ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates what the intersection of anthropology and activism looks like in contemporary global settings where pressing issues such as forced migration, refugees’ search for asylum, contested infrastructure development projects, immigrant’ rights, and increasing income inequality are front and center as public issues. Anti-immigrant and racist sentiment in the US has informed public policy on immigration, and in the current decade the state of Florida is no exception. With a background in Peace and Conflict Studies, Brenda Fitzpatrick's research goal was to increase the understanding of both sides, leading to more equitable conflict resolution. She notes that anthropology is ideally suited to identifying environmental worldviews on both sides of a conflict, rooted as they are in divergent assumptions and underlying beliefs about humans and nature. The dilemma for activist anthropology, at least where one takes a position in a conflict, is that it dilutes one’s expert, independent observer status, thus jeopardizing anthropology’s potency as a transformer of public opinion.
