Anthropology in Action

This article discusses the epistemological challenges of contending with hegemonic norms while ‘studying up’. In particular, I discuss the challenges that I faced in following feminist and queer approaches to gender while conducting fieldwork on the gendered norms and values produced through undergraduate computer science education in Singapore. These approaches suggest critical questions about the construction of computer science knowledge and of the common focus on the ‘woman problem’ in computer science. While feminist and queer approaches enabled me to find partial connections with participants, the heteronormativity in/of computer science and problem-solving-based hegemonic epistemology brought challenges in maintaining my methodological and theoretical approach. I highlight the need for closer examination of the power dynamics and how these shape the epistemological risks of fieldwork while studying up.

The concept of ‘readiness’ in collaborative research is almost exclusively framed and evaluated with respect to the preparedness of a community. We argue that the concept of readiness should be flipped to consider institutions, and thus ‘institutional readiness’, rather than solely assessing a community's capacity to engage in research projects. To investigate institutional readiness in Canada, we surveyed publications resulting from projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's (SSHRC) Community–University Research Alliances (CURA) programme to look at the frequency of mention of limitations related to institutional readiness versus those related to on-the-ground project specifics. Our findings suggest that institutional factors are major barriers to collaborative research and provide perspective on areas where readiness for repatriation could be built.

In the past two decades, everyday politics of infrastructure have garnered rich scholarly attention. A polysemous infrastructure that permeates everyday life, roads for long have emerged as effective sites of state craft. Employing the case of a road leading to the Sino-Indian border area of Tawang, this article argues that roads are critical to the project of border-making and management. Drawing from my road journeys to Tawang, I discuss the ways in which roads are strategised by the state to govern its border citizens. Often, visual proximity of roads casts the impression of the state which is near to its people. However, this article foregrounds that even through their conspicuous absence and disrepair, roads register the palpable presence of the state.

In this article, I explore the contradictory demands of ‘participation’ and ‘bureaucratisation’ in Pakistan's HIV sector. Local models of relatedness, personhood and informal networks, and the particular social and emotional skills of development workers were co-opted under the rubric of ‘participation’ while rolling-out projects for community care, yet the affect, relations of trust and confidence built by community workers during their work were not translated into templates for reporting-up project impact. Technologically less equipped workers were either forced to extend their roles into report-writing, template-filling and indicator-measuring or driven out of the HIV sector altogether during the process of scaling-up. This, I ague, is a form of bureaucratic violence that undermines community care. It draws attention to moving beyond the metrics-driven data determinism of global health.

Straight A's: Asian American College Students in Their Own Words Christine R. Yano and Neal K. Adolph Akatsuka (eds.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, ISBN: 978-1-4780-0024-2, xiv +231 pp., Pb. US$25.95

Hydropolitics: The Itaipu Dam, Sovereignty, and the Engineering of Modern South America Christine Folch, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019, ISBN: 9780691186603, 250 pp., Pb. US$27.95

Spacious Minds: Trauma and Resilience in Tibetan Buddhism Sara E. Lewis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019, ISBN: 9781501715358, 252 pp., Pb. £21.99

Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A Practical Approach and Toolkit for Collaborative Community Research Thurka Sangaramoorthy and Karen A. Kroeger, New York: Routledge, 2020, ISBN: 978-0-3672-5229-8, 198 pp., Pb. £29.59