Covid-19 and Teaching in Anthropology during the Minneapolis Uprising
Since February 2020, I have been living and working from my apartment in South Minneapolis, just 11 blocks from where George Floyd was murdered by members of the Minneapolis Police Department on May 25, 2020 and in a neighborhood near the epicenter of the Minneapolis Uprising. This is the second neighborhood I have lived in in Minnesota where a community member was murdered by police officers - the other was Philando Castille, murdered by Falcon Heights Police officers on July 6, 2016 (about 10 blocks from where I lived when I returned from fieldwork). As I write about whiteness and the North Atlantic, I think about George and Philando and my neighbors and all of the important work by black and indigenous-led organizers in our cities. I’m grateful that through RIGS, I get to support and facilitate spaces for folks to meet, talk, make, write, refuse together.
I also wanted to name that I, like many other graduate students and instructors, had to quickly become mental health support for our students, peers as Covid-19 has spread. Meanwhile, so many have had to become teachers to our teachers about a great many things from recording lectures to how to name and fight white supremacy that permeates academic interactions, spaces, generational wealth, access to education, and institutional hierarchies. I’m grateful to have wonderful mentors and students, and an incredibly supportive advisor and committee who are not new to this fight but are in conversation and action about reparations, refusals, and addressing complicity in anti-blackness, and indigenous and native erasure (among others).
I’m also deeply grateful to my interlocutors from Iceland and all over the world. Our conversations stay with me and push me to keep writing, talking, thinking, owning up, and making new. I get to hear your voices and see your faces in my recordings of our time together and hope to see you all in person someday soon. <3
Stay tuned for writing and film updates. And if you would like some cool Racial Justice Resources, please check out these compiled by RIGS Director, Professor Kat Hayes and Public Historian, Denise Pike, M.A.
Be well and in care! ~Jen