Dear ACYIG colleagues,

We are organizing a panel for this year’s AAA meeting in December in Washington, DC. A tentative title is “Unsettling the Trope of Change: Negotiations with ‘Tradition’ among Contemporary Youth.” Papers on this panel will draw on research with youth (broadly defined) to  unsettle the common dichotomy between change and tradition.

In our research (Bonnie’s in India, Mindy’s in Mexico and the US), we both work with youth and teens who are generally the first generation in their families to attend school and to plan for (or are currently in) higher education. They have grown up with the goal of producing very different adult identities within society than those of their parents. However, we continue to see unexpected continuitieswith “traditional culture”that do not fit with a Euro-American model of individualization in Late Modernity. We see them often prioritize their family roles and maintain a strong sense of familism, despite simultaneously aiming for such modern economic identities that in the West link to the loss of familism.
While we tend to situate our own research within a context of social change, we realize that we need to unsettle this anthropological trope to enable a more nuanced understanding of growing up, in order to theorize how young people embrace these seemingly conflicting local and global ideals for personhood.

Please let us know as soon as possible if you are interested in joining our panel (email: brichard@ucla.edu). We will need abstracts by the end of March, but need to hear from you soon if you are thinking about submitting with us so that we can plan accordingly.

Bonnie Richard (UCLA) & Mindy Steinberg (UCLA

113th  AAA Annual Meeting Call for Papers and ACYIG Sponsorship Instructions

This year’s AAA meeting will be held in Washington DC (December 3-7). The theme is Producing Anthropology (see below).

April 15 is the proposal deadline for all sessions, individual paper and poster presentations, media submissions and special events via www.aaanet.org.

As ACYIG members, there are two special things to keep in mind:

1.      When submitting, be sure to select ACYIG as your second review section. All ACYIG members should do this.

2.      In addition, if you are organizing a session and would like ACYIG sponsorship for your session (which means that your session becomes one of two sessions chosen to receive the “Organized by ACYIG” tagline and an endorsement from the executive board program committee), please alert ACYIG by Tuesday April 1 (please email your materials as one document or pdf file to esobo@mail.sdsu.edu). You should send:

a.       Session organizer names, affiliations, and contact information

b.      Session title

c.       Session abstract (250 words or less)

d.      Names/affiliations of confirmed participants & their paper titles

To prepare to submit your sessions to ACYIG for sponsorship, we encourage you to use the listserv to publicize ideas and solicit collaborators. Send out a draft abstract and invite interested colleagues to contact you; submit ideas on hot topics around which you’d like to see others organize sessions (or installations); and/or offer up your own proposal to see if anyone would like to include it in a panel they already have organized. Some ideas we’ve heard being floated for sessions or installations include: princess pornography; ethno-theories of education; child iconography; developmental science; digitizing childhood; production of child health; and learning gender.

Remember, as per the AAA Meetings Website, “In  addition to the familiar, productive formats of individual papers, organized  panels [etc. the AAA now welcomes] Installations—performances, recitals, conversations, author-meets-critic  roundtables, salon reading workshops, oral history recording sessions and other  alternative, creative forms of intellectual expression.” As you plan, then, feel free to be creative! Be aware, also, that double sessions are no longer allowed.

More from the AAA Meetings Website: “Producing Anthropology, the 2014 annual meeting theme, offers a provocation to examine the truths we encounter, produce and communicate through anthropological theories and methods. What are our epistemological commitments to the ways we make scientific knowledge today? What impact does our epistemic convictions and predilections have, intended or not? What goals do we want to set for ourselves? What partnerships should we build? What audiences should we seek?  And how will the truths we generate change as we contend with radical shifts in scholarly publishing, employment opportunities, and labor conditions for  anthropologists, as well as the politics of circulating the anthropological  records we produce?”