Dear Linguistic Anthropologists,
It’s that time of year again: The Society of Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 107th Annual Meeting, to be held in San Francisco, CA, on November 19-23, 2008. 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 San Francisco this November. The theme of the 2008 Meeting is “Inclusion, Collaboration, and Engagement.” I also hope that you will consider orienting your panels to the conference theme, although you do not have to do so.
Deadlines:
There are two deadlines for submission: (1) an internal SLA deadline for invited sessions (Monday, March 3 Friday, March 7), and (2) the AAA deadline for volunteered sessions and volunteered papers/posters (5pm, Eastern Time, April 1, 2008). While you must submit your materials to the AAA website for both of these submission processes before the stated deadlines, invited session submissions must also be sent by the March 3rd deadline directly to the SLA Program Section Editor. 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 6-member SLA Program Committee for review. (Note: Invited session submissions to the AAA website by March 3 March 7 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. This information is posted on the AAA meetings website under “Call for Papers and Participation Rules.” Before submitting, we encourage you to read through “Submission Guidelines and Requirements.”
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 as soon as possible, but by March 3rd at the very latest. Again, you must submit your materials both to the AAA website and to me by the March 3rd 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 session together with the SLA, so that we can put more invited sessions onto the conference program. If there are other AAA 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. You can also contact other Section Program Editors directly on your own, to see if co-sponsorship might be a possibility. For a list of other AAA sections, see here.
If your panel is selected for invited status, I will send you an email to this effect before April 1, with a password to use on-line. You will need this password for the proposal form so as to complete your on-line submission by the general deadline.
Conference Theme:
The AAA elaborates on the theme as follows:
This theme provides us the opportunity to critically examine anthropology’s relationships: across subfields, with other disciplines, with our many publics, and with contemporary social problems. The Executive Program Committee envisions healthy debate as we confront methodological, ethical, and epistemological concerns that unite and divide us; as well as discuss the challenges, risks, and opportunities for growth enabled by this dialog.Inclusion, Collaboration, and Engagement are ideas that have been central to anthropology throughout the discipline’s history and they are particularly important today. Anthropologists, scholars in other disciplines, and the general public have begun to recognize that anthropology has a great deal to contribute in this era of globalization. Still, our discipline remains a mystery to many and we are often not approached when social science information is needed. Moreover, anthropologists are conflicted about whether and how to participate in important public debates. Although there are the myriad attempts to develop a public interest anthropology, we are also wary of activism and public engagement, particularly as we recall government influence on anthropology during times of war.This theme deserves our scholarly exploration. Analysis of the processes that promote inclusion, collaboration and engagement for positive human outcomes is a common area of interest for both academic and applied/practicing anthropologists, as is clear communication of anthropological perspectives to the wider public.
Please refer to the AAA website for more details on the theme.
Additional details:
Finally, the AAA has again asked Program Section Editors 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. Please contact me if you have any questions. I’m looking forward to another exciting AAA Annual Meeting with strong SLA participation!
Kira Hall
University of Colorado
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