This year’s AAA meetings have the highest number of registrants on record. As one of the student assistants on the Executive Program Committee, the level of interest was both reassuring and daunting. Last month, I traveled to Washington DC to the AAA offices to help with the enormous task of scheduling the academic program. It was great to see the “backstage” spaces of the organization and to understand the labour process of putting together the meetings.
Staff members, Jason Watkins and Carla Fernandez, had already been hard at work preparing for Dr. Monica Heller, Dr. Rob Albro and myself to arrive. In a complex web of flip charts, coloured labels and index cards we sorted and slotted an enormous amount of academic knowledge. I can’t say much more, but I can say SLA members will be intrigued to see the ways in which the conference theme Circulation has been taken up. There are also some other exciting program elements which I will talk about in upcoming posts. The full program will be online very soon!
Nice to have SLA members on the inside! Glad you can share your experience with us, thriugh the blog.
Did you feel that linguistic anthropology was well-represented?
Fascinating to hear about the process!
Representation is always a fraught process!
There were lots of considerations we had to make while scheduling. The priority for the smaller sections is to avoid overlap so all members can attend all sessions. With larger sections it is a matter of equal access to “prime” slots. I will say a lot of work has been done by section program editors before we even show up. They have done the extended reading and ranking of proposals. Some make additional helpful notes about when to schedule particular panels, and which ones to avoid having in the same time slot. Section editors know their members much better than we do, so we follow their advice as closely as possible.
The call for Executive Sessions this year was specific about bringing together multiple branches of anthropology into a single conversation. We also made efforts to encourage people to submit abstracts in languages other than English. Section editors were very responsive to the idea and were prepared to seek out reviewers in other languages. We hope to have this be a more visible option in the coming years. We are also experimenting with ways of facilitating multilingual presentations to help these sessions be fairly attended.
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