Claiming respectable American motherhood: homebirth mothers, medical officials, and the state

Based on ethnographic research regarding public policy and grassroots organizing for midwifery in Virginia, this article explores how medical discourses around appropriate health care practices intersect with state discourses about what practices are considered "respectable" versus "pathological" for its citizens. In recent legislative debates about the legalization of direct-entry midwifery, medical officials have extended their criticism of midwifery and homebirth to mothers who resist state-sanctioned childbirth practices. This article examines how medical officials challenge the respectable mothering practices of homebirthers by linking them with women they deem pathological--child abusers, negligent mothers, and drug users--and placing them outside the cadre of "normal" American mothers who acknowledge the "logical" and "natural" superiority of biomedical childbirth practices. I also address homebirth mothers' responses, which assert that their political advocacy for midwives is a respectable mothering practice because they are responsible citizens who desire what they deem the best care for their children.     

Rethinking Europe, (anti-)austerity and political behaviour

Leah Bassel and Akwugo Emejulu’s Minority Women and Austerity offers an important and much needed contribution to discussions on austerity, social movements, race and gender in Europe. Centring their analysis of the interplay between the 2008 economic crisis and activism in Europe on minority women and using a critical race studies and a black feminist epistemological framework, they make a bold epistemological move since, as the authors extensively demonstrate, European political racelessness renders intersectional claims and activism invisible, inaudible and illegitimate, while dominant social movement theories tend to ignore important forms of collective action that minority women develop. Thanks to their epistemological and analytical framework, their qualitative study, although limited to three national contexts, offers a lot of room for thinking both generalization and differentiation across and beyond their case-studies. Bassel and Emejulu’s work will thus certainly be inspiring for scholars working on similar issues in other European countries.     

Acts and practices of citizenship: Muslim women’s activism in the UK

Drawing on the growing literature on Muslim women’s activism, this paper explores grammars of action that frame political mobilizations of Muslim women in the UK. By taking a broad view of political activism, we identify acts and practices of citizenship through which Muslim women activists engage with, reinterpret and challenge social norms. The article critically engages with dominant readings of post-migration minorities’ political mobilization through the lens of citizenship regimes and draws attention to more processual and agency-centred perspectives on citizenship. We focus on two salient themes that Bristol-based Muslim activists were concerned with: mobilizing against violence against women, manifested in the anti-FGM campaign by Integrate Bristol, and attempts to re-negotiate the terms of participation in religious spaces, manifested in claims for more inclusive mosques. In both instances, mobilization was not confined to the local community or national level, but supported by and embedded in related transnational struggles.     

A Sea Change in Anthropology? Public Anthropology Reviews

ABSTRACT  In this article, we introduce the inaugural issue of the "Public Anthropology Reviews" section. We suggest that the new section reflects significant changes underway in the discipline, including an expansion in the kind of work valued among anthropologists, new ways in which anthropological knowledge is being produced and disseminated, and an acknowledgment that anthropologists have a responsibility to dedicate their skills to issues of broad public import. The section will, thus, expose AA readers to some of the new anthropological work appearing in a wide variety of media and nontraditional academic formats that aims both to communicate primarily with nonanthropological audiences and to have an impact on critical issues of wide social significance. We here present the reviews in this issue, identify additional contemporary issues likely to be addressed in future reviews, and welcome submissions and critical feedback for the section.     

Ravished Armenia: Visual Media, Humanitarian Advocacy, and the Formation of Witnessing Publics

Discourses around human rights frequently treat media as transparent delivery systems for testimony and spectacles of atrocity. Such views detract from the degree to which media circuits shape human rights claims, in which aesthetic strategies transform a vast and distant horror into sympathetic cause, and systems of exhibition channel sentiment into action. This article's study of Ravished Armenia and the early film advocacy of Near East Relief in the Armenian case yields not only the contributions of media to claims-making process and humanitarian action but also Christian underpinnings of human rights movements. The evangelical legacy produced missions that provided the transnational infrastructure for sharing visual testimony and administering aid and offered an instrumental iconography of suffering that shaped an early "rights imaginary."     

Distinguished primatologist address—moving from advocacy to activism: Changing views of primate field research and conservation over the past 40 years

Field studies of wild nonhuman primates have grown exponentially over the past 40 years and our knowledge of primate behavior, ecology, and social, and mating systems has expanded greatly. However, we are facing a major extinction crisis with some 60% of all primate species listed as threatened and more than 75% of species with declining populations. The primary factor driving primate population decline is human population increase, which over the past 50 years has resulted in the unsustainable conversion and degradation of natural landscapes for industrial agriculture, the production of nonagricultural commodities for international trade, pastureland for cattle, dam construction, fossil fuel exploration, mining, and the construction of road networks and infrastructure to support large urban centers. Recent ecological modeling predicts that by the end of the century, the four primate‐richest countries in the world will lose 32–78% of their existing primate habitat to agricultural expansion, and nine of the top 15 primate‐richest countries are expected to have 80–100% of their primate species extinct or threatened with extinction. If we are going to save the world's primates, the time to act is now! Not only should all primate field research include a strong conservation component, but in addition we must actively join with our professional societies, zoos and research facilities, universities, conservation organizations, concerned business leaders, global citizens, like‐minded political leaders, and grassroots organizations to inform, demand and direct governments, multinational corporations, and international organizations to engage in transformational change to protect biodiversity and seek environmental justice against those entities that actively destroy our planet. As the chief academic discipline dedicated to the study of primates, we must organize and collectively move from being advocates for primate conservation to becoming activists for primate conservation. This is a call to action.     

Between the State and Indigenous Autonomy: Unpacking Video Indígena in Mexico

This essay unpacks the complex emergence of video indígena , or state-sponsored small media, at the height of official pluralism in Mexico in the early 1990s. A government video program created in a transitional institutional setting colludes with the indigenous autonomy movement---through the work and visions of individual video makers and cultural activists---to produce a social form and process that has gained international recognition while confronting particular challenges in indigenous communities.     

“Whoever decides for you without you,s/he is against you!”: immigrant activism and the role of the Left in political racialization

Much of the migration literature neglects the questions of why and how “native” allies obstruct activism by immigrants and ethnic minorities. Left-wing organizations in particular are often assumed to be supportive of inclusion, and little research exists on the ways they have prevented the migrant population from having a voice in the political arena and from taking part in society as equals. Drawing on the critical theory literature, I introduce the concept of political racialization. This concept refers to mechanisms whereby political actors, in order to legitimize their work on immigration, have partially included immigrants in the political sphere, but in a relationship of “ethnic” or “racial” subordination. Through the analysis of 57 in-depth interviews with immigrant activists, I show how political racialization works within the Italian Left and how it contributes to marginalize the migrant population. I further explain how immigrant activists have challenged political racialization through their activism.     

Introduction: Making Human Rights Claims Public

This introduction explores some of the broader themes in this special section on the technologies of witnessing. In today's globally mediated world, visual images play a central role in determining which violences are redeemed and which get recognized. Northern human rights activists understand this fact and in recent years have built a transnational communications infrastructure through which "local" actors' claims are formatted into human rights "issues." I discuss the axiom that underpins this infrastructure, the notion that "seeing is believing," and then go on to briefly analyze some of the models (mobilization of shame) and forms (testimony) through which activists mediate their claims.