AAA 2010 Information

Tue Feb 16 00:24:52 UTC 2010

Dear all,

I'm not sure whether this email has been sent up to the linganth list  
yet - if so, please accept my apologies for the duplicate posting.   
This should give you just about *everything* you need to know about  
submitting abstracts for the upcoming AAA in 2010.  I'm hoping for  
lots of SLA participation--

Kira

**********************************
Dear Linguistic Anthropologists,

It's that time of year again:  The Society for Linguistic Anthropology
(SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological
Association's 2010 Annual Meeting, to be held in New Orleans, on
November 17-21.  As this year's SLA Section Program Editor, I am
writing to encourage you to submit invited sessions, volunteered
sessions, and volunteered papers and posters so that we can have an
exciting meeting in New Orleans this November.  The theme of the 2010
Meeting is "Circulation."  I hope that you will consider orienting
your panels to the conference theme (see below), although you do not
have to do so.

There are two deadlines for submission:  an internal SLA deadline for
Invited Sessions (Friday, March 5), and the AAA deadline for
volunteered sessions and volunteered papers/posters (5pm, Eastern
Time, Thursday, April 1).  While you must submit your materials to the
AAA website for both of these submission processes before these
respective deadlines at www.aaanet.org <http://www.aaanet.org> ,
Invited Session submissions must also be sent by the March 5th
deadline directly to the Program Chair (kira.hall at colorado.edu
<mailto:kira.hall at colorado.edu> ).  Your email to me should include a
copy of your session abstract as well as individual paper abstracts
from each of your proposed participants.  I will then send these out
to the SLA Program (6-member) Committee for review.  (Note: Invited
Session submissions to the AAA website by March 5 can still be
somewhat preliminary;  you can make changes on your submission up
until the general deadline on April 1.)

The word limit for a session abstract is 500 words and for a paper
abstract 250 words.  More detailed information on panel or paper
submission can be found on the AAA meetings website
(www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm
<http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm> ) under "Call for
Papers PDF."

This year, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology is encouraging
panel organizers to make use of the official SLA website for the
building of sessions: www.linguisticanthropology.org
<http://www.linguisticanthropology.org> .  We encourage SLA members as
well as nonmembers to visit the site and post descriptions of
panels-in-progress.  This is potentially a great way to find other
scholars working in your area of interest.  The email linganth list is
also a great place to advertise panel ideas; for information on how to
subscribe, visit
http://www.linguisticanthropology.org/resources/mailing-lists/.

INVITED SESSIONS

For those of you unfamiliar with the conference structure, Invited
Sessions are, in the words of the AAA, "innovative, synthesizing
sessions intended to reflect the state-of-the-art in the major
subfields and the thematic concerns of those fields."  The SLA Program
Committee is responsible for selecting sessions for invited status; we
are especially interested in panels that feature cutting edge research
and theory, topics that cross subdisciplines, and/or topics related to
this year's meeting theme.  If you are organizing a panel and would
like it to be considered for invited status, please notify me of your
interest via email (kira.hall at colorado.edu
<mailto:kira.hall at colorado.edu> ) as soon as possible, but by March
5th at the very latest (when the full panel submission is due).
Again, you must submit your materials both to the AAA website and to
me (preferably in pdf format) by the March 5th deadline.  (When you
submit your panel to the website, you will not yet know whether or not
it has been chosen for invited status, so simply submit it as a
volunteered session.  We can always change the session status later,
should your panel be selected as invited.)

Important note:  The SLA unfortunately has very few allotted spaces
for Invited Sessions:  we can choose either 3 single panels or 1
double panel plus 1 single panel.  We therefore encourage you to
consider the possibility of having another AAA section co-sponsor your
panel with the SLA, so that we can put more Invited Sessions on the
conference program.  If there are other sections that you feel your
panel might interest, please specify this on your application to me
and I will consult with the Program Section Editor in those sections
to see if there is a possibility for collaboration.  For a list of
other AAA sections, consult www.aaanet.org/sections/
<http://www.aaanet.org/sections/> .  (You can also contact other
Section Program Editors directly on your own, to see if co-sponsorship
might be a possibility.)

If your panel is selected for invited status, I will send you an email
to this effect in late March, with a password to use on-line.  You
will need this password to answer question 2 on the proposal form, so
as to complete your on-line submission by the deadline on April 1.

CONFERENCE THEME:

Please refer to the AAA website for more details on the theme, at
www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm
<http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm> .  The AAA
elaborates on the theme as follows:

"New Orleans has inspired the theme of the 2010 AAA Annual Meeting:
“Circulation.” This theme is meant to encourage us to think about what
happens when movement is the organizing trope of our questions,
methodologies, analyses and accounts. We can think in terms of
circulation across time as well as space, through different organizing
principles, and in a variety of shapes and forms.
The idea of circulation invites us to consider what triggers,
facilitates, constrains, disrupts or stops flows; what is at stake in
these processes, and for whom; and what their consequences might be
for humans and for the environment. It opens up questions about what
exactly circu lates: signs, objects or bodies. Do different things
circulate in different ways? Do they change or remain constant? What
new phenomena, arrangements and inequalities does circula tion
produce? How are resources and ways of understanding them identified,
made sense of, produced and distributed in the process? How and why do
rates and types of circulation vary across time and space? What
crystallizes and what continues to flow and reshape?
“Circulation" also invites us to think across boundaries, whether
those are boundaries organizing phenomena we seek to describe and
explain, boundaries within and across disciplines, or boundaries among
anthropologists or other social groups. It asks us to turn our
attention to zones of encounter, conjunctions and liminal passages. It
also requires us to ask whether “circulation” is a helpful trope for
the production of anthropological knowledge. What light does it shed
on the (increasingly widely circulating) concept of “culture”—argu
ably the central organizing construct of anthro pology—and on
anthropology itself?
We are interested in bringing together papers reflecting the
perspectives of all subfields and forms of anthropological practice,
or across them, investigating this theme with data, method and theory
oriented to all temporal and spatial horizons."

ADDITIONAL DETAILS:

The AAA has again asked Program Chairs to encourage their memberships
to consider allotting more time for discussion and experimenting with
non-traditional formats.  You can certainly fall back on the
tried-and-true standard sorts of formats if you wish, but the SLA
Program Committee is eager to consider variation.  This year, the AAA
is also encouraging submissions and presentations in languages other
than English, a development that is obviously of great interest to us
as linguistic anthropologists. If you are thinking of submitting a
bilingual or multilingual panel, I encourage you to contact me in
advance, as I will need to set up appropriate reviewers for assessing
the submission.

Finally: Registration waiver. In an effort to facilitate the
participation of and increase members' access to international and
community-based scholars at the AAA annual meetings, one registration
waiver will be made available to each of the 38 sections of the AAA
Section Assembly, of which SLA is a member. Unused or unallocated
waivers will go back into a pool and a lottery held to redistribute
them. Qualifying scholars need not be current AAA members and cannot
hold employment in university-based anthropology departments nor work
as practicing anthropologists in any of the discipline’s four main
subfields (archaeology, sociocultural, biological, linguistic).
Registration and membership fees will be waived for the qualifying
scholar nominated by sections to receive this waiver. Individual
qualifying scholars are responsible for all other
conference-associated costs.The AAA deadline for the waiver nomination
is March 1, so session organizers must contact Kira Hall before that
date with nominations. Along with information on the proposed session,
please provide the name of the qualifying scholar nominated to receive
the section’s waiver, and a short description of the nature of the
scholar’s proposed meeting participation as well as her or his
credentials and qualifications (i.e., non-anthropologist,
community-based scholar, international scholar, etc).

Please contact me if you have any questions.  I'm looking forward to
another exciting AAA Annual Meeting with strong SLA participation!

Kira Hall
Chair, SLA Program Committee

***************
Kira Hall, Associate Professor
Director, Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP)
Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology
Campus Box 295
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado  80309-0295
Phone: (303)492-2912
Fax: (303)492-4416