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Call for Papers ( Last
Date : 10th February, 2012)
Anthropologists' continued
engagement with micro-macro interface, in its efforts to emerge
as a generalizing science of human experiences, has instilled
the required skills among its practitioners to deal with
emerging questions that contemporary societies encounter in
globalizing era. Recent advances in information technology
creating a kind of viable world communication network has led to
the creation of ' world community of anthropologists' engaged in
a critical reflections and creative sharing on issues that
convey greater meaning in cross cultural perspectives. Though
envisioning a strong and vibrant ' global anthropology ' might
not appear to be free from hegemonic influence over global south
and therefore becomes problematic, negotiations are already
underway towards a creative synthesis of insights from regional
and national anthropologies for a potential world platform which
is not far from reality. This becomes more significant in term
of changing power equations globally where the North-South
divide is getting increasingly obliterated.
Globalization offers fresh
challenges for humanity across race, ethnicity, cultures,
regions, and nations. New forces of economy, technology, polity
and market have brought human destiny to a crossroad. Climate
change, food insecurity, water scarcities, natural disasters,
war, ethnic strife and violence, terrorism, tourism, migration
and population displacement are phenomena of serious concern
that need to be addressed from perspectives that offer
comparative and critical understanding of views from within and
the indigenous strategies to cope up within broader contexts.
Conventional concepts of anthropology like culture, society,
community and boundaries stand decosntructed and fresh
theoretical debates need to be negotiated across academic
tables, to look for a future anthropology of new discourses.
WCAA with its wide membership from
different corners of the world has made the first step in this
regard. Needless to mention that the collective voice of the
world council has further strengthened the regional or lesser
known concerns thereby creating a space for the marginal and
often unheard academic and political initiatives for enriching
and empowering the discipline. The Symposium proposes to engage
in a cross -cultural debate on emergent global Issues informed
through local ethnographies, informed by all branches of
anthropology but also going beyond the disciplinary boundaries
to reach out to the insights that civil society engagements with
policy and practice offer in different national traditions.
IAS & IAA also seek panel
proposals from Indian Scholars till 10 February 2020 in All
Branches of Anthropology revolving around the symposium theme
(with an abstract of 300 words).
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Contact Person: Soumendra Mohan Patnaik
President, Indian Anthropological Association
Department of Anthropology,University of Delhi,India
Emails: iaadelhi@rediffmail.com | copy marked to:
smp_du@yahoo.com
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Please indicate to which panel you are submitting your paper,
choosing one of the panels below. If none of the panels matches
your research interests, you can also submit a paper on the
overall theme of the symposium (as above).
Please send the Title of the paper
along with an abstract of 250 words latest by
10 February 2020
to
iaadelhi@rediffmail.com with a copy marked to: smp_du@yahoo.com
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Individual Panels within
the WCAA Symposium
1) Anthropology and Public Policy: Critical
Perspectives and Productive
Interventions Chair: Greg Acciaioli
Anthropologists
regularly provide advice to government agencies on a wide range
of policies, including policy planning, development, and
evaluation (e.g. Strang 2009). Such advice can benefit the
people affected by the policies concerned. At the same time, the
potential for complicity and a misuse of anthropological
knowledge has also sparked much critical debate within the
discipline The role of anthropologists has been subjected to
intense scrutiny, for example, in cases of resettlement (e.g.
transmigration in Indonesia and elsewhere), military campaigns
(e.g. Project Camelot, Project Minerva, etc.), and interventions
with Indigenous populations This panel seeks to stimulate debate
on anthropological entanglements with public policy in a range
of local, national and international contexts. Papers may
present case studies within the context of national traditions
of anthropological practice, examine the role of anthropology in
evaluating the impacts of international conventions, protocols
and treaties in particular national contexts, explore the uses
made of anthropological theories in the formulation of national,
regional and international policies, as well as other related
issues. It is hoped that this panel will contribute to a greater
awareness of the role that anthropology can play not only in
critically evaluating various policies, but also in promoting
more insightful integration of anthropological perspectives in
policy formulation and implementation in local, national, and
transnational contexts.
Strang, Veronica 2009 What
Anthropologists Do. Oxford and New York: Berg.
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2)
Anthropology, Development and the Shaping of Globalization
Chair: Thomas Reuter
The persistent
uneasy relationship between anthropology and development
reflects the awkward positioning of the discipline -- between
advocating for the right to self-determination of people in
developing countries or remote areas targeted for capitalist
development, and satisfying the vested interests of the agencies
or corporations who employ development anthropologists. This
problematic situation is dynamic and changing but it is not new,
considering the now well-publicized historical legacy of
complicity of anthropologists in colonization, warfare and other
forms of imperialist intervention in the affairs of other
peoples and nations. On the other hand, some of the social risks
of the development process may be mitigated or averted by the
critical application of anthropological knowledge to specific
development policies and projects, to the sector as a whole, or
indeed, to the entire process of development-driven
globalization. This panel provides an opportunity to theorize
development anthropology and the anthropology of development
further, towards a clearer vision of the kind of alternative and
inclusive globalization anthropologist may be willing to
support. Participants may also wish to discuss particular cases
that either illustrate "best practice" or exemplify a
contemporary form of malpractice in development anthropology.
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3)
Engaged Anthropology from a Global Perspective: Promise and
Problems
Chair: Setha Low
As a discipline,
anthropology has increased its public visibility in recent years
with its growing focus on engagement. The call for engagement
has elicited responses in all sub-fields of anthropology around
the world and most notably in nations outside of the hegemony of
US and UK academic tradition, and particularly in the Global
South. Nonetheless, despite the fact that engaged anthropology
is the center piece of anthropology in Latin America, Africa,
and Southeast Asia, there has not been an examination of its
practice, an analysis of how the academic and engaged work
together, much less the recognition of the importance of the
integration of academic and applied practice in most of the
world. This session will begin a discussion of the global
configuration of engagement and will attempt to understand the
different ways in which engaged anthropology works in various
global contexts. The session will focus on engaged anthropology
and the dilemmas it raises among these different national and
transnational forms of practicing anthropology.
Previous work by
Low and Merry (2010) on engaged anthropology in the US
distinguished a number of forms of engagement:
1) sharing and
support,
2) teaching and community outreach,
3) social critique,
4) collaboration,
5) advocacy and
6) activism.
Their analysis
suggests that engagement takes place during fieldwork, through
applied practice, in institutions, and as individual activists
work in the context of war, terrorism, environmental injustice,
human rights, and violence. This framework may or may not be
adequate to begin to understand engagement globally, but will be
used to start the conversation. Members of the WCAA are invited
to present materials on how engagement proceeds in their
associations, and the kinds of problems and conflicts that are
generated nationally, globally or academically by this
engagement. It is hoped that through this session, we will begin
to outline a global understanding of engagement as part of a
world anthropologies future.
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4) The
growing power of IRBs and the issue of ethics for anthropology
worldwide Chair Andrew ‘Mugsy’ Spiegel
The
establishment, especially in universities and research
institutions in the global north, of what are often described as
institutional review boards (IRBs), has increasingly forced
anthropologists to reconsider the ethical constraints on their
own and their students’ work. That is especially the case where
funding, especially from agencies in the global north, comes
with requirements that all proposals for research ‘involving
human subjects’ have to be cleared through a formally
constituted ethical review process. In some academic
institutions, medical and legal researchers and administrators
have become the driving force behind those processes, and they
have tended to come to dominate institution wide ethics review
committees (IRBs) and to impose unrealistic demands on
socio-cultural researchers. In part this derives from their
unfamiliarity with the processes of participant observation and
participatory research; in part from institutional inability to
distinguish ethics from legal liability.
This panel seeks
to provide opportunities for anthropologists from diverse
settings around the world to document the kinds of experiences
they and their students have had in negotiating the hurdles of
such IRB audits of their research proposals and the challenges
they have faced in attempting to address the ever tighter grip
that such IRBs are imposing, both in proposal preparation and in
undertaking research itself. An aspirational goal of the panel
is to be able to begin to develop guidelines for ethical
research practice that are able to accommodate the realities of
the open-ended kinds of research that constitute so much of
anthropology’s established, and tried and tested, methods.
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5)
Building a Network of Anthropologists Without Borders - ASF (Antropólogos
Sem fronteiras/ Antropólogos Sin Fronteras/ Anthropologues
Sans Frontières/ Anthropologists Without Borders)
Chairs: Virginia F. Dominguez and Carlos Caroso
In August 2010,
the World Council of Anthropological Associations (the WCAA)
began a serious discussion about establishing an action group
named ASF (which stands for Antropólogos Sem Fronteiras, in
Portuguese, Antropólogos Sin Fronteras in Spanish,
Anthropologues Sans Frontiers in French, and Anthropologists
Without Borders in English). The WCAA Task Force involves
anthropologists from countries around the world and different
areas of expertise. Much like other borderless (or
border-crossing) professional action groups, the aim of ASF is
to establish a non-profit organization and global network of
anthropologists, drawing on knowledge and experience acquired by
anthropologists around the world and connecting groups that seek
the expertise of specialist anthropologists able to serve as
critical readers, examiners, and reviewers of reports and
documents about which they (the non-anthropologists approaching
ASF) may have substantial doubt.
In line with
contemporary positions advocating engaged and action
anthropology, the intention on this panel is to stimulate
discussion of views about such an organization and the ways it
may become an important tool in bringing information about
anthropology to others, including about anthropology's role in
understanding people and collaborating in (possibly) solving
various sorts of social conflict, especially those related to
sociocultural differences, differences of gender, ethnicity, and
ways of life, among many others.
The panel calls
for papers and presentations that discuss how the basic methods
and field study strategies of academic anthropology (extended
fieldwork, participant observation, and collaborative research)
could contribute to this project and the views that underlie it.
These papers and presentations could address
(1) how (and
whether) it is possible to foster deep-seated connections
between practicing anthropologists and those among (and
alongside whom) they conduct research, and
(2) how this
experience could contribute to establishing ASF as a worldwide
network that may be called upon to share their views and
expertise in dealing with situations entailing risk and
vulnerability, including social, cultural, environmental, and
health cases.
Registration Window will open soon with further details (on
the website) |
