It’s that time of the year when we need to condense and translate our hard work and intellectual passions into proposals for the upcoming AAA meetings. As always, we encourage anyone proposing a paper, poster, or session dealing with Africa and the African Diaspora to submit through AfAA. The deadline for general submissions for the 2016 meetings is April 15.
Submissions that are clearly written, timely, relevant and which speak to the theme of the meetings are given priority. The 115th Annual Meeting theme, ‘Evidence, Accident, Discovery’, raises issues central to debates within both anthropology and politics in a neoliberal, climate-changing, social media-networked era: What counts as evidence? What does evidence count for? What are the underlying causes and foreseeability of violence and catastrophes? How is misfortune interpreted, and causality, attributed in cases of humanly-preventable harm? And in the give and take of relationships on which anthropological evidence typically depends, who gets to claim that they discovered something?
We welcome proposals that debate these and other questions stimulated by the conference theme, in the opportunity that our annual meeting provides for “big tent” debate. There is more information on the theme at the AAA website. We welcome your individual papers, posters and organized sessions. We especially encourage submissions for roundtables. These are very popular as they focus on audience participation, which, AAA surveys have shown, is one of the most desirable experiences people hope to have at the meeting. For this reason we also encourage leaving discussion time in organized sessions. AfAA is allotted two slots for invited sessions on the program, and we select these from among your submissions. For invited sessions we try to negotiate co-sponsorship with other sections. Co-sponsorship is important because it enables us to turn our allotted two invited slots into four co-sponsored ones listed in the program. If you want your session considered for invited status get in touch with us early, and identify another section that you feel would be a good co-sponsor. If you have any questions contact AfAA Program Editors David Turkon (dturkon@ithaca.edu) and Kristin Hedges (khedges@email.arizona.edu).