Conference Reflections: Our Proof of Concept
In late 2021, Uxeda attended the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in Baltimore. The Uxeda booth aimed for an ambience somewhere between home library and Baltimore basement coffee shop (and maybe more than just a little James Lipton’s Actors Studio). The conference theme for the year was “Truth and Responsibility.” Fresh off a redeye from San Salvador, I found myself straining to recall my freshman-level anthropology fundamentals.
Which begged the question, why were we here?
Reflecting on our conference experience calls to mind the challenges and beauties of communicating in a foreign language. Our purpose, after all, was to talk to people and gain insights on the tools that people need to do their work well. My background is in public policy and program evaluation, and my professional “mother tongue” embraces a core set of values specific to my practice—interest articulation, stakeholder capacity, performance measurement, cause and effect, outcomes and impacts, to name a few. While my work is often rooted in behavioral sciences and socio-cultural explanations for program effectiveness, I nonetheless wondered how much overlap there is between my professional practice and the discipline of anthropology – where does the common ground on that Venn diagram begin and end? Where do our objectives, tools, and epistemological articulations converge, and where do they differ? And for Uxeda’s purposes during those three conference days, what would this mean for our ability to reach people across academic and professional disciplines?
We’ve all had to cross a lingual divide in a new country, in a different corner of the United States, or even across town. At one extreme, we find ourselves gesticulating like clowns, seesawing the volume of our voices, or relying on a smile or a nod to communicate understanding. More commonly, however, we find ourselves conveying very similar sentiments in unique ways across languages. Examples abound of pidgin languages drawing from one another to better capture situational sentiments. When we pay attention, we improve our understanding of our own language through our interaction with others.
To frame the analogy in the context of fieldwork, I have walked out of dozens of field interviews and suddenly realized I missed an opportunity to follow up on a golden nugget of information from an interviewee. The frequency of this occurrence over the course of several field trips led me and fellow team members to adopt Denis Diderot’s l’esprit de l’escalier–that devastating sensation of a missed opportunity for a witty retort–as a favorite turn of phrase. And one best articulated in French.
Uxeda's goal is to reach across disciplines, across academic languages, with explicit recognition that we as social scientists share similar research objectives, grapple with similar inconveniences and roadblocks in the field, and require similar tools to overcome them. The AAA conference afforded us a wonderful opportunity to test-drive Uxeda’s founding concept—social science tools for social science researchers everywhere–within a specific community of practice. Our objective was not to sell anything, except maybe our boyish charm and a few campy t-shirts. We took a different approach. To draw in conference attendees and generate conversation, we set up a spinning raffle wheel with colors corresponding to questions about various elements of participants’ research experience.
Lo and behold, it turns out that indeed, people of different disciplines, from anthropology to archeology to public policy, share much in common when it comes to field experience, challenges, and material and digital needs.
As proof of concept, it was, to quote Will Ferrell’s James Lipton, scrumtrulescent.
