SLA Call for 2012 AAA

Tue Jan 24 17:56:49 UTC 2012

>From Jocelyn Ahlers, Chair of the SLA Program Committee:

_______

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
2012 Annual Meeting, which will be held this year in San Francisco,
California, November 14-18.  This year’s theme is: “Borders and Crossings”.
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.  We are also including the call for submissions for graduate
student papers for the SLA’s Annual Student Essay Prize; please take a look
at that call if you are a graduate student.  Below I have included the
information that you should need to submit your proposals.

*Invited Sessions*:  *March 15 deadline*

The first deadline is for the submission of proposals for invited sessions.
All proposals should be submitted directly to the AAA site.  The website
will be open for submission beginning February 15; the deadline for final
submissions is March 15.  The invited session proposal requires a complete
list of presenters and a panel abstract (500 words). Ideally, each
presenter will also submit his or her abstract as well (250 words).  In the
past, panels which include both session and paper abstracts have been
ranked more highly, as the submission reviewers are better able to assess
the panel as a whole.  We are particularly interested in panels that
feature cutting edge research and theory, topics that cross subdisciplines,
and/or topics related to this year's meeting theme.

As in the past, all panels submitted for invited status by March 15 will be
reviewed and ranked by a panel of reviewers.  (If you are interested in
serving in this capacity, please get in touch with me.)  All AAA sections
receive a set number of invited session slots; last year we had three
invited sessions on the program.  Co-sponsored sessions are one way to
spread those slots further by sharing the time allotment with another
section; please indicate on your proposal if there is another section that
might be interested in co-sponsoring your proposed invited session.

Notifications will be made by April 4.  Panels which are not accepted for
invited session status will be automatically rolled over into volunteered
session submissions (those submissions can be altered on the AAA website,
if desired, between April 4 and April 15).  Those panels which are accepted
will have until the April 15th deadline to finalize their submissions on
the AAA website.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions
about your proposal, but do remember: all submission must be made to the
AAA website – if you just send them to us, then they are not officially
submitted.

*Volunteered sessions, individual papers, individual posters*:  *April 15
deadline*

Proposals for volunteered sessions, individual papers, and individual
posters must be submitted to the AAA website by April 15.

*Graduate Student Paper Prize Competition*:  *March 15 deadline*

Due to the success of last year’s Graduate Student Paper Prize roundtable
at the AAA, we will be including another roundtable in the program this
year (note, the undergraduate student paper prize competition is not
affected by this and will be announced as usual).  The SLA is calling for
graduate students to submit papers to the section by March 15th; the winner
and finalists will then be invited to participate in an SLA-sponsored
workshop at the 2012 AAA meetings in San Francisco, along with two senior
linguistic anthropologists (to be announced), to conduct a discussion based
on the papers’ research results.  In order to be eligible for the award,
the applicant must have been a graduate student in a degree-granting
program when the paper was written; must be the sole author of the paper;
and must submit the paper no more than two years after it was written.  The
paper must be an original work based on original research conducted by the
author.  It will be evaluated on the basis of clarity, significance to the
field, and substantive contribution.  The paper should be suitable for
submission to the *Journal of Linguistic Anthropology* and must not exceed
25 double-spaced pages, not including bibliography.  At the time of
submission for this competition, the paper must not have been published or
submitted for publication.

The paper must be submitted electronically in either .pdf or .doc format by
the March 15 deadline.  It should be sent to Jillian Cavanaugh, SLA Member
at Large (at the email below).  The cover sheet should include the title of
the paper; the author’s name; the author’s email address; the author’s
college or university affiliation; and the name of the faculty member who
served as the student’s advisor with respect to the writing of the
paper.   Please
contact Jillian Cavanaugh with any questions: jcavanaugh at brooklyn.cuny.edu.

*General information and other thoughts*:

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology would like to encourage panel
organizers to make use of the SLA website for the building of sessions:
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/.

The AAA has again asked Program Chairs to encourage their memberships to
consider allotting more time for discussion and experimenting with
non-traditional formats.  Sessions can be one of two lengths: 1.75 hours or
3.75 hours.  While all of the 15-minute time slots in the sessions must be
scheduled, the SLA Program Committee is eager to consider variation in the
way that they are used.  We also encourage 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.

The AAA adheres to a very strict "one paper/one other role" rule.  A person
can give one paper and be a discussant or be a chair. Organizer/chair
counts as one role in the same session.  No exceptions; one paper plus one
other role. Participation in special events like chairing a business
meeting or leading a workshop are not included in this calculation.

The organizer of a volunteered session MUST be clear in directing the
session to a particular section for review, and the same goes for authors
of volunteered papers.  Similarly, if you would like a session to be
considered for co-sponsorship, be sure to include all interested sections
for review.  If session organizers or authors are in doubt as to where
their proposals will be best received, please contact all of the relevant
section program editors for preliminary assessments before completing your
submission.

Session organizers must check the progress of the session to make sure each
participant registers and/or submits a paper/poster by April 15. If a
participant role is incomplete -either by not registering or by not
submitting an abstract - the participant will not appear as part of their
session in the preliminary or final program.

If a panel includes a non-anthropologist, this person may apply to have the
Association membership waived but must still pay the meeting registration
fee.  The non-member (not the organizer of the panel) can apply for the
waiver when they go through the submission process.

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

Jocelyn Ahlers
Chair, SLA Program Committee