Forthcoming

SJSCA 31/2025 Reciprocal Vulnerability: Privilege, violence, and solidarity from fieldwork to academia (Spring 2025)

This special issue explores the entanglements between vulnerability, privilege and solidarity that shape researchers’ complex positionalities and situated knowledges. Rethinking engaged anthropology from our embodied experiences, the issue draws on feminist and decolonial scholarship contesting the heroic self-image of the anthropologist who ‘engage[s] in lone acts of bravery in order to shed light on the struggles of others with less relative privilege’ (Berry et al. 2017, 547). Despite long-standing criticism and calls for reflexivity from feminist researchers, the image of the brave, strong and independent researcher has widely persisted in (engaged) anthropology, reproducing gendered and racialised forms of violence in academic research.
A researcher’s vulnerability is often seen as a personal and professional failure rather than as what it is: the result of a structural position both in the field and in academia at home––a position based on gender, race, class and sexual orientation. In this special issue, we contend that anthropologists are not always in a privileged position to stand up against the oppression and violence they experience against their own bodies or that of others. In certain situations, they are scared, vulnerable and condemned to silence in much the same way as their research partners may be.
We use ‘reciprocal vulnerability’ as a conceptual lens to focus on the social exchange of care that responds to violent and harmful situations. The concept brings to the fore the relatedness and intimate connections between researchers’ experiences of suffering and those of the people they work and live with. These connections enable anthropologists and their research partners and/or colleagues to build solidarities across differences and within frameworks of privilege and inequality for healing, survival and transversal political struggle for social justice. Through reciprocal vulnerabilities and related ordinary ethics of care, researchers come to understand themselves as vulnerable human beings who need others, and they may find non-heroic ways to resist and write against all forms of physical and structural violence from fieldwork to academia.

SJSCA 32/2025 Des arts dans l’espace public : enjeux esthétiques et politiques entre le local et le global (Fall 2025)

Ce dossier thématique propose d’explorer la manière dont les arts, en s’insérant dans l’espace public, cristallisent des enjeux se situant à l’articulation entre le local et le global. En rassemblant des textes s’appuyant sur des terrains différents par les pratiques artistiques observées (danse, cirque, musique, arts visuels), par leurs modèles économiques (travail au chapeau, industries culturelles, commandes publiques) et dans des territoires concernant des aires géographiques plurielles (Afrique, Amériques, Océanie, Asie et Europe), ce dossier cherche à restituer les manières dont les enjeux esthétiques et politiques interconnectés induits par des circulations artistiques dans l’espace public, coproduisent des espaces de l’art transnationaux.
L’espace public dont nous parlons dans ce numéro à l’espace du dehors, de l’extérieur, dans lequel différentes formes d’art sont données à apprécier aux usager·e·s de la ville, aux passant·e·s et aux habitant·e·s. Mais cet espace public est aussi étudié comme espace du politique, à partir duquel sont constatées et mises en débat différentes formes d’inégalités (culturelles, sociales, économiques, politiques), et d’où émergent des formes d’engagement par les arts comme l’artivisme, cette manière de lier ensemble production artistique et activisme politique.