A Year in Process: (Re)Collecting Relationships of Practice, Belonging and Community

The Ann Plato Annual Lecture/Webinar will be held on Thursday, May 6th at 4:00pm.  Amanda J. Guzman, Ann Plato Fellow in Anthropology and American Studies
“A Year in Process: (Re)Collecting Relationships of Practice, Belonging and Community”

Home. Belonging. Work. 2020 saw these sites, relationships, and practices entangled for many. Process papers are exercises of self-contemplation and evaluation that I have assigned to my students and now I assign to myself. Collecting memory and reflecting on process is an intentional assertion both that the lessons learned, and dialogues prompted last year should continue to be remembered in our current moment but also that ethically engaged research remains emergent and in process. Juxtaposing my ongoing research work re-assembling Puerto Rican museum collections in North American institutional contexts with pandemic-era classroom case-study approaches to teaching on/with objects, I will materialize and narrate my personal trajectory of working remotely, but in community. This talk will trouble the ways in which belonging has been traditionally prescribed in anthropological relationships around knowledge production and trace tangible articulations of belonging as a transformative site for thinking critically about our collective standpoint(s) as storytellers in/of a material world.

Amanda J. Guzmán is an anthropological archaeologist with a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the field of museum anthropology with a research focus on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico at the intersection of issues of intercultural representation and national identity formation. In the context of Puerto Rico’s current environmental and economic uncertainty, her work critically traces understudied museum acquisition narratives documenting the island’s material relations with the U.S. mainland. Amanda applies her collections experience as well as her commitment to working with and for multiple publics to her object-based inquiry teaching practice that privileges a more equitable, co-production of knowledge in the classroom through accessible engagement in cultural work. She is currently the Ann Plato Post-Doctoral Fellow in Anthropology and American Studies, teaching courses on materiality and Puerto Rican cultural production. She will be joining the Anthropology Department as an assistant professor in fall 2021.

Pre-register here:
https://trincoll.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Z5tQoT0xROC-CXYkRuGnVQ