Conférence Alisse WATERSTON - Writing to be Read: A Call to Scholars

Writing to be Read: A Call to Scholars

Abstract
In “Writing To Be Read,” Alisse Waterston sends a call to scholars to venture beyond the confines of the ivory tower to engage with diverse audiences. This is not a new call but one that comes with great urgency given the material, environmental, political, and economic conditions of life in these times and across the world. Moving from the question, “Why write?” Waterston reflects upon the art and the craft, the whys and wherefores, the conceptions and creations, and the uses of new tools and technologies as scholars anticipate putting knowledge to public use in the interest of a more just world. Invoking her writing experiments with intimate ethnography and the graphic format, Waterston considers matters of commitment, motivation, inspiration, worries, writing habits, narrative strategy, and institutional constraints as scholars look to get people to read what they write. Underneath these efforts are various questions for discussion that may include: What is gained and what is lost in crafting works designed to stimulate, disturb and/or inspire? What personal decisions and institutional principles and expectations are required to take a creative work of public scholarship from its initial conception to its fruition, and beyond that to its reception by readers in and outside of the academy?

Alisse WATERSTON
Presidential Scholar & Professor Emerita
City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Fellow, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study


Alisse Waterston is a scholar and advocate who studies the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequity. She is Presidential Scholar and Professor Emerita, City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and author or editor of seven books including the award winning My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century, an intimate ethnography (10th anniversary edition, 2024), and the graphic novel Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning (2020; illustrated by Charlotte Corden). A Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Programmes in Transnational Processes, Structural Violence, and Inequality, Professor Waterston served as AAA President in 2015-17. Recent 2024 publications include: “Living in and with a Regime of Silencing: Narrative Control and Totalitarian Tendencies since October 7. 2023” in Today’s Totalitarianism; “Reading and Writing in the Company of Anthropologists,” in A Collection of Creative Anthropologies; “Intimate Ethnography: Bridging Story, Memory, History,” with Barbara Rylko-Bauer, translated in the Polish for Czas Kultury; and the soon to be published “Improvising Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Anthropological Perspectives” in the Swedish Journal of Anthropology. Recipient of the 2024 Boas Award, Professor Waterston is editor of the Berghahn Book series, Intimate Ethnography.