CFP for AAA: "Open Sourcery"

[Susan Seizer]

Dear LingAnth Colleagues,

Please see this call for paper submissions for a panel I plan to submit for the AAA 2013 meetings, in collaboration with my colleague here at IU, Susan Lepselter. I hope some of you will consider presenting a paper on the panel. Feel free to direct any further questions you may have to me.

Interested parties should submit a paper idea by direct email to us at sseizer at indiana.edu & slepselt at indiana.edu as soon as possible.

best,
susan


CFP for the AAA 2013 meetings in Chicago
Conference theme: “Future Publics, Current Engagements.”

Panel: “Open Sourcery: collaboration and confusion in the E-thnographic age”
Panel co-organizers: Susan Lepselter & Susan Seizer, Indiana University

As anthropologists of the contemporary world, we already write with our subjects’ responses in mind. But how do changing technologies of communicative circulation affect both the potential for and the limitations on our ethnographic interpretations today?  New forms of circulation change the ethnographic relationship in ways both promisingly collaborative and fraught with the possibility of unforeseen consequences. Texting, emailing, blogging, facebooking, and tweeting about select aspects of what we are doing and thinking, and where, when and with who, makes for a promise of communicative clarity that is simultaneously bounded by conventions of technological format and plagued by informational clutter. The ubiquity and velocity of circulation, along with the intensified capacity for ethnographic material to appear in reappropriated and seemingly random contexts, may affect longstanding anthropological understandings of ethics, dialog, and subject consent. How might all these rapid changes affect our ideas of audience, ownership, performance and risk? If we open our work to collaboration through use of these new arenas of communication with our subjects, do these relations change the ethnographic product of our research and if so, to what effect? Such questions of engagement – along with the particularity of the styles, forms, and languages encouraged by new technologies of circulation -- seem to increasingly shape and color the choices we must make about ethnographic representation. This panel aims to bring together papers that consider how contemporary ethnography might contribute to a rethinking of the discipline's epistemological, methodological, and areal foundations as we work with and in a landscape of changing communicative possibility.


Susan Seizer
Associate Professor
Communication & Culture
Indiana University
800 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-9700
phone: 812-856-1986
fax: 812-855-6014
And now, two project websites!:
roadcomicsmovie.com
stigmasofthetamilstage.com