111th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting
November 14-18, 2012
San Francisco, CA
Borders and Crossings

The submission portal for proposals of papers and panels at the 2012 AAA Annual
Meeting is now open until March 15, 2012. Go to http://aaanet.org for more
information.

The 2012 AAA Annual Meeting in San Francisco offers the perfect venue for
thinking about border crossings across time, space, embodied differences,
language and culture. If we have learned anything in the last decade with the
increasing globalization of social movements, the election of the first black US
president, and the legalization of gay marriage in five states, it is that
borders—taboos, injunctions, stigmas and resource flows—are not fixed, but open
to renegotiation. It is in that spirit that we dedicate this meeting to
recognizing our discipline's borders and those borders' permeability to relevant
transgressions. We want to acknowledge the structures, genealogies and
technological changes that continue to shape our research questions,
methodological choices, and subsequent interventions in the fields of
archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology and sociocultural anthropology.
With respect to disciplinary exclusions and inclusions, the institutional and
discursive constraints that shape what we can and cannot do are ours to own and
ours to overcome.

Similar to other traditional disciplines, anthropology has increasingly become
an interdisciplinary practice, but what is lost and what is gained from such
borrowings? Our disciplinary contribution to the social sciences includes our
scientific and interpretive methods of knowledge production. But when scholars
in other fields use our methods, do we recognize their work as anthropological?
And is our work recognizable across disciplines? These meetings offer a chance
to reflect on the challenges and opportunities posed by both the crossings by
other disciplines into what has long been viewed as our intellectual and
methodological terrain as well as anthropology's incorporation of
interdisciplinary strategies.

World anthropologies, engaged anthropology, and modes of scientific inquiry are
three areas within our discipline that challenge questions of knowledge
production at the borders of our field. "World anthropologies" reminds us that
anthropology has been taken up differently outside the United States and Europe,
and therefore it is important to bring scholars from all over the world together
in order to develop a clearer sense of our discipline's topography. Engaged,
collaborative, or applied anthropologists who are embedded with environmental,
medical and other specialists, ask us to expand our notions of research
objectivity and the potential of both qualitative and quantitative research to
address social problems. Finally, we continue to reflect on how anthropology
sits alongside other sciences as well as how the anthropology of science is
reshaping disciplinary boundaries.

Attending to the borders we construct around our discipline allows us to examine
how far we can take our discipline methodologically and still recognize and
value our work as anthropology. As we explore the centers and outer edges of our
field, we have to ask: What keeps us from crossing over permanently into other—
imagined or not—disciplinary terrains? Is it the audience we anticipate? The
history of our discipline? Is it a mistrust of qualitative or quantitative data?
And why do we self-censor? Is it because of funding issues? Legitimacy and
translation issues? And what stories do we choose to study and why? By
essentially mapping our discipline it is our hope that this meeting will offer
our association a chance to celebrate our methodological and theoretical
diversity, reaffirm our expertise, transcend our differences, and strengthen
efforts to expand our knowledge of the human condition across sub-fields and
through a variety of perspectives.

Golden Gate BridgeGiven our Borders and Crossings theme, we are planning various
ways to promote lively conversations throughout the meeting, including a new
initiative to encourage reading klatches in cafés and bars to engage early
anthropological texts, broadly defined. Our goal in celebrating our disciplinary
roots is to remind us of how methodologically open and experimental the founders
of our discipline were with respect to scientific and interpretive knowledge
production.

Our discussions throughout the meeting on Borders and Crossings will help us
gain a fresh sense of how anthropology remains a discipline of engagement and
collaboration, and how important it is to acknowledge the indigenous
epistemologies that inform our theory.

Meeting guidelines and rules for participation are available by clicking here.

Communications about the program theme should be addressed to Program Chair
Carolyn Rouse at 2012aaaprogramchair@.... Please refer all other annual
meeting questions to Jason G Watkins, or Carla Fernandez of the AAA and Sections
Meeting Department at aaameetings@... or (+1) 703/528-1902.