Toward a reflexive anthropology
This partly personal, partly polemical, and partly speculative essay is my thinking-out-loud about how anthropologists might decentre existing ways of producing, teaching, and sharing ethnographic knowledge and strive toward a more accountable, more responsible, and more ethical way of working in the discipline. Imagining a genuinely ethical and intellectually critical anthropology, I reflect on my experiences as a racialised woman trained in the “Western” academy in the subject of anthropology. I think about at what—and whose—cost anthropology stagnates in its whiteness, and how this stagnation affects the emergence of new forms of anthropological knowledge and work as well as how neoliberalisation of academia further encourages and perpetuates whiteness as the norm. Then, I ruminate on what anthropology could look like if anthropologists made serious efforts to dismantle white academic privilege, if we let go of our obsession with Theory, if we took ethics seriously: what I imagine to be a critical epistemic multiplicity in a reflexive anthropology.
Access the journal article here.
Drawing more-than-human kinship
In my work as an anthropological ethnographer and illustrator, I have been working to connect seemingly disparate disciplines together—at times, even as a messy and rough bricolage. Thinking broadly about kinship—both intra- and inter-species—as a fundamental and foundational practice toward a mutually thriving future, I experiment with different formats and genres to reimagine what it means to produce ethnographic work. This reimagined work is not only informative but also beautiful, like the kinship I experience with my dog, Frank, who is depicted in the illustrations below. My investment in beauty is also an intentional form of resistance against neoliberal capitalist systems that prioritise profit, results, and efficiency over beauty, process, and patience.
It matters that the illustrations in this series are digital. Using a software called Procreate on the 11” iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, I actualise my imaginations on the screen. That is, this specific combination of technologies enables me to create art based on my dreams of domesticity; it helps me dream.
Through these illustrations, I hope to combine writing and art and to push beyond ‘multidisciplinary’ or ‘interdisciplinary’ and toward ‘undisciplinary’ (see Ko 2019). Drawing from fields with no clear demarcation of their boundaries—those that can thus stretch out their tendrils infinitely—such as kinship studies, queer and feminist theory, and environmental humanities, I hope to use visual artistic methods to tell imaginative stories of more-than-human kinship.
Read the blog post here.
More-than-human kinship against proximal loneliness
Dogs are here to live with, not just to think with. In this autoethnographic essay, I share my experience of loneliness and more-than-human kinship while being in lockdown with my dog, Frank, in our small flat in Edinburgh due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I open with our histories and how we have come to be kin in order to make our positionalities explicit. I then tell three stories that illustrate how our lives – and our bodies – are being shaped by the current pandemic, addressing the ways in which its contribution to my loneliness in COVID-induced lockdown manifested in our everyday life. Engaging with existing scholarship on emotional/personal, social and cultural loneliness, I theorise that life in lockdown suffers from a new type of loneliness: proximal loneliness. Then, I build on the concept of response-ability to argue that multispecies kinship helps to alleviate feelings of proximal loneliness through emergent practices that make us response-able – care and respond – to one another. I contend that even in these unprecedented and viral times that have come to elicit profound feelings of loneliness and despair for many, the repertoire of our multispecies emergent practices that may help us through the difficulties of proximal loneliness continues to exist and grow with shared response-abilities of our kinship across the species boundaries.
Access the journal article here.
Thinking through the lens of white ignorance that makes possible denial (which leads to selective memory, and thus selective narratives) (Mills 2007, 29), it is not difficult to see what stood in the way of the emergence of a narrative that is both pro-animals and anti-racist in this space. However, for that kind of space to emerge, people steeped in white ignorance must first be willing to challenge white supremacy despite the discomfort it may cause.
Access the blog post here.