emerging in the U.S. under conditions of state terror. Who we build solidarity with and where we join them are questions of grave concern; but far more important than who and when, is how we build power by engaging collectively in the practice of politics.

I offer these pieces in conversation not to prescribe any particular position nor to call for a particular intervention in the field of anthropology. Regardless of whether these essays speak to you, we as a field we need to engage with the question of what anthropology offers, and we should come up with good answers before others impose a verdict. Solidarity is a compelling answer to what we offer. Solidarity is an act that is often uncomfortable, nuanced, inconvenient, and complex. It requires unconditional relationality, as Cox tells us (2018), and world-changing transformations, as Thomas tells us (2019). To fully engage with solidarity as a reason why anthropology matters does require a re-thinking of where we put our energy and how we use our knowledge. As Marty and Shafafi (2024) put, we must engage in acts of translation and acts of knowledge construction that do not garner prestige. We must take action outside the university classroom, outside the academic journal, outside the conference presentation, outside the dissertation. Solidarity as an answer requires ongoing and active commitment to something beyond our careers and universities, and does not, in my experience, garner academic prestige all that often. Nonetheless, I think solidarity is at once a goal, a practice, and a question worth thinking through for every anthropologist.

SJ Dillon is a cultural anthropologist working at Emory University as a visiting assistant professor. Their current project focuses on gender dysphoria as a racialized experience in the American south.

Notes

[1] I want to be clear that this is not true, I think, for all or even most anthropologists. I just want to identify a trend that I have seen in the debates, the idea that speaking at conferences in general and attending conferences in particular places (and only attending the conferences), are grounded and important acts of solidarity.  This I find somewhat suspect.

[2] Applied anthropologists have a more considered approach to this question. Marty and Shafai (2024) have called for a kind of anthropology at the frontiers (in the sense of both knowledge-creation and confronting power) that is a far more nuanced answer to how anthropology can and should matter within and without the academy.

[3] Although I recognized that ethnography’s originary conceit is founded on a kind of salvaging of the past, whereby the world lies at the feet of the white ethnographer who pillages the world before colonization destroys what once was and now is, but is soon to be lost (Clifford 1989; Simpson 2014). Ryan Jobson has argued that what is left to us is to let anthropology of the now burn, so as to make space for anthropology “in service of political projects of repatriation, repair, and abolition” (2020, 259). This too I find compelling: Jemima Pierre (2023) argues that in order to decolonize we must end the world as we know it, and Savannah Shange (2020) argues for an abolitionist anthropology. Perhaps all this quibbling over solidarity is really just getting in the way of the larger project, although I think pushing against the idea of the conference (in its current form) is solidarity is inherent to abolishing anthropology as it is now as well as envisioning an anthropology of the future that Cox calls for (2018).

[4] For critique of this rationale, see Schuller 2023 and Teitelbaum 2019; see Edwards 2025 for thorough analysis of the possibilities and problematics of these conceits.

[5] Even my own imagination here is limited by academics, and is that not quite interesting? I wanted to know what anthropologists conceived of as solidarity, so I put out a call to paper on academic listservs. Of course, I do other things in my life that feel more like solidarity, but I want that solidarity (as I believe do others) in my academics as well. Can anthropology escape the bind? Is an anthropology of the future, one imagined through possibility and centered not on cynicism, possible for the field (Cox 2018)? I hope so.

[6] I do not proscribe any particular mode of this solidarity, however, sidestepping the 1990’s discussions of militant anthropology (Scheper-Hughes 1995), which Michael Edwards helpfully lays out (2025).

Works Cited

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