AFA Celebrates Its 25th Anniversary this Year!

The Association for Feminist Anthropology welcomes sessions to be considered for inclusion in AFA’s programming for the 112th AAA Annual Meeting, to be held in Chicago, November 20-24, 2013. The 2013 AAA theme is “Future Publics, Current Engagements.” In conversation with this theme – and in celebration of the AFA’s 25th anniversary in 2013 – we encourage panels and papers on topics including (but not limited to):

• The scope of feminist anthropology today:  how are feminist anthropologists defining their roles as distinct from or intersectional/overlapping with others (race and ethnicity studies, queer studies, economic anthropology, biological anthropology, etc. etc.) within and beyond the discipline?  How are feminist anthropological perspectives contributing to our knowledge of social, archaeological, cultural, historical, economic, political and biological phenomena including and beyond the traditional topics of gender and sexuality?
• Ethnography, excavation, activism and new media: how are anthropologists engaging digital technologies and social media? What roles do they play in our scholarship, our fieldwork, our teaching, our activism, and/or our public engagements?  How do these technologies enrich, transform or challenge feminist and anthropological theory, and vice versa?
• Twenty-five years after Strathern commented on the “awkward relationship” between feminism and anthropology, how are feminist anthropologists mediating diverse analytical and methodological approaches and disciplinary traditions?  What are their multiple political and ethical commitments and their visions of social justice?  How are these visions being articulated and enacted within and beyond academia and other institutional settings? Do feminisms and anthropologies engage?
• Looking back and moving forward: which debates, concepts, or scholars have informed feminist anthropology most crucially in the past twenty-five years (or received surprisingly little attention)?  We welcome sessions that offer rich histories of particular schools of thought or conflictive moments in the history of feminist anthropology – in the United States and globally – as well as synthesizing the lessons of those pasts for the anthropology of the future.

As always, we welcome submissions from a broad range of theoretical, methodological, and sub-disciplinary perspectives. We encourage session organizers to consider roundtable and workshop formats as well as traditional panels, and we are particularly eager to see proposals for events that take advantage of our Chicago location and bring conference participants into conversation with non-profit organizations, activists, and other local residents. On a limited basis, AFA can provide a registration waiver or sponsorship for non-anthropologists; please get in touch with us in advance of your submission if you would like to propose a waiver recipient.

Finally, if you are submitting your session for consideration for invited status, please consider whether another section would be suitable as a potential co-sponsor. This allows AFA to maximize its presence in the program and to gain a greater audience for your session.

Deadlines and time frames for 2013:

February 15: Online abstract submission system opens on AAA website, www.aaanet.org<http://www.aaanet.org>
March 15: Deadline for submitting sessions for section invited status and public policy forums via online system, www.aaanet.org<http://www.aaanet.org>
April 4: Results of section invited session proposals announced by section program committee chairs
April 15: Proposal deadline for volunteered sessions, individual paper and poster presentations, media submissions and special events via www.aaanet.org<http://www.aaanet.org> (*participants must be registered for the meeting by this date for inclusion in 2013 AAA Annual Meeting program)
April 16-May 31: Section program co-chairs review and rank paper and session proposals
June 1-15:  AAA Executive Program Committee schedules program
July 1-15: Program decisions emailed to applicants

For more information, please contact 2013 Program Chairs: Jennifer Patico (jpatico@gsu.edu<mailto:jpatico@gsu.edu>) and Debarati Sen (debarati9@gmail.com<mailto:debarati9@gmail.com>).
If you have a student-focused workshop idea, please contact AFA student representative Isabelle LeBlanc ý(eil6354@umoncton.ca).