National Association of Student Anthropologists (NASA) 2002 Annual Report to the AAA

National Association of Student Anthropologists (NASA) 2002 Annual Report to the AAA
Submitted by Eric Haanstad

Membership and Finances:
Membership in NASA continues to grow dramatically, due in large part to the 1999 restructuring of our section dues which allow members to join for $1 if they are already a member of one or more AAA section(s). Membership grew from 655 in December of 2001 to 871 in October of 2002 (the latest available data) and will doubtless be much higher after members who joined during the annual meeting are processed. The budget for 2002 was prepared by NASA Secretary-Treasurer, Chad Morris, and President, Eric Haanstad. As of October 2002, total revenues were $450 over the projected revenues of $1,000. Expenses for 2002 were budgeted at $3,500, but actual expenditures for the year are projected at roughly half that amount. We feel the rapid and sustained growth of our membership as well as a healthy fund balance over $10,000 justified the flexibility of a projected deficit budget, particularly in the $1,500 available for the Carrie Hunter Tate and Travel Awards which are used to recruit as well as maintain existing members. In addition, NASA maintains an growing fund balance of roughly $3,500 from the Distinguished Teaching Award, which was discontinued in 1996. At this year's annual meeting, I began discussing with AAA Resource Development Director, Larry Rzepka, how to ensure that the future use of these funds will conform to AAA resource guidelines while at the same time remain a source of maximum benefit to our student members.

AAA Meeting Activities
NASA Program Editor, Lori Johns, again organized an impressively diverse number of activities at the AAA Annual meeting in New Orleans. NASA sponsored two invited sessions: "Keeping It Anthropological: Defining 'Community' in Medical Anthropology Research" and "Conspiring to Inspire: Students, Faculty, and Social Engagement." We also sponsored two other sessions, "Firing the Health Fairy: Community Health, the Urban Environment, and Realities of Intervention" and "Culture Change, Diaspora, and Identity." NASA sponsored a Poster Session and two workshops, the Second Annual NASA/AAA Mentor Workshop, which continues to be an successful way of pairing students with faculty from a variety of fields, as well as a Field School Workshop. Finally, NASA sponsored a "Student Open Forum" for the first time this year. The student forum was an opportunity for free discussion of student issues within AAA, academia, and our own communities. Although the AAA Executive Board denied a request from AAA Section Convener, Frank Proschan and NASA for funding of a similar forum lunch event in 2003, the forum was a big success, and will continue at next year's annual meeting. The forum spawned a student listserv made up largely of student section representatives from across the AAA as a way of sharing information, cooperation and opportunities throughout the year.

At the NASA Business Meeting, Nominations Committee Chair and Carrie Hunter Tate Award Chair, Carla Guerron-Montero presented the graduate Carrie Hunter Tate Award to Rory McCarthy (Western Michigan U) and the undergraduate award to Erin Andrews (U Georgia). Lori Johns, Chair of the NASA Travel Award Committee, presented Travel Awards to Karen Kapusta-Pofahl (U Minnesota), Donald C. Wood (U Tokyo), Jason Miller (Western Washington U), Maxine Oland (Northwestern U) and Jennifer R. Wies (U Kentucky). The business meeting continues to be a good resource for recruiting members to participate on NASA committees, publication efforts and other activities for the coming year.

Communications
NASA Editor, Tara Hefferan was officially elected to office in November of 2002, but also served as interim editor throughout the previous year. She continues to create an informative monthly AN column. The column is a well-rounded mixture of section announcements, items of interest from members, and insights from her research. Tara sent a call for submissions for the NASA column to fifty anthropology departments around the US with the goal of raising the profile of the AN, and to identify student contributors. In addition to the section column, NASA maintains a well-populated listserv that is also used as a communication tool in addition to important e-mails to the entire membership provided through AAA lists. Recently, NASA restarted publishing its opportunities list through the listserv, which is a digest of opportunities for student awards, jobs, resources, and calls for papers compiled from the web. The opportunities list is an important benefit for NASA members and we hope to maintain and build it as a resource in the future. One problem with the listserv is the lack of non-advertising-based hosting space available. Yahoogroups currently offers a variety of features, but the number of ads would make a private AAA-based listserv based on current membership enrollment vastly preferable. We encourage AAA to explore the possibility of offering private listserv hosting and would welcome an opportunity to assist the Association in establishing such a resource. Finally, the NASA website was redesigned this year by Web Editor, Jessica Vernieri, and we have added a History of NASA as well as a planned on-line NASA publication Inquiry/Action: the Journal of Student Anthropology to replace the printed Bulletin of NASA which was discontinued in 1999.

Outreach Efforts
NASA continues to search for ways to cooperate and share ideas with other like-minded AAA sections, journals, clubs and associations. As mentioned previously, this year the Student Open Forum brought together student leaders from across the association for the first time in its history. We hope that this event will encourage much more cross-section cooperation in the future. In addition, NASA has continued its long-standing efforts for creating student representation in the association and section-wide governance of AAA. From the section's origins more than a decade and a half ago, NASA has been instrumental in stressing the importance of student participation throughout AAA. In its student members, AAA has an enthusiastic and creative resource for the future and our section continues to create opportunities for increased student participation wherever possible. We also approached several sections without student representatives about the possibility of including students in their governing boards as well as offered assistance to all sections in identifying candidates for existing student representative seats.

This year, we requested that the AAA Executive Board consider a proposal to add an additional student seat to the Board. Our request was based on the fact that student members in AAA consistently provide roughly one-third or thirty-three percent of AAA total membership (AAA Membership/Subscriber Report 2001/2002), yet are only provided with one-fifteenth or seven percent representation on the AAA Executive Board. The proposal reasons that the creation of an additional student seat on the AAA Executive Board would allow students from more than one subfield to be represented at a given time on the Board, would provide an invaluable opportunity for students to participate in the governance of AAA, and would more accurately represent the total membership of the Association. Although the proposal did not pass, it was suggested that NASA nominate multiple students for undesignated spaces on the board and on various AAA committees. NASA nominated a number of students for AAA positions including the existing student seat and undesignated seats as well as the undesignated seats on the Minority Affairs Committee, Committee for the Status of Women in Anthropology and the Public Policy Committee.

Changes in the Bylaws or Governance Structure
In 2002, a committee made of NASA members and Secretary-Treasurer, Chad Morris, who served as a consultant, created a policy for travel reimbursement to NASA officers. The policy was drafted as a bylaws change and passed in the AAA spring ballots. This bylaws change was necessary to clarify the current travel reimbursement policy and ensure oversight and fairness regarding future reimbursement for officers.

Activities Related to the Long-Range Plan
This year, NASA provided a statement to the AAA Long Range Planning committee which details our contributions to the long-range plan as well as suggestions (reprinted partially below) ranging from expanding student representation in the AAA to greater institutionalization of practicing and applied anthropology in universities. I will be happy to provide additional copies of this statement to anyone who requests more information ejhaanstad@wisc.edu

Future Activities
Although relatively informal, the following serve as a rough guide for future NASA activities this year.
I. Create greater institutional impact of NASA within AAA through networking and Student Representatives
II. Offer expanded membership participation/benefits
III. Increase membership
IV. Provide student communication networks and organizational transparency
V. Creation of on-line publication and website expansion
VI. Explore bylaws changes that may be necessary to make NASA effective

Recommendations to the Long-Range Planning Committee
Reprinted from NASA's "Long-Range Planning Input 2002"

* We would like the association to continue to make itself affordable and accessible to student participation. Student rates for association membership, annual meeting costs, publications and special events should always be kept as low as possible. One of our goals is to work towards student representation in all applicable sections. We would also like to see increased student representation in section and association-wide committees and task-forces. To this end, we would like the opportunity to participate more directly in AAA long-range planning by the addition of a student seat on the planning committee. If this seat was adopted by the AAA membership, NASA would be happy to provide a commitment to assist the nominations process by identifying a range of student nominees for the position.

* We would like to see the AAA expand its public engagement initiatives, not only in the area of government or public policy, but to wider public arenas as well. Encouraging anthropologists to contribute to public debates will increase the vitality and relevance of the discipline. AAA should continue to provide and increase opportunities for media training, popular publishing and community action among anthropologists. Public intellectual engagement is common outside of the United States and can be used as a model for American anthropologists who want to make greater public contributions.

* Beyond the ethics training goals of AAA (currently targeted only towards graduate students), the Association should explore methods of interaction with the agencies which currently regulate the ethics of research among students and professional anthropologists: institutional review boards (IRBs) on human subjects research. These boards are often based on guidelines for medical and psychological research which differ considerably from the methods most anthropologists employ. Moreover, these committees often seem to lack understanding of what most anthropologists do, and as a result, create unnecessary institutional obstacles to anthropological research. Finally, the research environment fostered by most review boards is more concerned with legal liability than ethicality and the types of guidelines outlined in AAA's statement on ethics. Therefore, the discipline as a whole would be well served by an association-wide effort to interact with IRBs. This effort could be accomplished through the creation of a AAA statement addressed to IRBs which outlines how the federal guidelines for human subjects research relate specifically to anthropological research.

* Since the creation of sections within AAA, there seems to be a trend towards increased specialization within sections and reduced interaction among them. Any effort to reduce the increasing exclusivity and specialization among sections should be encouraged within the Association. The attempt to find alternatives to sections through interest groups and alternate structures is a step in the right direction. NASA is in a unique position to benefit from increased section interaction, because we share a common experience as students rather than as part of a particular sub-discipline or world area.

* Similarly, as our members can increasingly expect to find job opportunities in anthropological practice, NASA is somewhat concerned that the actions set forth in the AAA long range plan may actually serve to further divide practitioners and traditional anthropologists -- particularly as the plan seemingly does not address possible AAA-initiated steps toward integrating practicing and traditional anthropology within the academy. NASA asserts that a strong future anthropology depends much more on institutionalized academic valuation of practice, as opposed to seeking out token practitioners to sit on committees. We highly encourage, for instance, efforts toward AAA advocacy of teaching methodology and research design in anthropological graduate programs. Graduates of programs in which such practical skills are ignored are ill-prepared for changes in a discipline that is limited in academic openings, is growing in number of graduates, and is attempting to demonstrate usefulness in policy arenas to a multidisciplinary audience.

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