Americas

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, CANADA May 13-16 2009

In an era when anthropology is increasingly attentive to transnational connections, globalized geographies, and diasporic identities, the discipline itself is subject to new and challenging forms of deterritorialization and re-territorialization.

Anthropology has long been constituted by tensions between the gravitational force of its various national traditions and the pull toward an international intellectual cosmopolitanism. Yet the increasing presence of scholars from the world “periphery” in metropolitan universities, the rise to international prominence of subaltern academic centers, the deterritorialized concerns and priorities of funding institutions, and the growing transnational links between researchers, research institutions, and research subjects (among other factors) are further complicating the spatiality of anthropological practice.

These shifts, in turn, are transforming the way anthropologists examine the production of power relations, inequalities, and identities in local and global arenas.

The 2009 CASCA-AES conference to be held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver calls anthropologists and scholars from across the social sciences and the humanities to offer a fresh look at the increasingly transnational nature of knowledge production, at the resilience of regionalized academic hierarchies, as well as at the different ways in which the latter are being reconstituted and subverted. Additionally, the conference welcomes submissions related to the internationalization of social practices, power relations, and subjectivities and to any other theme associated with ongoing anthropological questions.

More information: http://aesonline.org/node/589

University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology, April 25- 27, 2008

This conference calls upon ethnography to widen our understanding of contemporary war, American power, and the structures and logics of security at domestic and international levels. We seek ethnographic understanding of global responses to recent deployments of the US military, and of US military actions in comparison to other forms of coercion, compellance, and intervention.

Reading US military theorists, we seek to understand the emerging interest in study of culture in the broad context of military responses to US military failures (and opportunities). We pursue the full implications of the connection now being sought by the US military between culture and insurgency and turn an anthropological lens on the nature of violence and order in the current era.

More information: http://anthroandwar.uchicago.edu/

The College of The Bahamas, February 21-23, 2008 at the Oakes Field Campus, Nassau

Topics:

* Language and Oppression
* Religion in Slavery: Agent Provocateur or Opiate?
* Slavery and Human Sensibility
* Power and Enslavement
* Kinship across the Diaspora
* Identity: Culture, Race and Gender
* Enslavement and Liberation: Pedagogy
* Liberation: Ideologies, Contexts and Dynamics
* Liberation: Simple Past or Present Continuous?

More information http://www.cob.edu.bs/News/AbolitionConference/

28. 11. – 2.12. 2007, Washington DC

In the contemporary world, the symbolic and material dimensions of inequality and power are being actively renegotiated in dynamic contexts of crisscrossing flows and overlapping fields in which civil societies, states, markets and capitals are being restructured according to the logic of a transnational, neoliberal culture. Accompanying, or perhaps as a result of this process, disparities of wealth, health, life-expectancy and military control appear to be widening.

If these trends continue to unfold, what are the implications for subsistence security, intercultural relations, human rights and well-being, and the prospects for environmental sustainability and world peace? What identities and practices are emerging to contest, craft alternatives to, and arrest these trends? What ideologies, social movements and political projects are being mobilized to create conditions for a future of greater equality and social justice?

To what extent are models and struggles for justice gendered, raced and grounded in culturally resonant expressions of class consciousness and opposition to heterosexism?

How does talk about difference implicate forms of symbolic and structural violence? Or does it reinforce regimes of truth that claim kinship, classlessness, color blindness, gender neutrality, and equal opportunity in the face of hunger, poverty, pandemics, homophobic hate crimes, mass rape, war and genocide?

More information: http://www.aaanet.org/annual_meeting/2007/