It’s this time of the year when one should think of everything but work. Yet, Allie is here to remind us that 2015 is full of fabulous anthro promises! Here is our curated list of December events and calls for papers that we think deserve our full attention. And remember to CONTACT US if you’re organising an event you think Allegra should feature or if you want to publish a report on an event you recently attended! Help us remain on the top of the anthropological calendar! Reach us by email at allegralab@gmail.com.
ECAS 2015: 6th EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON AFRICAN STUDIES
Collective Mobilisations in Africa: Contestation, Resistance, Revolt.
8 – 10 July 2015, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris
Theme of the conference: The historic turn embodied by the Arab “revolutions”, whose repercussions are felt throughout the Sahel; anger, expressed in a range of ways, at the rising cost of living; mobilisations around issues of citizenship; manifold forms of religious revival: all seem to attest to a profound political reconfiguration underway across Africa. These and associated forms of contestation have pushed new actors to the front of the stage, at the crossroads of local and global dynamics. To fully appreciate the complexity of these developments, we must consider longer-term histories of uprising, stand-taking and engagement on the continent, casting a renewed gaze on jihads, slave uprisings, mass conversions and dynastic conflicts. Too, we must reflect in novel ways on the social trajectories of actors involved in present-day contestations and on the responses that the latter elicit from those in power. This in turn should bring us to pay close attention to repertories of collective action, to modes of transgression and subversion, to takes on activism, and to ways in which all of these intersect with social, generational and gender statuses. [more]
Panels with a focus on anthropology
Panels with a focus on law
Deadline for submission of papers: 9 January 2015
SIEF2015 12th Congress: Utopias, Realities, Heritages. Ethnographies for the 21st Century
21 – 25 June 2015, Zagreb, Croatia
The public fascination with heritage in recent years might be understood in the context of this history of temporal imaginations: burying various visions of the future, we excavate multiple visions of the past. Indeed, heritage also presupposes a projected future for which we must safeguard it, populated by future generations who we imagine will care. In between utopia and heritage are day-to-day realities, the ordinary and the routine: the practices and expressions that ethnologists have long taken as their principal objects. It is in this most mundane of realities that people realize their utopian visions and heritage imaginaries, motivating their action and interpreting their existence in the context of imaginary pasts and futures.
The congress theme takes the triad of utopias, realities, and heritages as a challenge and seeks to relate it to the ethnographic study of expressive culture and everyday practices: from religion to politics, from heritage to spatial imagination, from the physical to the virtual, from narrative forms to the food chain, from music to the museum, and from nationalism to tourism. [more]
Allegra’s special attention goes to the panel Engaged anthropology: Reality? Necessity? Utopia? organized by the Transformations Network: Under the title “Engaged Anthropology: Reality? Necessity? Utopia?”, the network aims to bring together anthropologists, editors, publishers, and organizers who have been involved, in one way or another, in projects of public and engaged anthropology. Open access journals, online or print magazines, blogs, and outreach and advocacy networks are of particular interest to us; but also web-designers or other kinds of developers, who have contributed to the increase of anthropology’s public presence. Most importantly, this is not just another panel providing yet another lose discussion about the generalized notions of “public” and “engaged”. But rather, the conveners seek to learn from each others experiences in running, founding, promoting and contributing to projects that are grounded in anthropology, but do communicate beyond its boundaries.
Deadline for submission of papers, workshop contributions, films and posters: 14 January 2015
14th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film
16 – 19 June 2015, Bristol, UK
The RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film is held biennially with the first edition held in 1985. The 14th festival is hosted jointly with The Watershed Cinema in Bristol, The Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol and The Center for Visual Anthropology, USC Dornsife, LA, California.
Filmmakers throughout the world are invited to submit films for screening during the festival and for the various prizes and awards administered by the RAI.
Submissions are invited from any field of ethnographic film. Only films released (first screened in public) after 1st January 2012 are eligible for competitive Screening.
Deadline for film submissions: 15 January 2015
(In)fertile Citizens: Anthropological and Legal Challenges of ARTs
28 – 30 May 2015, University of the Aegean, Lesvos, Greece
The regulation of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) varies significantly between different European countries. The outcome of such legal diversity is that an ever-growing number of people may travel within Europe, searching for possibilities for reproduction, because they do not have access to feasible ARTs in their own countries due to legal, economic, practical, technological or religious reasons. Current discussions on assisted reproduction and cross-border reproduction focus on a permissive vs. restrictive discourse that draws on notions of reproductive autonomy, free will, right to choose on the one hand and protection of life, human dignity, public acceptance, moral views of the majority, “adequate protection from the state”, on the other (Blyth and Farrand 2005). The current proliferation of ARTs on European and global level necessitates that research moves beyond liberal/libertarian vs. restrictive dichotomies and reconsiders topics of reproductive citizenship in relation to the specific cultural contexts, local/ global exchanges and social/ technological networks they emerge from. In the context of this conference, we propose to explore two axes of research which combine an interdisciplinary approach with a comparative one. The first calls for a cooperation between anthropological and legal studies and aims at exploring its potentialities in the field of reproductive rights and ARTs. The second invites to reflect upon the practicability and epistemological value of comparison, by investigating ARTs implementation in different neighbouring European and non-European countries and transnational reproductive networks emerging within, across and beyond them. [more]
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 16 January 2015
2015 FWSA Conference: Everyday Encounters with Violence: Critical Feminist Perspectives
9 – 11 September 2015, School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK
Although violence is an integral part of experiences in mundane living spaces, feminist conceptualizations of violence have so far been mainly confined to violence over women’s bodies. This conference therefore aims to look beyond, or perhaps behind, such understandings of violence by exploring violence and feminist critiques thereof in all its structural, material, legal, social and embodied forms across both the Global North and Global South.
The conference draws upon a wide definition of violence from sources in the arts, humanities and social sciences, seeing violence as both an everyday social force inflicting harassment, harm, suffering, grief and trauma and as a transformative force that (re)produces gendered agency, social action and resistance. It will explore violence as simultaneously structural, subjective, cultural, material, embodied and representational.
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 January 2015
ASA15: Symbiotic anthropologies: theoretical commensalities and methodological mutualisms
13 – 16 April 2015, University of Exeter, UK
The aim of this conference will be to explore the shifting borders and boundaries of anthropological work today. Symbiosis describes processes of differing types of beings and organisms living together, whether over short or long periods of time, in close contact, loose or harmful association. In the context of biology, symbiosis implies various kinds of co-existence between entities of different orders, encompassing relations that are mutually beneficial and those that are parasitic and even harmful to one or more parties involved. By symbiotic anthropologies the conveners want to suggest close examination of precisely those occasions and relationships when in response to institutional pressures, or ethnographic demands, we are forced, obliged or fortunate enough to depend upon others for our institutional survival, or our theoretical and methodological innovations. [more]
