Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed presented her paper “A Healing African Diasporic Deconstruction of Ashkenormativity” at the American Anthropology Association Conference in New Orleans on November 20. The presentation was on the panel she also chaired, titled “Canonical Hauntings of the Body: On Harm and Healing—Knowledge Production and the Politics of Belonging.” Dr. Reed’s paper explores how the dismissal of whiteness by white presenting Ashkenazi Jewish Americans harms Jews of color and erases their experiences within the Jewish Diaspora. Through a critical inversion of the haunting paternalistic relationship between Jewish anthropologists and Blackness, she asks what Jewish Americans can learn from African Diaspora scholarship. She suggests that Jewish identity should be reconceptualized through African Diasporic notions of identity and race as a means to deconstruct Ashkenormativity and to fuel a healing critical recognition of Jewish diversity. Anthropology graduate Zacharia Arifi ’24 presented a paper on this same panel, titled “Bourdieu Awal and Me: Unraveling a Canon of Franco-Kabyle Ethnolography,” where they mediate the history of French ethnography with ethnographic fieldwork to posit how a legacy of disciplinal practice haunts ethnic identification among the French Kabyle. Particularly, they define how its corpus has codified and perpetuated hegemonic knowledge of belonging that supplant the diaspora’s autonomy in self-conceptualization. They consider, then, how its communities negotiate what it means to be Kabyle through living encounters with discursive expression. Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson served as the discussant for this panel. The conference program can be found here.