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Society for Cultural Anthropology
Student-Faculty Workshops
AAA 2009 Philadelphia
Each year, the SCA sponsors five faculty-student workshop luncheons
intended to provide an informal setting where students can discuss
their work with scholars from other universities. A list of the workshops
appears below.
The luncheon workshops are limited to six students each, and they
take place in restaurants near the conference hotel. The workshops
are free to all participants and are open to SCA student members
at all levels of graduate training. Lunch is provided.
All workshops run from 12:15 to 1:30 to match the AAA's programmed lunch sessions.
To join one of these workshops, please submit a one-page description
of no more than 250 words by November 4th about your research
project. Participants are encouraged to include within the description
specific questions about the project for the workshop leader or
leaders and for the group as a whole to consider. In advance of the
workshop, project descriptions will be shared among all participants.
Applications will be accepted on a first-come-first-served basis noting that:
1. the project descriptions are closely suited to the workshop themes;
2. students and workshop leaders are from different institutions; and
3. you are a member of the SCA. If you are not yet a member of the
SCA, but would like to join at the modest student rate of $21 a year,
which includes a full print subscription to the journal, Cultural
Anthropology, you can do so easily on our website:
http://sca.culanth.org/join/join.htm.
Please send your request to SCA's Student Representative,
Mary Murrell (UC Berkeley) at scaworkshop2009@gmail.com. Include
your name, your university affiliation, the workshop you want to
attend, and your one page-description. Please bear in mind that
project descriptions longer than 250 words will not be considered.
Formal notice of participation will be sent out on November 11th.
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Workshops
Friday, December 4th
#1: Design and Fieldwork
Leader: George Marcus (UC Irvine) and Keith Murphy (UC Irvine)
Description: This workshop is interested in the expanding appeal of design thinking
and processes as resources for rethinking long-established cultures of
inquiry in the human sciences. Specifically, we would like to explore the
various ways that ethnography and design interrelate. Most
particularly, we are interested in the experiment of overlaying the terms of
design techniques and practices—such as the studio, the crit, the cultural
probe, and so forth—onto the conventions of ethnographic research, in
multi-sited terrains and in dissertation pedagogy.
#2: Anthropological Approaches to Mind and Brain Sciences
Leader: Emily Martin (New York U)
Description: I am interested in discussing projects that involve
an anthropological approach to the mind and brain sciences.
Topics could include the varied lives of psychiatric diagnoses in
different cultural and historical settings; neuroreductionist
tendencies in research, their media coverage, and their effects
on concepts of the person; or the historical stabilization of the
human subject in the experimental research practices of
psychology and psychiatry. Methodological issues could include
how to find research sites; how to handle relationships with
interlocutors, whether patients, researchers, or physicians; how
to include historical research in an ethnographic project.
Saturday, December 5th
#3: The State of Media: Revisiting Media and the State in the Digital Age
Co-leaders: Faye Ginsburg (New York U) and Brian Larkin (Barnard C)
Description: The place of the state has had an ambivalent position
in the anthropology of media, but is difficult to avoid whether we
focus on Bollywood, or study practices that are under the radar of
mainstream media. How do we theorize the place of the state in
the emergence of digital technologies, its capacity to regulate
media infrastructures, and the capacity of communities to control
the circulation of their own imagery? From the war on terror and
the surveillance this demands, to the emergence of activist groups,
NGOs and religious movements outside of the state, to the efforts
of governments to control the digital media these groups use, to
the efforts of people in remote areas to have equality of access in
the digitial age, the place of the state has returned as an analytic
focus for anthropologists. In this session we will assess this focus,
opening up questions about the state and media in anthropological theory.
#4: Formations and Transformations of the State
Leader: Fernando Coronil (CUNY)
Description: What is the state? What forms does it take in
different places and times? How to study its formation and transformation?
What's the relationship between the modern state and capitalism?
How to approach struggles to change the state? How to think of
the relationship between between emancipatory social change
and state transformation? This workshop will discuss projects that
in one way or another approach these or related questions concerning the state.
#5: The Corporate Encounter
Co-leaders: Melissa Cefkin (IBM Research--Alameden) and
Melissa Fisher (Georgetown U).
Description: An increasingly active intersection is occurring between
ethnographic and anthropological work and the business sector,
whether in strategic or organizational advising, product and technology
design, marketing or the production of ethnographies on corporations
and finance. What kind of effects does the study of the corporate world
writ large have on anthropology – and the discipline’s interest in questions
of culture, capitalism and power? What kinds of effects do such
ethnographic inquires have on corporate enterprises?
What potential—disruptive, productive, reflective—does the injection
of ethnographic imaginaries have for the efforts of business enterprises?
And, what are the differences and similarities between conducting
ethnographic work in collaboration with corporate enterprise, and
producing ethnographies intended for a more academic / anthropological audience?
Past Workshops
2008
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