Program

Day 1 — Friday, April 9, 2021

10:00-10:15am — Welcome

10:15-10:45am — Field Exercise I

10:45-11:30am — Session 1: Field Camp(s)

  • Chair: Susan Lindee (UPenn)
  • Etienne Benson (UPenn), Field Camp: Taking “the Field” and “Fieldwork” Seriously, or Not
  • Erika Lorraine Milam (Princeton), Cook Shacks and Lab Tents: On the Construction of Scientific Field Camps

11:30-11:45am — Break

11:45am-12:30PM — Session 2: Home and AFIELD

  • Chair: Mary Mitchell (University of Toronto)
  • Laurel Waycott (UCSF), Putting the “Father” in the “Father of Cambridge Anthropology”: Reading Alfred C. Haddon’s Letters Home
  • Rosanna Dent (NJIT), (In)Hospitable Sites of Study: Whose Home is “The Field”?

12:30-1:30pm — LUNCH Break

1:30-1:45pm — Field Exercise II

1:45-2:45pm — Session 3: Field/Lab Inversions

  • Chair: Andi Johnson (UPenn)
  • Stefan Helmreich (MIT), Flipping the Ship: Making the Lab in the Field in Physical Oceanography
  • Cameron Brinitzer (UPenn), The Field in the Lab: Electromagnetism in a Cognitive Science of Culture
  • Alexis Rider (UPenn), On Being Cold: The Making and Melting of the Lab and the Field

2:45-3:00pm — Break

3:00-3:45pm — Session 4: Questioning the Field

  • Chair: Sharon Traweek (UCLA)
  • David Kaiser (MIT), Local Tools with Universalizing Baggage: Rethinking the “Field” Concept
  • Laura Stark (Vanderbilt), Field and Metaphor: How Colonialism Operates Through the Field Concept

3:45-5:00pm — Break

5:00-6:30pm — Reception

Day 2 — Saturday, April 10, 2021

10:00-10:15am — Field Exercise III

10:15-11:15AM — Session 5: (De)colonial Fields

  • Chair: Rosanna Dent (NJIT)
  • Sebastián Gil-Riaño (UPenn), Nomadic Fields: The Erasure of Violence in the Aché Fieldwork of Pierre Clastres and Carleton Gajdusek
  • Paul Wolff Mitchell (UPenn), Return to the Field?: Repatriation Practices and the Reconstruction of Fieldwork in Nineteenth Century Physical Anthropology
  • Deborah Thomas (UPenn), What Constitutes Fieldwork? Or, How Might We Think About Ethnography in a Decolonizing Anthropology?

11:15-11:30AM — Break

11:30AM-12:30Pm — Session 6: Reinventing Fieldwork

  • Chair: Adriana Petryna (UPenn)
  • Gabriel Coren (Berggruen), From Fieldwork In to Fieldwork With: How the Field of Synthetic Biology Becomes a Site for Co-Engineering New Fieldwork Practices
  • Judy Kaplan (UPenn), Fieldwork at the Linguistic Data Consortium
  • Ramah McKay (UPenn), Distant Fields? Thin Description, Thick Models, and Social Data at a Distance

12:30-1:00pm — Concluding Discussion