So, without further ado, here's our call! If you are interested in participating in this panel/ project, please get in touch with us by April 12th.
Call for Papers | Speaking more broadly:
Adapting anthropological concepts for a broader audience
Panel for AAA 2018 Annual Meeting in San Jose, CA:
For
questions or to submit an abstract for consideration, please email Jennifer
Long (longjen@mcmaster.ca)
and Rhiannon Mosher (rhmosher@yorku.ca)
by April 12th.
In this panel, we seek to identify,
contextualize and ‘translate’ anthropological concepts and constructs for a
broader audience. This year's conference organizers ask anthropologists to
write about holism, social change, resistance, resilience, and adaptation in
the contemporary moment, and to recognize the importance of discussions about
species, societies, reorganization, transformation and stasis. We invite
anthropologists to take this challenge literally.
This CfP seeks authors who wish to break down
the organizers' questions into their sum of parts in an effort to consider: how
other disciplines, our applied experiences, and interdisciplinary partnerships
inform our discussions. We want to know how we can tap anthropological
experiences and perspectives to engage and educate a wider public? We seek to
understand specifically how an anthropological vocabulary shapes and frames the
field and our practices with our partners, interlocutors, and colleagues.
Further, we want to better understand the ways in which anthropological
understandings are understood, changed, and integrated into new contexts.
This proposed panel is a response to calls
like Ryan Anderson's (2013) post (on the blog now known as Anthro{dendum}) to
break the closed loop in which anthropologists often work. Anderson argues that
anthropologists often end up speaking (just/ only) to one another about our
work – all the while, this cacophony of anthropological insight remains locked
behind closed doors. In our current sociopolitical context, and with more and
more of our graduates working outside of the academy in interdisciplinary contexts,
learning how to "get involved, to collaborate, to find ways to communicate
and bring the ideas of anthropology to wider issues and conversations"
(2013) should be the discipline's priority.
While the irony of calling for papers at the
Annual Meeting on the topic of breaking open the closed loop of anthropological
discussions is not lost on the panel organizers, we seek to create a resource
which situates various anthropological concepts historically within our
discipline, and then contextualizes these concepts in their new, renewed, and
revised contexts. Importantly, each concept or term should be explained through
a case study, an experience from the field, with researchers from different
disciplines or through original research. It should be noted that this call is
open to anthropologists in all four fields. The goal of this panel is to
jump-start the draft for a text where various concepts are discussed using to
be used by students, practicing and interdisciplinary colleagues.
Therefore, panel organizers seek papers that
define, describe, and compare anthropological concepts used in practice, past
experience, in industry (e.g. ethnography in user design or market research) or
other disciplines (e.g. other social sciences, hard sciences or technology,
engineering or math). Panelists should define the term in plain language,
provide a brief history of its origin and use, then elucidate on the term using
a case study from fieldwork, in conversation with non-anthropologists, and the workplace.
For questions or to submit an abstract for consideration, please
email
by April 12th.