National Association of Student Anthropologists (NASA) 2004 Annual Report to the AAA

Submitted by Chad Morris, President (Outgoing)

Membership and Finances: According to September 2004 figures, NASA membership stands at 936, substantially higher than last year's average of 807. This increase in membership is attributed largely to efforts NASA has made via the NASA Opportunities list and other announcements to provide enhanced information-sharing services to our membership.

As of September 30, 2004, NASA's net assets stand at $7944.49. NASA's primary expenditures continue to be travel and award monies, including the Carrie Hunter Tate Awards and the Travel Awards, used largely to offset the cost of annual meeting attendance for members. NASA, in accordance with our bylaws, offers travel monies to all incoming and outgoing officers who: a) attend the annual meeting, and b) certify that their trip hasn't been provided via another source of travel monies (i.e. university grant, other travel award, etc.). Travel reimbursement and student Travel Award monies saw less than budgeted expenditures this year due to the change in annual meeting venue, which represented a particular deterrent to students given end-of-term schedules. NASA continues to adjust its annual budget downward to combat deficit spending, but will likely be looking at a minimal dues increase (above the current $1 dues paid by the majority of our membership) in the near future in order to enhance programming alternatives.

AAA Meeting Activities For the fifth consecutive year, NASA Program Editor, Lori Horsman, organized an impressively diverse number of activities for the AAA Annual Meeting in San Francisco/Atlanta. The 2004 NASA program represented a particularly strong group of sessions, many of which were cancelled due to the change in meeting venue. One session, "Advocacy and Scholarship in Minoritized Communities: Engaging Activism and Academia", co-sponsored by the Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology, did take place, and is scheduled to be featured in an article in the February 2005 issue of Anthropology News.

NASA's would-be fourth annual NASA/AAA Mentor Workshop, which continues to be a successful way of pairing students with faculty from a variety of fields did not take place due to the change in meeting venue, though NASA Graduate Representative At-large Michelle Verma put much effort into planning the event. This year, NASA did hold the third annual "Student Representative Open Forum," which is an opportunity for free discussion about student issues within AAA, academia, or our own communities. The forum brings together student representatives from across AAA sections as well as student leaders from other student anthropology associations. Given the change in meeting venue, NASA postponed an offer by a generous anonymous donor and AAA Executive Board members to fund breakfast for the Forum. This breakfast will be held at the 2005 Washington, D.C. Annual Meeting. Finally, for the second time, NASA offered a "Student Orientation to the AAA Annual Meeting: Insider Perspectives," which gave students who are attending their first annual meeting a chance to learn how to get the most from their time in Atlanta. NASA Secretary/Treasurer Frank Mannix continues to be instrumental in planning this event.

The NASA Business Meeting this year was sparsely attended, but offered additional opportunity for frank discussion about the role of students within the AAA. Typically NASA Awards are presented at this meeting, but NASA had no Travel Award applicants this year owing to the change in meeting venue, and, for the same reason, NASA's two recipients of the Carrie Hunter Award, Keri Brondo (Michigan State -- Graduate Award) and Jacob Hickman (Brigham Young -- Undergraduate Award) were unable to be present.

On the Saturday in November that had previously been reserved for the San Francisco meetings, NASA President Chad Morris met with interested students at YouthSpeaks in San Francisco. This location was made available thanks to the organization of the Society for Critical Anthropology at San Francisco State University. This special NASA forum allowed students who had decided to gather in San Francisco to meet with a NASA officer to discuss their feelings about the labor issues and meeting venue change, to compare notes on the various anthropological forums that were taking place in San Francisco, and to discuss student involvement in AAA governance. The discussion was productive, and, along with several other discussions via email and in person, has afforded NASA officers a strong understanding of student opinions on all sides of the AAA/Labor issue.

Communications NASA Editor, Tara Hefferan continued to create a strong monthly AN column. The column is a well-rounded mixture of section announcements, research and items of interest from members, and insights from the editor's own fieldwork. NASA maintains a listserv of more than 550 members that is also used as a communication tool in addition to e-mails to the entire membership provided through AAA lists (listserve membership has increased by over 150 in the past year). In addition, NASA member Anne Darfler publishes an 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 that NASA offers its members and we hope to maintain and build it as a resource in the future. A continued 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 makes a private AAA-based listserv based on current membership enrollment vastly preferable. Are excited by the opportunities Anthrosource may provide in this area, and encourage greater focus on making these sorts of communication options to membership available as soon as possible.

Thanks to NASA's Webmaster, Arleen Garcia, our webspace was updated this year and kept up-to-date, serving as another way to generate interest in student participation. This year via the website we noticed an increase in interest in local anthropology clubs, and thus will be looking to pursue ways of connecting these valuable student organizations via our webspace and other means. The aforementioned NASA opportunities emails are archived on the site, and calls for student participation in the AAA conference were also posted on the NASA website.

Outreach Efforts NASA continues to search for ways to cooperate and share ideas with other like-minded AAA sections, journals, clubs and associations. The Student Representative Open Forum, for example, brings together student leaders from across the association. We hope that this event will continue to grow and 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 we are working to create opportunities for increased student participation wherever possible.

At the request of Richard Thomas, NASA also provided an officer, Arleen Garcia, to speak at the University of California Santa Barbara undergraduate conference in May. This conference was well attended by undergraduates from throughout California, and represents an excellent example of NASA's willingness to improve undergraduate understanding of opportunities within anthropology.

This year, NASA also nominated several students for AAA positions. We feel that these nominations provide an important service both for the AAA and for our student members. We encourage the AAA to remain open to student participation in its committees and leadership structure.

Future Activities
Although relatively informal, the following serve as a rough guide for future NASA activities:

I. Create greater institutional impact of NASA within AAA through networking and Student Representatives II. Offer expanded membership participation/benefits III. Increase membership to more accurately reflect the number of students within AAA IV. Provide student communication networks and organizational transparency VI. Work to achieve financial sustainability while maintaining NASA's high membership value

For 2005, NASA has been immediately challenged by President Katie Boswell's inability to uphold the duties of the office from her fieldsite in Africa. NASA President-elect Persephone Hintlian has risen to this challenge by agreeing to take on the duties of the President until Katie's return in the summer of 2005. Particular NASA goals for 2005 include effective officer transition, continued emphasis on communicating opportunities to members, institutionalization of the Student Representative Forum within the AAA, and effective communication of student perspectives on current issues of AAA leadership.

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 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 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.

NASA Officers 2003-2004
Chad Morris, Kentucky, President, chadmorris1@aol.com
Katie Boswell, Indiana, President-elect, kboswell@indiana.edu
Tara Hefferan, Michigan State, Editor, thefferan@hotmail.com
Frank Mannix, Tulane, Secretary-Treasurer (appointed), fmannix@tulane.edu
Rory McCarthy, Western Michigan, Grad Rep-at-large (appointed), siddhartha1972@hotmail.com
Michele Verma, Columbia, Grad. Rep-at-large, mmoritis@hotmail.com
Meli Glenn, Undergrad Rep-at-large, meliglenn@hotmail.com
Lori Horsman, Program Editor (appointed), lhorsman@hvc.rr.com
Arleen Garcia, Webmaster (appointed), webdesigner@arleengarcia.com
Anne Darfler, Opportunities List Editor (appointed), adarfler@comcast.net
Ryan Adams, Indiana, Nominations Committee, rtadams@indiana.edu

Anduamlak Meharie, Kentucky, Nominations Committee ameharie@yahoo.com