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 2011 Annual Meeting, which will be held this year in Montreal, Quebec, November 16-20. This year’s theme is: “Traces, Tidemarks, and Legacies”. 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. This process has changed somewhat this year, so that all proposals will now be submitted directly to the AAA site. The website will be open for submission beginning March 1; 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). 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
This year we will be conducting the SLA graduate student paper prize competition a little differently than in the past (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 2011 AAA meetings in Montreal, 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 either a graduate or undergraduate 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 clarify, 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.
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
the SLA mailing-list page.
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.
The organizer 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. I’m looking forward to another exciting AAA Annual Meeting with strong SLA participation!
Jocelyn Ahlers
Chair, SLA Program Committee