CfP AAA 2025 Panel: Haunting the Discipline: Embodied Knowledges, Artistic Praxis, and Decolonial Ethnography
Melinda Gonzalez
Call for Papers & Performances: AAA 2025 Panel
Haunting the Discipline: Embodied Knowledges, Artistic Praxis, and Decolonial Ethnography
Organizer & Chair: Dr. Melinda González (Georgetown University)
📍 2025 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting
📍 New Orleans, Louisiana
📅 In-Person Panel
Call for Participants – Oral Presentation Panel
The ghosts of colonialism, epistemic violence, and disciplinary constraint haunt anthropology, shaping how knowledge is produced, legitimized, and shared. This panel seeks to reimagine ethnographic research through embodied, poetic, and artistic practices—summoning new ways of knowing and transmuting research beyond the written word into movement, sound, and visual expression.
We invite ethnographer-poets, dancers, singers, painters, musicians, and performance artists to present and/or perform their work, creating a space within the AAA meeting for community healing and decolonial praxis. This session will explore how artistic and embodied methodologies function as sites of resistance, communal care, and speculative futures. How do we, as artists and scholars, engage with the spectral, the haunted, and the unseen? How does performance materialize the traces of the past and provide a roadmap for futures beyond colonial paradigms?
This panel particularly welcomes contributions from Black, Indigenous, Brown, Muslim, and otherwise marginalized scholars and students committed to creating new modes of knowledge production and sharing.
Submission Details
- Interested participants should submit an abstract (max 1500 characters) by April 1st, 2025
- Accepted participants will be notified by April 6th, 2025
- Email submissions and inquiries to melinda....@georgetown.edu
- Each presenter will have 15 minutes to share their work, whether as a performance, oral presentation, or a hybrid of both.
Session Format
- Session Length: 90 minutes
- Presenters: 4-6 participants (15-minute presentations)
- Modality: In-person only
- Roles Available: Organizer (filled), Chair (filled), Discussant(s) (max 2), Presenters (4-6)
Themes & Topics of Interest
- Ethnography as performance and creative expression
- Artistic and embodied methodologies in anthropology
- Decolonial approaches to research and storytelling
- The role of hauntings, memory, and spectral presence in cultural production
- Community care, healing, and resistance through artistic practice
Join us in crafting a space where knowledge is embodied, poetry speaks, movement archives, and the unseen becomes tangible.
We look forward to your submissions!
Walsh School of Foreign Service
"Mi vida está hecha de todas las vidas."
-Pablo Neruda
**My work time may not be your work time. Please do not feel you must respond to my email if it comes during your down time. I generally take 24-48 hours to respond to emails. If your message to me is time sensitive, please indicate this in the subject line. Thank you.