The Oregon Humanities Center will present a Wine Chat with anthropologist Kristin Yarris discussing her co-edited volume Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 at 5:30 p.m. at Capitello Wines, 540 Charnelton St.

The book features writing by anthropologists whose work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a mode of engagement inspired by feminist care ethics, decolonial methodologies, and Latin American activist traditions of acompañamiento, or accompaniment.

Contributors to this volume respond to and address present sociopolitical conditions: entrenched inequality, heightened xenophobia, unbridled white nationalism, and the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, with its disparate impacts on marginalized and impoverished communities. They reflect on how the current political and historical moment has inspired and shaped their scholarship and relationships as engaged anthropologists working with im/migrant communities.

These writers describe how and why their roles may shift from scholar to social worker, observer to friend, witness to advocate. They describe fighting deportations, engaging in social protest, writing reports and editorials, developing immigrant-friendly programs, advocating for inclusive health and social policies, and fostering systems of support for migrants—accompaniment acts as a grounding force, a being with and standing alongside, a form of care that shifts scholars away from traditional ways of doing ethnography into more unsettled but productive spaces of possibility for solidarity and social justice.

Kristin Yarris is an associate professor in the Department of Global Studies at the UO. Her research focuses primarily on transnational migration and global mental health. She helped launch the UO’s Global Health Initiative and the Center for Global Health. She is affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Women in Society and has served on the OHC’s Faculty Advisory Board. Yarris was a 2018–19 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.

Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities (2024), co-edited with Whitney Duncan, Anthropology, Northern Colorado University, was published with support from the OHC/CAS Subvention Program.

Yarris’s Wine Chat is free and open to the public. Beverages are available for purchase and a food cart is on the premises of Capitello Wines. There is ample parking at Banner Bank across the street.