SVA Annual Report 2002

SVA Annual Report 2002

From: Carol Hermer, SVA President [2001-2003] (chermer@u.washington.edu, chermer@pipeline.com)

I: Board Members
The 2002 elections saw two members, Mary Strong and Jeff Himpele reelected and new members Joyce Hammond and Rolf Husmann elected, replacing Anne Zeller and Najwa Adra. At the 2002 meetings Peter Biella took over as President-Elect replacing Past President Harald Prins. Mary Strong will be our new Secretary and Marilyn Thomas-Houston continues as Treasurer

II. Membership
For the past several years membership has hovered around 550 but this year it seems to be growing and for the past six months has been around 600. There is one area that continues to worry, and that is the number of lapsed memberships. Figures indicate that, in an average year, approximately 50 per cent of members change over. We are trying to initiate several measures to maintain interest in the society year round. More troubling is the drop in VAR subscribers, almost certainly attributable to the couple of years when the journal was not issued regularly. With the appointment of a new editor, see below, we expect this trend to reverse.

III. Financial Status.
Because of the fact that the SVA has been very frugal in its operations and also because of the decrease in printing and distribution costs due to the delay in publishing the journal, our fund balance remains very good. This year we did, however, actively engage in spending to decrease it, as a continuously growing balance suggests we are not giving our members their money¹s worth. We have therefore submitted a negative balance in our budget for 2003 but expect this to be a one-year situation. Our main extra expenditure this year will be to support the publication of papers presented at a meeting in Gottingen in June 2001 which celebrated the history of Visual Anthropology. We have also allocated some extra funding to jury reimbursement for the film festival, although still requiring jury members to accept some of the burden of their expenses. A major budget concern is still VAR¹s publication backlog (see VAR Report) and though we expect any decline in membership due to the VAR problem to be temporary, we plan to make up the two missing issues in the next two years, which will require additional expenditure.

IV. SVA Scientific Program 2002
Overall, we can be satisfied that the SVA has once again managed to present an interesting program. Unfortunately there were major scheduling conflicts. In a total of seven sessions sponsored by SVA, three were scheduled concurrently on Thursday and two scheduled concurrently on Friday. I must urge the next AAA Program Editor to be vigilant about conflicting sessions. For a small group like SVA, having concurrent visual-anthropology related sessions is disadvantageous to both presenters and audiences. Another issue that is of concern to SVA is the high charge for the use of LCD projectors during the meetings. With the increase in use of Powerpoint as well as video this should be a check-off item on the session form, no different from overheads and VCRs. Almost every SVA session requires the use of these projectors and the cost per meeting becomes very high.

a) Sessions:
This year the SVA sponsored two invited sessions, four volunteered sessions and one poster session. Coincidentally, many of the sessions were focused on traditional art and/or photography. In addition Joanna Scherer organized a special conference session on anthropological cartoons, together with an exhibition held in the exhibitor¹s hall.

b) Workshops: This year there were two SVA sponsored workshops, on Digital Anthropology. and Field Photography. These continue to prove popular with the general membership.

V. Visual Anthropology Review Journal
The journal continues to be our most tangible benefit of membership BUT there continues to be delays in its delivery to members (currently, we are one year behind schedule). The guest-edited special edition described by Harald Prins in last year¹s report did not help the shortfall as it replaced rather than supplemented the regular issues. David Sapir still has one issue to produce under his term as editor. The new editor is Peter Biella. He will produce two issues this year and Sapir one. Next year we expect two issues from Biella and a special guest edited issue on Edmund Carpenter. This should bring the journal up to date by the end of 2004.

VI: SVA Film, Video and Interactive Media Festival
The 2002 Festival received 65 entries ? about the same as last year. Two films were awarded Awards of Excellence, four received Awards of Commendation and three won Awards of Honorable Mention.

VII: Section News Column in AN
In spite of restrictions on space, editor Marcelo Fiorini publishes information for members as well as reports of new and ongoing visual anthropology research.

VIII: Visual Research Conference
The 18th Annual Visual Research Conference, organized by Tom Blakely and Peter Biella, included ten long presentations and a sponsored guest from South Africa, discussing a media campaign against AIDS. Next year, in an effort to have the conference conform to the timelines of the generalmeetings, a committee of three, including Blakely, will oversee it.

IX: SVA on the Web
The new SVA website is now in place, at www.societyforvisualanthropology.org. It is hoped that the site will encourage active participation from members. We are instituting two interactive features, a discussion page and a page, entitled From-the-Field, devoted to new research which will carry contributions of text, images and video from members.

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