This workshop examines what becomes possible when we endeavor to do anti-racist fieldwork. Complicating the commonly held understandings that fieldwork is “over there” and temporally bound or that anti-racism simply requires, as the pervasive US centric neoliberal discourse suggests, a shift in how we approach social interactions; we will collectively interrogate what ‘fieldwork’ entails and what we mean by ‘anti-racism’. We will use the framework/language we develop around these key terms to discuss your projects. With the latter in mind, please plan on bringing either a question that has emerged as you’ve designed your research project or a story from your fieldwork that you would like to discuss in this workshop.
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is an ethnographer, filmmaker, and visual artist. His written and creative works attend to processes of racialization, performances of masculinity, and Afro-Asian interactions and their histories across India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He is the author of two books, The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, masculinity, and urban space in Delhi, India ( 2020 Duke University Press) and Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the age of Social Media (2023 with Sahana Udupa, NYU Press). Gabriel’s films have screened in international festivals, including the Tasveer International Film Festival, Ethnografilm Paris, The International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), and the German International Ethnographic Film Festival. He has exhibited his video and sound installations in various venues, including Khoj Arts (Delhi), the Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), and Bow Arts (London). He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, New York University having previously taught visual anthropology for several years at Goldsmiths, University of London.