COVID-19, Affect, and Activist Anthropology

Abstract

Abstract: Anthropologists have long grappled with how and to what extent researchers should disentangle personal emotions from their analysis of their interlocutors. For scholar-activists, this complexity is enriched if/when researchers are directly engaging in social movements or activist organizing. How does a researcher navigate the blurred boundaries between participating in a social movement—planning, organizing, campaigning—and analyzing the intricate human relationships, theories, and actions that comprise a movement, and what is an anthropologist’s role in these processes? While a multitude of scholars have sought to answer these questions (Hale 2006; Sanford and Angel-Ajani 2006), during my fieldwork an additional layer of contention was added with the emergence of COVID-19. This article provides a descriptive account of my personal experience completing fieldwork among US-Latin American solidarity activists from 2019 to 2021 during the most intense phases of COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States. Throughout this article I illustrate how COVID-19 impacted my research and relationships with my interlocutors, often leading to an array of circumstantial affects that both complicated and enriched my analytical process. I demonstrate the emotional navigation that takes place amid fieldwork with friends and organizers during a global pandemic. In doing so, I re-examine the role of both affect and social crisis in directing the positioning of activist anthropologists.