Submissions Open – ACYIG Invited Session Proposals for Nov. 2015 AAA Meeting

Dear ACYIG members,
The deadline for submitting proposals for the 114th AAA Annual Meeting is coming soon. The meetings will be held Nov. 18-22, in Denver, CO.

This year, ACYIG may INVITE one session. This session will receive the “Invited by ACYIG” tagline in the AAA program.

We are now soliciting proposed sessions for ACYIG invited status.

For consideration, please submit your session proposal to both EJ Sobo and Aviva Sinervo (esobo@mail.sdsu.eduasinervo@ucsc.edu) by Wednesday, April 1, 2015.
Session proposals must include the following information:
  • Session title
  • Name, affiliation, and email of Session Organizer
  • Session abstract (no more than 500 words)
  • Names, affiliations, emails, and paper titles for all session members
  • Name(s) and affiliation(s) of discussant(s), if applicable

Decisions will be made by Wednesday, April 8th.

The AAA’s call for papers follows: 

“Familiar/Strange – Casting common sense in new light by making the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar is a venerable strategy used across anthropology’s subfields. It can denaturalize taken-for-granted frames and expand the horizons of students and public alike. But useful as this process of estrangement and familiarization can be, it can lapse into exoticism through “us/them” comparisons that veil historical and contemporary relations of power and powerlessness within and across societies, begging the question of the normative templates (of the “West,” of “whiteness”) that lurk behind. As an orienting theme for the 2015 Denver meeting of the AAA, we invite proposals for Executive Program Committee sponsorship (sessions, forums, special events, installations or media submissions) that press us to grapple with how and why this strategy proves both productive and obstructive, considering what it simultaneously opens up and ‘nails down.’ We particularly seek proposals that bring together and foster dialogue among subfields as we scrutinize the multiple uses and effects of this durable anthropological ‘way of knowing.'”