Insights: Forms of Engagement

the thinking
the doing
the writing

By Neni Panourgia (Columbia University)

A collection of essays solicited and curated by Neni Panourgia on the conceptualization, fieldwork, and writing of engaged anthropology. Richard Handler revisits the questions that frame the theory of ethnography; Laura McAtackney and Katerina Sergidou present writing that is being done from within the familiarity of their spaces as "native" scholars; Laura Brady writes as an allo-ethnographer witnessing the same spaces as Laura McAtackney, bringing Twitter as a form of fieldwork; and Sally Campbell Galman tells us how to write an ethnographic zine.

Neni Panourgiá is an anthropologist, adjunct associate professor at the Prison Education Program, Psychology Department, and academic adviser at the Justice in Education Initiative at Columbia University. Her essays on anthropology, ethnography, critical theory, art and architecture, critical medical studies, and politics can be found in Mousse, Documenta, American Ethnologist, Ethos, Anthropological Quarterly, angelaki, and many edited volumes. Her book publications include Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography; Ethnographica Moralia (coedited with George Marcus); Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State, and a new edition of Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher. Her new book Λέρος: Η γραμματική του εγκλεισμού (Leros: The Grammar of Confinement) (published in Greek by Εκδόσεις Νεφέλη) is forthcoming in English. She most recently curated the special issue on COVID-19 and incarceration for Synapsis: A Journal of Medical Humanities.