This initiative is engaged in the development of a Radical Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology and is designed to explore and implement what a radically humanist anthropology could look like.  This initiative merged in response to Ryan Jobson’s 2019 year-in-review essay for American Anthropologist, “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn”.  Through various collaborations has been committed to the parsing of the field’s enduring legacies of objectification, dehumanization and erasure, and to consider how we can continue to rebuild the field of anthropology by reflecting on core principles of an engaged and decolonizing anthropology, both as it has been formulated in the past and as it develops to address the specific needs of the present.  

In conjunction with the Wenner-Gren Foundation and a range of additional partners such as Association of Black Anthropologists, the Transformative Memory Project, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, and the Anthropology Southern Africa, the intiative has been working on elaborating a radically humanist anthropology that is grounded in a praxis of equality and a notion of being and becoming that moves us beyond the conceptualization of a liberal subject that is knowable and reducible to cultural units and ethnographic data.  The intention has been to imagine new horizons for the discipline and insist that anthropology be done in the service of real-time material, affective, and ideological transformations through an interrogation of the Problem of Method; the Problem of Knowledge Production; and the Problem of Representation.