towards a tender critical theory
A panel for the 2019 Australian Anthropological Society conference (2-5 December).
Taking place on unceded Ngunnawal country (Canberra, ACT, Australia).
abstract
Contemporary anthropology as a whole, is able to act with potency and strength, equally comprised of vulnerability, empathy, and care; we chose the word 'tender' to describe and collect an array of scholarly modes, both practiced and reached for. Tenderness, intimate thing that it is, runs through responsible fieldwork and glimmers in good ethnography, where it is carefully threaded through writing and representational narratives. There is something tender in the ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart 2007) and ‘arts of inclusion’ (Tsing 2010) with which scholars frame a constructive use of noticing. There is also something emerging from the careful, ruminating promise of ‘slow scholarship’, and how it might complement forms of public engagement and advocacy we see scholars advancing in ways that are not well-captured by metrics, but do much to develop the discipline.The tender modes we speak of are not apolitical, but the politic they enact can be a subtle one; generative and committed to demonstrating possibilities in ways that depart from discursive conventions, like argument and riposte, which may enact theoretical engagement with a spirit of deconstruction.The modes we speak of softly illuminate with a distinctly ethnographic light and energy. They seek unapologetically feminine modes of argument, queering analytical questioning, and reorienting the academe towards the epistemological force of our interlocutors.Tender critical theory enacts a subtle—yet vigorous—resistance to neoliberal knowledge worlds. This panel invites papers that help elucidate the theoretical force, rhetorical potential, and slight but rigorous politic of tenderness in scholarly output and praxis.
participants
Convenors: Mythily Meher (University of Melbourne); Esther R Anderson (University of Southern Queensland)Presenters:
Laura McLauchlan (University of New South Wales) - On becoming restorative: the radical challenge of tenderness
Taking the tender as careful attention to relationality, the urgency of working with tender skill is clear. In a range of practices from restorative justice to radical pedagogy, responsive ethnography and community mediation, effective and transformative work requires skilled recognition of and cooperation with relationality. Such practices share commitments to holding space for both the integrity of participants while also recognising the ways in which lives are connections that comprise them. In such approaches, notions of opposition may shift as enemies within require befriending alongside those without. Such modes of attending to reality, however, may raise ontological challenges for those of us raised in paradigms of individualist-rational-action; concepts of blame, responsibility and justice rest on the assumption of bounded individuals. Secular-rational languages of linear accountability may give little space for the realities of such tender-critical practices. We might not wish to be open to all others or their worlds (Candea 2010). Indeed, to refuse to do so may be the important work of boundary maintenance (Haraway 2001). However, when it matters to open to one another, how do we create the pre-conditions—both ontological and practical—for the possibility of working well with the relational? And how to voice such deeply-responsive and mutually-worked practices? In this paper, using both prose and movement, we offer a speculative consideration of emerging languages for holding a tender critical openness to life.Meg Forbes (University of Southern Queensland) - An exploration of empathy as tenderness through culturally appropriate research
Tenderness promotes purposeful, empathetic action towards the needs of others, while empathy assists researchers in entering the private world of their participants. This process is strengthened when researchers and participants approach research, and the methods to be used in their research, collaboratively. Empathy may be relevant to qualitative research with marginalised groups, strengthening relationships between participants and researchers through the development of trust. In particular, empathy may enhance the ability of research students who are outsiders to listen deeply to, and represent, participant stories through their research. In the past, research conducted with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians often employed culturally inappropriate research methods that lacked consultation with those participating in the research. By contrast, the use of culturally appropriate methods empowers participants and promotes the development of strong relationships between participants and researchers. This paper examines a research partnership case study with six Aboriginal communities in South West Queensland. Specifically, the case study will explore the collaboration between Aboriginal participants and a non-Aboriginal researcher, using an Indigenous qualitative method, yarning. Yarning is validated in Australia and internationally as a credible and rigorous research method that promotes relationship-building between participants and researchers. Through this paper, the author's experience of tenderness through empathy is explored through her research and her relationship with cultural mentors.Mythily Meher (University of Auckland) - Uses of the ethnographic impulseA core part of our training, as anthropologists, is growing versed in the odd and specific writing genre that is the academic essay, emphasising argument as the most valid form of theoretical engagement and expression. Yet, anthropology is a project moved by so many impulses. Against most genres of engagement learnt before one's first fieldwork, ethnography seems so differently impassioned. Ethnography, even for secular anthropologists, is a project of faith: in speaking truth to power, in the vitality of informants' lives, in the transformative possibilities of being and becoming alongside others, and in the humble value of writing it up. This is an ethnographic rigour that is instructive not just for what it reveals about the world, but also what it imparts about how to be in that world. Tender critical theory, for me, means recognising this impulse in the ethnographic project and channeling it towards others that anthropological work is peopled by: the literature one thinks with and those one speaks to, both in and beyond the academy (salient for my work in public health and in institutional reform). In this, I think of scholarly writing and speaking as intentional community-building. What comes of shifting weight from asking just, 'does it hold together?' to also asking: 'what does it hold open and who for?' This paper explores critical theory as a creative, relational act moved by critique and care to revitalise what has come before and what might come after.Rosemary Wiss (University of Sydney) - Vulnerable ethnography: Sex, tourism and relationships in the Philippines
The ethnography for this paper draws on research in a Philippines sex tourism industry. It delves into the difficulties and possibilities of researching illegal and shameful acts amongst suspicious and at times hostile subjects. Foreign men aim to create boundaries around who is inside, and who is outside of their community. Narratives of belonging and the expulsion of those seen as disruptive or disapproving of this foreign male Utopia - such as White women - helps create the White male expatriate community. My aim is beyond the politics of 'giving voice' to allegedly mute female victims or castigating demonised 'sex tourists'. Instead I evoke the complexities of these peoples' desires and prospective hopes. Categories such as 'sex tourists' and 'prostitutes/sex workers' are replaced by descriptions of emergent exchanges between people, relations, and contexts. As such, the productive possibilities of identity do not lead to a position of neutrality and a consequent denial of the problems which pervade this world - drug and alcohol abuse, feelings of alienation and unhappiness, allegations about the sexual abuse of children, and corruption and violence. Instead I show the importance, indeed necessity, of taking specific articulations of identity into account, including for the researcher, in a world both harsh and tender.Esther R Anderson (University of Southern Queensland) - Spiritual moorings in ethnographic landscapes
Every day, anthropologists walk through landscapes that are equal parts soft and harsh, or even bewildering and incomprehensible; situated spiritual moorings hover gently at the centre of all these acts of movement and well-meaning enquiries. Anthropological analyses are ventures towards intentionally heightened convictions, regardless of whether that belief lies in an inherent worldly goodness, in vibrant flickers of humanity, or in the constructive value of knowledge and lived ontologies. Frameworks closely attuned to spatiality can offer possibilities for enlightened ways of thinking, resistant to easily anthropocentric modalities. This hopeful, tentative exploration is lovingly dedicated to metaphorical and physical immersion into the organic worlds and communities below, recognising that "a city lies under your feet" (Tsing 2010, p. 191). In enquiring after the practice of inhabiting the ethnographic landscape, I want to invert and reimagine notions of the solitary mobile subject away from romanticised inwardness and performative masculine flâneurie (originating from Baudelaire). Instead, this paper is a slow, searching undertaking, looking to cultivate an ethos and praxis that are intertwined with collaborative ecologies, boldly emerging from non-canonical disciplinary substrates (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010) and offering tangible methods of being alongside ever-encroaching contemporary apocalyptic narratives (Instone 2015). Spiritual and sensory moorings, in this manner, can be used to both make sense of and carefully represent challenging environments.If you have any questions, you can contact the convenors via email, at [email protected]/[email protected].
readings
A miscellaneous collection of people, materials, or works (in whatever form) we see as tangentially relating to, or inspiring this theoretical undertaking.- The 2016 album 'A Seat at the Table', by Solange (YouTube playlist).
- Sedgwick, EK 2003, Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity, Duke University Press, Durham.
- Stewart, K 2007, Ordinary affects, Duke University Press, Durham.
- Tsing, A 2010, 'Arts of inclusion, or how to love a mushroom', Manoa, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 191-203.
- Christchurch mosque attacks: A public syllabus, curated by students in ANTH406/ANTH312 at Victoria University of Wellington, "with input from lecturers and students from across the School of Social and Cultural Studies".
- Various, ongoing public scholarship by Hilary Agro (anthropology PhD student at the University of British Columbia) via Twitter.
- MeTooAnthro, "a collective of anthropologists from around the world committed to making our discipline a safer and more just space, by combatting sexual assault and harassment", which the panel conveners are also part of.
- Artworks, installations, and exhibitions by conceptual artist, Jenny Holzer.