The AES board is in the midst of organizing several programs for the 2008-2009 academic year. First, AES has selected thirty-three panels as invited sessions for the AAA meetings in November. Many of these are co-sponsored with other sub-sections. A small sampling of invited panels include “New Landscapes of American Inequality,” “On the Edge of the Dream: Narratives of Arrival and Foreclosure,” “War, Debt and Charity,” “Global Comings of Age: Elders, Generations and Late Life in the 21st Century,” and “Civilizing Children: The Last Primitives?” A complete list of AES invited sessions can be found on the AES website: http://www.aesonline.org.
Spring Conference
AES and CASCA are co-hosting the annual spring conference at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from May 13-16, 2009. The conference theme is “Transnational Anthropologies: Convergences and Divergences in Globalized Disciplinary Networks.” Conference organizers Jacqueline Solway and Gaston Gordillo state “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 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.” Registration for the conference will begin in early fall through the AES website.
Book Prizes
After a one-year hiatus, AES will resume its book prizes. The awards go to works that speak to contemporary social issues with relevance beyond the discipline and the academy. Ethnographies and critical works in contemporary theory – single-authored or multi-authored but not edited collections – are eligible. There are two separate competitions for the books prizes: the Sharon Stephens prize is given for a junior scholar’s first book, and the Senior Book Prize recognizes a work by a senior scholar. The prizes will be awarded in alternate years, starting with the Sharon Stephens prize in 2009, which will include books published during the previous two years. Please see the AES website for more detailed information and submission guidelines.
